I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SYLVANSHINE (2014).

One of the fun things about doing these summer posts is finding appropriate music to each week’s write up. I like to find something related to what’s down below.  Last week it was an artist named Pale King.  This week it’s a band called Sylvanshine.

Sylvanshine is a cover band from Texas.  According to their web site, they play covers of Collective Soul, Van Halen, The Black Crowes and Stevie Ray Vaughn. I didn’t listen to any of their live tracks, but the excerpt of their version of The Toadies’ “Possum  Kingdom” is pretty spot on.

Learn all about them (or book them) at their website.

[READ: July 21, 2014] Pale Summer Week 2 (§10-§21)

Week two continues some of the characters’ lives and introduces us to them at the Service.  It also has a couple of very lengthy passages in which people spout their opinions about aspects of the country and the Service which are thoughtful and, frankly, very interesting and would work as good meme quotes, if you liked that sort of thing.

§10

This is a two-paragraph chapter about bureaucracy “the only known parasite larger than the organism on which is subsists.”

§11

A list of syndromes/symptoms associated with Examination Postings in excess of 36 months (ending with “unexplained bleeding”).

§12

Leonard Stecyk is back in this short chapter.  He is an adult now. He is walking door to door to introduce himself to his presumably new neighbors, and to offer to the neighbors the Post Office’s 1979 National Zip Code Directory–“his smile so wide it almost looked like it hurt.”

§13

An unnamed character is inflicted with nervous profuse sweating.  (This character will be identified later).  This chapter also has footnotes (as did the Author’s Foreword), although these footnotes are in the third person (as is the chapter).  Does this mean it is written by Dave Wallace too?  It is another thoroughly detailed chapter that I find very enjoyable to read even if it doesn’t advance the “story” much.

§14

This chapter begins a series of interviews.  In §9, David Wallace talked about this as some of the data he reviewed for the book. The employees were asked questions for what was described as a documentary meant to humanize and demystify the Service, to help citizens understand how hard and important their job is.  This production belonged conceptually to DP Tate, although Leonard Stecyk did all the work.  There’s an intro reel that needs to be edited (or so they tell the interviewees).  And we learn that Toni Ware is employed here and is behind a window, watching the proceedings with some other employees.   This chapter reminds me of Brief Interviews as if that was a kind of set up for this.

Interviewees are given numbers:

945645233
Been here for three years and he sees that people who have been here for thirty or forty years have the look of a blind person (and he or she is very afraid of that).

968223861
The current President (Reagan) was elected on big defense spending an a massive tax cut–he’s not sure how this was supposed to work.  As for the Service, single men and women are transferred around to departments and locations where they are needed-it costs a lot more to move a family.  So he was in Utica and then Hanover, NH.  He then tells a joke about how you never tells anyone about where you work, you let them deduce from bits of information.

928874551
Using less sugar in a recipe produces a dry cake.  Don’t do that.

973876118
There are two types of people–the rebel and the solider (who believes in order and power and respects authority).  If you’re Type Two We Want You (that should be the Service’s slogan).  Tell the rebel to spit with the wind–it goes much farther.

917229047
Wants to write a play in which a man sits at a desk and nothing at all happens.  Until all the audience leaves and then the action starts.  But he could never decide on the action.

965882433
The job is not rocket science, it’s just that so many people don’t know what they are doing in the world–two-thirds of taxpayers think an exemption and a deduction are the same thing, or don’t know what a capital gain is.  Most of their work time is wasted dealing with people’s mistakes–you should see people’s handwriting.

981472509
“Tate is a moth at the arc lights of power. Pass it on.”

951458221
This is Kenneth “Type of Thing Ken” Hindle as mentioned in §9 FN 19.  David Wallace said that this was an accurate and valuable section.  Hindle says “type of thing” as a nervous tic.  And yet he is really on to something.  He is critical of Reagan’s proposal that lower taxes would spur investments: “two years in though, it’s fair to say the results contradicted the theory.” The Federal budget deficit was the greatest in history.  Hindle talks about the Three-Personed God of Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner for Systems and Chief Council. The Top spots in the Service organization, while the national office is known as Triple-Six (because of the address).
He says there is even a plan in place for taxation after a nuclear war called “Fiscal Planning for Chaos.”  He also talks about the Spackman Initiative, something which comes up throughout the book.  It was generated in 1969. The root was simple (and the current Administration likes simple) it was a backlash against complex social engineering of the Great Society.  Essentially–increasing the efficiency of the Service would increase revenues to the Treasury.  The tax gap (what was owed and what was actually paid) was 31 1/2 billion.  The paper said the gap was simply a matter of compliance–remedial misreporting which could be dealt with in a short term in three areas: Non-filing, Under-reporting and Underpayment.  Non-filing is Criminal.  Underpayment is handled through Collections and then there’s the Compliance Branch discrepancies.  This ultimately re-conceived the IRS as a business, which meant hiring 20% more workers (The Initiative).
There are two tendencies among the Service–decentralization from the 1952 mandate and the centralization of the 1960s. The 1980s is going back the other way, setting up regional instead of centralized offices which report to themselves.  But the key thing is which returns are most profitable to audit and how are these returns most efficiently to be found?

