Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  Historians often look to the Roman Empire to find analogies with the United States. They flatter us. We live not under the Pax Americana, but the Pax Frigida. I should not look to Rome for comparison but rather to the Most Serene Venetian Republic, a pedestrian state devoted to wealth, comfort, trade, and keeping the peace, especially after inheriting the wreck of the Byzantine Empire, as we have inherited the wreck of the British Empire. Venice was not inspiring but it worked. Ultimately, our danger comes not from the idea of Communism, which (as an Archbishop of Canterbury remarked) is a “Christian heresy” whose materialistic aims (as opposed to means) vary little from our own; rather, it will come from the increasing wealth and skill of other Serene Republics which, taking advantage of our increasing moral and intellectual fatness, will try to seize our markets in the world. If we are to end, it will not be with a Bomb but a bigger Buck. Fortunately, under that sanctimoniousness so characteristic of the American selling something, our governors know that we are fighting not for “the free world” but to hold onto an economic empire not safe or pleasant to let go. The Arab world—or as salesmen would say, “territory”—is almost ours, and we must persevere in landing that account. It will be a big one some day.

  Esquire, October 1963

  *Those were the days!

  EDMUND WILSON, TAX DODGER

  “Between the year 1946 and the year 1955, I did not file any income tax returns.”

  With that blunt statement, Edmund Wilson embarks on a most extraordinary polemic.* He tells us why he did not pay his taxes. Apparently he had never made much money. He was generally ignorant of the tax laws. In 1946, when his novel Memoirs of Hecate County was published, his income doubled. Then the book was suppressed by court order and the income stopped. While all this was going on, he was much distracted by a tangled private life. So what with one thing and another, Mr. Wilson never got around to filing a return.

  “It may seem naive, and even stupid, on the part of one who had worked for years on a journal which specialized in public affairs (the New Republic) that he should have paid so little attention to recent changes in the income tax laws…” It does indeed seem naïve and stupid, and one cannot help but think that our premier literary critic (who among other great tasks of illumination explained Marxian economics to a generation) is a bit of a dope. But with that harsh judgment out of the way, one can only admire his response to the American bureaucracy.

  Mr. Wilson originally owed $20,000 in unpaid taxes. With interest and fines, the $20,000 became $60,000. The Internal Revenue Service then went into action, and Mr. Wilson learned at first hand just how much power the IRS exerts. Royalties, trust funds, bank accounts can be attached; automobiles may be seized and sold at auction. Nothing belongs to the victim until the case is settled. Meanwhile, his private life is ruthlessly invaded in order to discover if he is of criminal intent (and therefore willfully bilking the nation of its rightful revenue). In Mr. Wilson’s case, much was made of the fact that he had been married four times (a sign of unstable temperament); that he had written, Heaven help him, books! In a passage of exquisite irony, Mr. Wilson describes how one of the agents was put to work reading the master’s complete oeuvre in order to prove that his not paying taxes was part of a sinister design to subvert a great nation. Did they find anything? Yes. In a journalistic piece, Mr. Wilson seemed to admire a man who had, among other crimes, not paid a Federal tax.

  Even more unpleasant than the bureau’s legitimate investigation was the unrelenting impertinence of the investigators. Why did Mr. Wilson spend six dollars to buy a cushion for his dog to sleep on? Why did he keep three places to live when the investigator (who earned a virtuous $7,500 a year) needed only one place to live in? Why was Mr. Wilson’s daughter in a private school? Even worse than this sort of harassment was the inefficiency and buck-passing of the bureau. No one seemed able to make a decision. Regional office A had no idea what regional office B had decided. Then, just as progress was about to be made, a new investigator would be assigned the case and everyone had to go back to “Start.” Kafka inevitably comes to mind; also, the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union which Mr. Wilson once contrasted—to his regret—unfavorably with our own.

  After describing his own particular predicament, Mr. Wilson then discusses the general question of the income tax and the free society. He records in detail the history of the tax since the 1913 Constitutional amendment which made it legal (in 1895 the Supreme Court had ruled that President Lincoln’s wartime tax on personal income was unconstitutional). Inexorably, the Federal tax has increased until today we pay more tax than we did during the Second World War. And there is no end in sight.

  Mr. Wilson then asks a simple question: Why must we pay so much? He notes the conventional answer: Since the cold war, foreign aid, and defense account for seventy-nine per cent of all Federal expenditures, putting the nation in permanent hock to that economic military complex President Eisenhower so movingly warned us against after a lifetime’s loyal service to it. There is of course some consolation in the fact that we are not wasting our billions weakening the moral fiber of the American yeoman by building him roads and schools, or by giving him medical care and decent housing. In public services, we lag behind all the industrialized nations of the West, preferring that the public money go not to the people but to big business. The result is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich. This dazzling inequity is reflected in our tax system where the man on salary pays more tax than the man who lives on dividends, who in turn pays more tax than the wheeler-dealer who makes a capital-gains deal.

  How did we get into this jam? Admittedly, the Soviet is a formidable enemy, and we have been well advised to protect ourselves. Empires traditionally must buy not only weapons but allies, and we are, like it or not, an empire. But there is no evidence that we need spend as much as we do spend on atomic overkill, on foreign aid, on chemical and bacteriological warfare (we are now reactivating at great expense diseases that the human race has spent centuries attempting to wipe out).

