We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us
Image by Getty Images via Daylife
There are two types of questions in politics: those that are important because of the answer and those that are important because of the question. “Why did Joseph Stack fly his Piper Cub into the IRS building in Austin Texas” in one of the former types and, as we learned in the hours after the incident, the answer lies in his profound anger at the American Tax system.
That leads us to the second type of question, the sort that is important because of the question itself. That is a bit meta so perhaps an example will serve as a better explanation: “When do we start rounding up anti-tax protesters, torturing them, and incarcerating them without trial?”
Clearly the United States is not going to do any such thing and thus the answer to that question is not all that important. Happy as it might make the Left (and some of the more politically astute members of the Republican Party) the American military is not about to start rounding up tea-baggers, shackling them, and tossing them down a dark pit.
But the question is important.
The question is important because it is the same question asked by millions of Americans after 9/11 and the same question still asked every time this country falls under threat of terrorist attack. It is just that, as Joe Friday might have said, the names have been changed to protect the innocent. What was once a threat of ideology has become a threat of race, of language, and of otherness. When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building, Americans were quick to label his attack what it was: terrorism. Yet since 9/11 we have redefined terrorism to be something inflicted by someone we judge to be not wholly American. Be they foreigners or merely members of the wrong religious minority, the political presumption of post-9/11 America is that “terrorist” and “white Christian” are mutually exclusive. We have created a reality of “us” and “them,” of “American” and “Terrorist” and we have assigned characteristics to “American” like “white” and “christian” and characteristics to “Terrorist” like “arabic” and “muslim.”
But while we might be unwilling to cast a clean cut software engineer in the role of terrorist mastermind in the next season of 24 that does not mean that a white, non-Muslim American can’t perpetrate an act of terrorism against the United States.
The notion of rounding up “terrorists” (or more accurately alleged terrorists) without trial, incarcerating them without charges, and interrogating them without legal protections might have seemed like a great idea when “terrorist” meant someone who neither looked, believed, nor thought as most Americans do. Yet looking at the burning wreckage of Austin’s IRS building it is very difficult to defend the idea that Mr Stack was not a terrorist.
If he was – if Americans are willing to make that leap – then how do we view previous statements and pronouncements on issues of civil liberties? When “Terrorist” meant “Muslim” many conservatives were in favor of detention on suspicion, racial profiling, harsh interrogation techniques, and a host of other questionable practices.
But now “Terrorist” might also include “people who are outraged at federal taxation.” We might just as legitimately round up Tea Partiers and anti-tax small government types for the same abuses already inflicted upon Muslims and Arabs in the name of national security.
We might, but we won’t.
We will not do these things because the thought of being searched, detained, and perhaps even tortured for our political beliefs enrages us. Because when the shoe is on the other foot we realize instantly and intuitively that such treatment is wrong, unjust, and unamerican. It flies in the face of everything that this country stands for. It is our right to protest politically, to rail against taxation and other perceived injustices inflicted by big government.
But it is also our right to be black or brown or Asian or, yes, Arabic. It is our right to speak a language and worship a God without fear of discrimination and retribution on the part of a fearful nation. It is not just our right, but everyone’s right. The values of religious freedom and presumed innocence can not stop at American borders and they can not be bound to an American Passport. They must not be rights that we hold but values that we carry with us.
If they are not then we must face the burning facade of the Austin IRS building and realize one immutable truth stretching back from Austin to Oklahoma City to Atlanta Georgia and beyond: “We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us”
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A “leftist’s” view of the IRS
Sometimes you need to use labels to talk about things. A label that applies to me is “liberal atheist” — who spent the first twenty seven years of my life in a most unsavoury locale: Texas.
As a self-described liberal atheist, I have always believed that taxes are the price of civilization, but this conviction has been dinged because there is little civilization to be found among a people — especially the type of conservative found in Texas — who take extremist positions on the big war and peace issues of our day while insisting that they do not need to know a damn thing about them. They way they vote to spend their tax money — on unwinnable, offensive military adventures from Vietnam to Iraq to Palestine — have forced a change in my attitude towards the idea of ‘civilization sustained by taxes’, at least as it applies to the US. There is no civilization in the USA anymore, if there ever was; it’s just a free-for-all, and the nastiest, most cynical and pampered take all.
My conventional “liberal atheist” take on the IRS has changed. I now see it as a vehicle for the de-civilization of the US, through the bottle feeding of Wall Street babies and the offence industry, with their unwinnable, global, generational wars on an abstract noun. But let’s give credit where it’s due. Washington D.C. is the symptom. This reality has come about precisely because a majority of American adults voted for it.
Why is Andrew Joseph Stack a Teabagger?
By this time we’ve all heard about the nut who hated the IRS so much that he crashed a small plane into the IRS office in Austin, Texas. And we’ve also read his manifesto. But somehow the MSM has concluded that this nut job was not JUST a nutjob, but an actual Tea Party supporter.
We see the following “editorials” from the MSM:.
NY Mag piles on
“In fact, a lot of his rhetoric could have been taken directly from a handwritten sign at a tea party rally.”
WaPo’s Capehart chimes in…
“But after reading his 34-paragraph screed, I am struck by how his alienation is similar to that we’re hearing from the extreme elements of the Tea Party movement.”
Then Time slips this one in not so subtly:
“Toward the end of what appears to be his final note, Stack wrote, ‘Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.’ (See the making of the Tea Party movement.)”
National Review
It’s more than apparent that the media decided to pick and choose words from Mr Stack’s manifestor with an already preconceived bias, namely they made the square peg fit into the round hole.
But what they ignored were the rants about anti-government, anti-Bush and even some pro-communism stances Start mentioned. Yeah, sounds really Teabagger to me. (sigh)
In his manifesto he curses the government:
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in
He curses organized religion:
… Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy….
He goes after Bush:
As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government
And he supports communism:
The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed
It would have to take a totally biased idiot to attribute any of the rantings of this man to “Teabagger.” Oh wait, I’m talking about the main stream media. I forgot.
This is a totally dishonest assessment and a hatchet job being done by the MSM. This would be like calling the shooter, Amy Bishop, at the University of Alabama, a die hard Obama lover who killed her collegues because of her obsession with Obama. Well we know she was obsessed with Obama, but no conservative has even considered that connection. YET, the MSM has decided to attach a Teabagger connection to Joe Stark.
To quote David Freddoso of the Washington Examiner; “Seriously, though, you’d think educated, intelligent people would see the difference. Unless they don’t want to see it.”
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