This is a lengthy detailed section.  It is kept amusing through the tic of “type of thing” and because on two occasions Ken asks if the interviewer is okay, which apparently he is not.

947676541
I have an unusually high tolerance for pain.

928514387
Dad used to mow the lawn in tiny sections to get the satisfaction of a job done many times over–his Service job is like that too–a small task every twenty minutes.

951876833
Referencing a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits in which a claustrophobic guy is put in solitary confinement so it gets worse and worse  It was called “Rules an Procedures”

987613397
“I don’t believe I have anything to say that isn’t in the code or Manual”

943756788
Mother called it being in a Stare.  His father would get like that–not daydreaming just staring–he finds himself doing it too. It frightens his children.  It’s tough here-are people doing their job or just caught in a stare?

984057863
A dog on a chain who, out of dignity, never went to the end of his chain.  He never felt compelled to choke himself.  He had a power to him.  This guy respected that dog.

§15

Claude Sylvanshine has Random Fact Intuition.  This very funny chapter talks about RFI and how facts, utterly useless facts, pop into his head all the time–it is debilitating.  The examples are hilarious (tastes a Hostess cupcake, knows where it was made, knows who ran the machine that sprayed a light coating of chocolate frosting on top; knows that person’s weight, shoe size, bowling average).

§16

Lane Dean is on a break.  He is listening to two older examiners. One is talking about going to Hank Bodnar’s house, the other is picking at a cyst on the inside of his wrist.  The locusts are noisy and if you thin of them as actually screaming it is unsettling. Lane Dean just wants to run around flapping his arms but he doesn’t dare.  Dean no longer needs a watch to know how long his breaks are.  The culmination of the Bodnar story is that they went to the screened in porch to eat to get away from the bugs.

§17

The unnamed person always thought of Revenue men as small heroes and he or she always wanted to be one–the kind of person who is on the Clean Up Committee instead of playing in the band.

§18

We learn that Glendenning is more agent-morale-oriented than the Pale King was.  Glendenning has instituted Desk Names: there’s a plate on your desk with a Desk Name–no obvious joke Desk Names like Phil Mypockets, just hard to pronounce names like Fusz, Traut, Schoewder–umlauts are always good, too.

§19

This is a lengthy dialogue between three or four characters who appear to be stuck… in an elevator (I base that on one line, so it may be false). As with a lot of these lengthier sections, I found myself rather moved by the impassioned dialogue of these three (or four) characters.  And while I may not agree with everything that the main interlocutor (who appears to be Glendenning in the beginning) he makes a very compelling case for civic duty.

The section is all unattributed dialogue (except for one line).  As I mentioned, I calculate four people: DeWitt Glendenning, Stuart A. Nicholas, X [whose name is revealed in §46], and a first person narrator.  There may be more, but without actually counting paragraphs and attributions (which I’m just not wiling to do although now that I mention it…no, I’ll let someone else do that) it’s not always clear who is speaking.

But in sum, this chapter’s point seems to be an argument for the reintroduction of civics as a field of study.  Civics: “the branch of political science that quote unquote concerns itself with citizenship and the rights and duties of US citizens” (131).

The chapter starts with an unnamed person (but I assume is Glendenning) expounding on civics and selfishness. It is an interesting look at a more or less Republican attitude before the Republican party hated the federal government.  Although it criticizes a liberal attitude, it seems to be more anti-libertarian.  He says that Americans infantilize ourselves—”we think of ourselves as citizens when it comes to our rights and privileges but not our responsibilities.  We abdicate our civic responsibilities to the government and expect the government in expect the government, in effect, to legislate morality…” (130). Which sounds very Republican until he gets to this part: “Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think—of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making” (131).

The easiest way to demonstrate what’s happening is to quote from salient paragraphs and attribute where possible:

Using the metaphor of the country as a lifeboat, you could eat everything on the boat while everyone is sleeping, but that’s not how it works.  Which is why you need to pay taxes for the good of everyone:   “The point is psychological—of course you want it all of course you want to keep every dime you make. But you don’t, you ante up because it’s how things have to be for the whole lifeboat” (131).

