By Andrei Codrescu
Three guys were eating the free breakfast at the Holiday Inn Express in Mountain Home, Ark., and one of them said, apropos the homerun ball loosed by Barry Bonds to break Hank Aaron’s record, being featured on CNN along with the lucky guy who caught it:
“The I.R.S. is gonna value that ball at $600,000 and he has to pay tax on it whether he sells it or not.”
Another man said: “Well, the average guy will have to sell it to pay the tax.”
The third guy pondered this a long minute, then declared: “He could insure it and then burn the house down.”
That didn’t bring any comment from the first two guys who spoke flat middle-class Midwestern English. The third guy was obviously a local, a smart hillbilly whose people had dreaded revenuers for generations. What he’d said had been meant humorously, but it was a kind of humor the Midwesterners weren’t used to anymore. They’d grown up in suburbs and their people had been company men for generations. They’d paid taxes for so long talk like this was nothing short of sedition. They might have laughed at an ethnic joke, after looking around to make sure that everyone eating the powdered eggs and microwaved sausages, wasn’t of the ethnicity under question, but they’d have laughed. Taxes? Well, that’s no laughing matter, it’s something they went to the polls every election to vote against, but they couldn’t conceive of anyone just out and out not paying them or, God forbid, as had been suggested, actually commit arson for the purpose of not paying them.
The mountain man knew that he’d struck the wrong chord, as if the others could actually smell the moonshine in his family tree. He hastened to repair the damage:
“I mean, if you found a crystal geode worth a few hundred or thousands, they wouldn’t get you for it, would they?”
It was too little too late and, anyway, what did the Midwesterners know about geodes? On their cubicle desks they had maybe a spinning gadget from the Discovery store at the mall, or maybe a test tube with a gold flake from Knots Farm in California, but a geode? For chrissakes, man, one of them telepathized his fellow, this hillbilly is really from somewhere else, isn’t he? Not from America, I mean.
Mountain Home, Ark., is a growing town. There is a Home Depot and a Staples and one of every kind of fast-food joint. You can’t yet get a fat-free latte for the world of you, but it’s coming. This is why the Midwesterners were here, in fact. There were booming opportunities in the area and they were here to do business with guys like the humorous tax-denigrator.
CNN went on to the war in Iraq and all talk of the lucky ball stopped. About Iraq they didn’t talk. It wasn’t breakfast talk and if they thought differently on that subject they weren’t going to let it show. Now, about the labor shortage: where are we going to find enough Mexicans to build us a Starbucks?
