SOUNDTRACK: MAJOR HIT-Robert De Niro at the Tony Awards Remix (2018).
Who is Major Hit? No idea.
Is this remix very good? Not really. It’s only a minute or so.
Is it hilarious? Yes.
Is it satisfying? Hell Yes.
Will you listen to it more than once? Probably not.
But will you feel a little bit better about your taxes after hearing this? Well, probably not.
Actually, it might make you feel a little better. And you probably find yourself quoting De Niro, too.
[READ: April 4, 2019] The Awakening of My Interest in Advanced Tax
Madras Press publishes limited-edition short stories and novella-length booklets and distributes the proceeds to a growing list of non-profit organizations chosen by our authors. For this particular book, proceeds to benefit Proceeds to benefit Granada House.
Originally appearing at the heart of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s posthumous semi-novel, this extended monologue brilliantly rambles its way around the circumstances that brought its narrator out of his ‘wastoid’ childhood and into maturity at the IRS. Along the way, he falls under the spell of a fake Jesuit, considers the true meaning of a soap opera station break, and narrowly escapes a gruesome death on the subway.
This is the final Madras Press book that I had left to read. Since I has already read The Pale King, I was in no hurry to read this one. But now it’s nice to say that I’ve finished all of the Madras Press books. And that I could post this just in time for the massive Republican tax scam in which thanks to trump and his evil puppet mcconnell, my tax return dropped over $3,000. Bastards. May they all rot in prison. And then hell.
Interestingly, back when I read this during Pale Summer (2014), this entire section was one week’s reading. So my post from that week is still relevant. It is posted almost in its entirety below:
This book is an excerpt from The Pale King. In the book, it is almost 100 pages of one person’s testimony. Without the novel for context, this excerpt stands on its own just fine. It is basically an unnamed person’s introduction. This narrator is so detail oriented that everything gets the same amount of importance–snowfall, the way to score drugs, the effects of drugs, Christian roommates, his father’s death, his mother’s lesibianism, oh and taxation.
So much of it is “irrelevant,” that I hate to get bogged down in details. So this is a basic outline of ideas until the more “important” pieces of information surface.
For the most part, this is all inside one man’s head as he talks about his life in college, after college, and into the Service. Mostly this is simply a wonderful character study, full of neuroses and problems that many people face at some point (to one degree or another). The interviewee states that “A good bit of it I don’t remember… from what I understand, I’m supposed to explain how I arrived at this career.”
Initially he was something of a nihilist, whose response to everything was “whatever.” A common name for this kind of nihilist at the time was wastoid. He drifted in and out of several colleges over the years, taking abstract psychology classes. He says that his drifting was typical of family dramas in the 1970s–son is feckless, mother sticks up for son, father squeezes sons shoes, etc. They lived in Chicago, his father was a cost systems supervisor for the City of Chicago.
He took some incompletes which his father found worse than a low-grade. The father is clearly disappointed in the son, and many many examples are given of this dismay. The narrator says the phrase “squeezing my shoes” a lot.
He took lots of drugs (he liked Ritalin), but also disliked a lot of the drugs offered (Dexedrine) because of side effects. He did not like psychedelics, especially after what happened to Art Linkletter’s daughter (she jumped out a window). He listened to KISS, REO Speedwagon, Cheap Trick, Styx, Jethro Tull, Rush, Deep Purple, and of course, good old Pink Floyd. He hated all rock groups with one-word place names: Boston, Kansas, Chicago, America. In 1975 or 76 he shaved off one sideburn thinking it made him a nonconformist–“I’m not kidding.”
Eventually his drug of choice became Obetrol which made him very self ware (what he calls doubling). While he is recalling this he remembers his roommate’s name (Steve Edwards).
An interesting character trait is that for two years after he learned to read, instead of reading words he counted them. His parents understandably freaked out. This tic is expressed in his chapter as he tallies up the words he has said thus far (2,752 words).
Much of the beginning talks about his college failures–how he and his roommate would watch a gigantic neon foot that was outside of their window (he can’t remember the name of the podiatrist–this lack of remembering names seems endemic to this character). Whichever way the foot pointed when it stopped spinning at night would determine their evening’s plans–study or go out to the Hat, “the currently hip UIC pub.”
He twice mentions the progressive sales tax of Illinois in 1977. There’s a (long and mostly humorous) explanation about the Illinois progressive sales tax of 1977 [it is fictional]. You were taxed more for the more that you bought, in theory punishing those who bought high ticket items, but eventually leading to people buying one or two things at a time at a grocery store and then going back for two more things. It is a wonderful idea for a failed policy. There is a lengthy and elaborate summary of the debacle.
As he looks back he sees that his feelings towards his roommate (whose name he cannot remember, although he does remember it later): “that I was just as much a conformist as he was, plus a hypocrite” is one of the first of many connections he makes with his (now dead) father. He thinks perhaps his father was witty and sophisticated: “very smart and somewhat unfulfilled, like many in his generation. He worked hard because he had to, and his own dreams were put on the back burner.” His father used the word “tedious” a lot, especially when related to his job. His father died at 49 in 1977 (we’ll learn a lot more about that shortly).