Naturally, the downfall for America was the 1960s, which “did a lot for raising people’s consciousness in a whole lot of areas, such as race and feminism… [but] becoming actually fashionable to protest a war opened the door to what’s going to bring us down as a country. The end of the democratic experiment” (132).

There are ample interesting arguments tossed back and forth, like that the founding fathers cared “more about the nation and the citizens than about themselves” (133).

“The government is the people, leaving aside various complications, but we split it off and pretend it’s not us; we pretend it’s some threatening Other bent on taking our freedoms, taking our money and redistributing it, legislating our morality…with the curious thing being that we hate it for appearing to usurp the very civic functions we’ve ceded to it” (135).

There is a sense of anti-corporations in the arguments as well.

“We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries—we’re actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation’s responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers f the pie” (136).

“Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it…You can blame [our struggle to gratify our various appetites] on corporations and advertising surely…. But the whole dark genius of corporations is that they allow for individual reward with out individual obligation” (136).

The anti-corporate idea is eventually shot down: “It’s awfully easy to vilify corporations, X” (140).

X is a character who is introduced.  Others are casually introduced as well.  On page 134 someone says, “Doesn’t sound all that new or experimental to me, Mr Glendenning.”

At the top of 137 someone addresses: “You are a complete genius of irrelevancy, X. This isn’t a seminar. DeWitt’s trying to get at the heart of something here.”  (DeWitt being Glendenning’s first name).

Then at the top of 139, we have this interesting moment.  It’s the only place in the chapter in which we have a narrator: “’That example makes it a lot easier to see your point, Mr, Glendenning,’ I said.”  So who is the I?  It is unstated at this point.

On 146 we get another name “I think Stuart’s tracing the move from the production model of American democracy to something more like a consumption model.”

One of the characters is  ayes man, seeming to reiterate and provide similar example or clichés to “help” the main speaker.  Not sure who the sycophant is.

The discussion covers the 14^th Amendment, the 13^th Amendemnt, and de Tocqueville.

At some point. X complains that this whole conversation is dull, to which the reply is

“Sometimes what’s important is dull. Sometimes it’s work. Sometimes the important things aren’t works of art for your entertainment, X” (138).

This sentence could almost be the kind of thesis for why this book exists–dull things can be very important.

There’s also this gem: “It’s more like I want a law to keep you from gas-guzzling and seeing that Wild Bunch, but not me” (142).

As the section draws to an end they also criticize the Reagan-Bush ticket (or Bush-Reagan ticket) for attacking the IRS.

“This is good for the Service? Another politician trying to score points by trashing the tax system?”
…
“Not to mention his hike-defense spending rhetoric. How are you going to lower marginal rates and increase defense spending?”
…
“Stuart’s saying it’s good for the Service because lowering marginal rates but increasing spending can happen only if collection of tax is made more efficient.”
“Meaning the reins are off. Meaning the Service’s quotas go up”  (148).

By making the Service tougher and more like the bad guys, it will make citizens hate the Service more, which is what Reagan ultimately needs for reelection. The Rebel Outsider President:

In other words we’ll have for a President a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of America civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job or representing corporate life as empty and soulless.  We’ll have a tyranny of conformist nonconformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit (149).

Not far off from the truth.

In terms of them being trapped in an elevator, there’s two comments that stand out.  On 143 someone asks, “Anybody got the time? How long we been in here, three hours?”  That could be anywhere, but it seems more likely involuntary when on 145 someone asks, “Is Mr. Glendenning even awake?” “He looks awful pale.”

So there’s a lot in this chapter, which is interesting and compelling but which likely doesn’t advance the “plot” all that much.

§20

Toni Ware has moved in two houses down from Lotwis with two large dogs.  She replied to his entreaties by saying that if anything happened to her dogs, she would blame him.

§21

A brief interview with a  taxpayer who clearly has lied about his report–the Service Employee (unspecified) has talked to one of this taxpayer’s “employees” who is actually in an Assisted Living Center (and cannot speak).

§ § § § § § § § § § § §

I enjoyed this section of reading a lot as well.  The longer sections (like 19) are wonderfully thought out, and, while confusing as to who is saying what, the whole tone is one of basic agreement so the principals aren’t that significant.  There are several brief, amusing sections.  And we also see that some of the characters will be followed from childhood through to adulthood, like Leonard Stecyk and Lane Dean and Toni Ware.  And there’s a lot of details about the Service itself which is also very interesting, even if the jobs themselves are not.