We learn that his mother and father split (in 1972) and that his mother took up with a partner, Joyce. He talks about parents. He says that of course parents love their children, “But actually ‘liking’ them, or enjoying them as people, seems like a totally different thing.”
A major moment in his life was when he and his wastoid friends were getting high in his father’s house while he was away. The father came home early, walked in, saw the scene, stated “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ and then picked up his overnight bag again and without a word, walked up the upstairs stairs and went into their old bedroom and closed the door.”
When his father was killed in 1977, it was a life changing event. It seems connected that he chose to go into the Service, since his father’s profession was civil service, but their technical areas were very different. Rather, he believes his entrance into the Service was due to his going to the wrong class, which proved to be the right class for him. He realized he never really talked to his father, certainly never asked him is he really liked his job, but he thinks his father was never really introspective anyway–he had a family to support and he did his job. That was all.
The short version (the book version is quite long) is that his father was killed when he got stuck in a subway car and was dragged to his death (in what must have been a very gruesome scene). The litigation went on for years and is still unsettled.
Half way through the 177 page book, he gets to “all this is part of the question of how I came to be posted here in Examinations.” In a more salient point he says that “there are probably just certain kinds of people who are drawn to a career in the IRS. People who are… “called to account. Meaning we are talking about almost a special kind of psychological type, probably. It’ not a very common type, perhaps one in 10,000–but the thing is that the sort of person of this type who decides that he wants to enter the Service really really wants to.”
This leads to his talk of a Christian roommate he had at Lindenhurst college. The Christian’s girlfriend talked about when she was born again. When the preacher said there was someone lost in the church, she knew he as talking about her. But the narrator mocked her because the preacher could have been talking about anyone–what made her think it referred to her? He later realized that the fact that the preacher could have been talking about anyone was the whole point.
This is interrupted by a digression about watching As the World Turns and actually hearing the TV announcer say “you are watching as the world turns” and him recognizing that it was time to stop drifting.
The crucial element for his joining the Service was entering the wrong classroom at DePaul in 1978. He was preparing for an exam prep class for his Federalist Papers class, but wound up walking into the wrong building (the two buildings were identical) and stumbled into Advanced Tax. This was for seniors and graduate students, and was taught by a well-regarded Jesuit. He didn’t realize he was in the wrong class until it started, and then he felt he couldn’t leave. And when the Jesuit (it was actually a substitute) came in the room, the narrator was transfixed. The presenter had integrity, not a sucking-up quality. He was non-nonsense (as his father would say).
This teacher became the first real authority figure he had met. And he makes some pronouncements that were bound to inspire the class: that working in the Service was heroic:
enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism. Heroism. … Not heroism as you might know it from films or the tales of childhood. The heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater… all designed to appear heroic to excite and gratify and audience. Welcome to the world of reality–there is no audience.
And
To give oneself to the care of others’ money–this is effacement, perdurance, sacrifice, honor, doughtiness, valor.
The metaphors get a bit strained by the end of the lecture, but everyone is rapt.
He decided right then to go and try to enroll in Economics, but the dean remembered him from the last time he was in the office under very different circumstance (and even said aloud to the dean “whatever”). The dean would not grant him any new terms on his enrollment. But then her heard on the radio (and saw an ad in the paper) about the Service Initiative to hire new people. He trudged through a blizzard (the worst in Chicago history) to the downtown Service storefront (next to the recruitment station) and signed up for the Tax Deferment Service program. He also tells about all the monitoring and expectations the branch had of people who came in–that they watched you and gave little tests to determine your commitment level and ability to tolerate boredom. This is an other long and largely funny section (it’s amazing that he can make boredom funny).
In the 1970s the Service was all about maximizing throughput of returns, but once the new Initiatives came in via Spackleman, the Service was more interested in “maximizing revenue rather than throughput of returns–screening recruits for a set of characteristics that boiled down to an ability to maintain concentration under conditions of extreme tedium, complication, confusion and absence of comprehensive info. Essentially, the were looking for “cogs not spark plugs.”
In that era the six main nodes or Service Branches were : Administration, Returns Processing, Compliance, Collections, Internal Control, Support Services and something called the Technical Branch.
He fills out all the paperwork (he’s the only one who returned through the blizzard). And when he hands it in, we get this awesome description:
I arrived back at the storefront recruiting station no later than 9:20 AM, to find no one else there from the prior day except the same Service recruiter, looking even more exhausted and disheveled, who, when I came in and said I was ready for advanced processing, and gave him the forms from the homework I’d plowed through, looked from me to the forms and back again, giving me the exact kind of smile of someone who, on Christmas morning, has just unwrapped an expensive present he already owns.
I love this final sentence so much and yet I have a hard time parsing it.
This is a challenging except. Not because it is hard to understand, it is just so mundane, so much back and forth and so much extra verbiage. But if Wallace has done his job right (and I think he has) he can make boredom interesting.
Happy tax day.
Don’t blame the cogs at the IRS, blame the pr*sident.
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