  Mr. Wilson is excellent at describing the mad uses to which our tax money is being put ($30 billion to get a man on the moon is lunacy), but he seems not to be aware of the original policy behind the cold war. It was John Foster Dulles’s decision to engage the Soviet in an arms race. Dulles figured, reasonably enough, that the Soviet economy could not endure this sort of competition. It was also believed that even if they should achieve military parity, their people, hungering for consumer goods, would revolt. This policy was successful for a time. But it worked as much hardship on our free society as it did on their closed one. We have become a garrison state, frightened of our own government and bemused by a rhetoric in which all is appearance, nothing reality. Or, as Mr. Wilson puts it:

  “The truth is that the people of the United States are at the present time dominated and driven by two kinds of officially propagated fear: fear of the Soviet Union and fear of the income tax.

  “These two terrors have been adjusted so as to complement one another and thus to keep the citizen of our free society under the strain of a double pressure from which he finds himself unable to escape—like the man in the old Western story who, chased into a narrow ravine by a buffalo, is confronted with a grizzly bear. If we fail to accept the tax, the Russian buffalo will butt and trample us, and if we try to defy the tax, the Federal bear will crush us.”

  Is there a way out? Mr. Wilson is not optimistic. Opponents of the income tax tend to be of the Far Right, where they fear the buffalo even more than they do the bear. There is nothing quite so engaging in our public life today as to hear Barry Goldwater tell us how we can eventually eliminate the graduated income tax while increasing military expenditures. Also, the militant conservative, though he will go to the barricades to keep a Federal dollar from filtering down to a state school, sees nothing wrong with Federal billions subsidizing a corporation in which he owns stock.
As for the politicians, they tend to be too much part of the system to try and change it. The most passionate Congressional budget cutter will do all that he can to get Federal money for his own district. Between the pork barrel and the terrible swift sword, Pentagon, Congress, and industry are locked together, and nothing short of a major popular revolt can shatter their embrace.

  Mr. Wilson discusses in some detail various attempts made by individuals (mostly pacifists) to thwart the IRS. But the results have not been happy. The line between Thoreau and Poujade is a delicate one. Yet it is perfectly clear that it must one day be drawn if the United States is not to drift into a rigid Byzantine society where the individual is the state’s creature (yes, liberals worry about this, too), his life the property of a permanent self-perpetuating bureaucracy, frozen in some vague never-ending cold war with an enemy who is merely a reflection of itself.

  Edmund Wilson’s personal conclusion is a sad one. He points out that at the age of sixty-eight he can never hope to pay the government what he owes. According to his settlement with the IRS, everything that he makes over a certain amount goes automatically toward settling the debt. On principle, he hopes to keep his income below the taxable level. More to the point, as a result of his experience with the New America, “I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I live in it, is no longer any place for me.” That is a stunning indictment of us all. Edmund Wilson is our most distinguished man of letters. He has always been (though the bureaucrats may not know it) something of a cultural America Firster. To lose such a man is a warning signal that our society is approaching that shadow line which, once crossed, means an end to what the makers of the country had hoped would be a place in which happiness might be usefully pursued. Yet Mr. Wilson’s grim pamphlet may be just the jolt we need. Not since Thomas Paine has the drum of polemic sounded with such urgency through the land, and it is to be hoped that every citizen of the United States will read this book.

  Book Week, November 3, 1963

  Few matters of a substantive nature can be discussed in the United States. Wilson’s extraordinary book was regarded as a joke at the time. In the ten years that have passed, the injustice of our tax system and the evil and foolish uses to which the national income is put are at last, most timidly, being noted.

  *The Cold War and the Income Tax (1963).

  TARZAN REVISITED

  There are so many things that people who take polls never get around to asking. Fascinated as we all are to know what our countrymen think of great issues (approving, disapproving, don’t-knowing, with that native shrewdness which made a primeval wilderness bloom with Howard Johnson signs), the pollsters never get around to asking the sort of interesting personal questions our new Romans might be able to answer knowledgeably. For instance, how many adults have an adventure serial running in their heads? How many consciously daydream, turning on a story in which the dreamer ceases to be an employee of IBM and becomes a handsome demigod moving through splendid palaces, saving maidens from monsters (or monsters from maidens: this is a jaded time). Most children tell themselves stories in which they figure as powerful figures, enjoying the pleasures not only of the adult world as they conceive it but of a world of wonders unlike dull reality. Although this sort of Mittyesque daydreaming is supposed to cease in maturity, I suggest that more adults than we suspect are dazedly wandering about with a full Technicolor extravaganza going on in their heads. Clad in tights, rapier in hand, the daydreamers drive their Jaguars at fantastic speeds through a glittering world of adoring love objects, mingling anachronistic historic worlds with science fiction. “Captain, the time-warp’s been closed! We are now trapped in a parallel world, inhabited entirely by women with three breasts!” Though from what we can gather about these imaginary worlds, they tend to be more Adlerian than Freudian: the motor drive is the desire not for sex (other briefer fantasies take care of that) but for power, for the ability to dominate one’s environment through physical strength, best demonstrated in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose books are enjoying a huge revival.

  When I was growing up, I read all twenty-three Tarzan books, as well as the ten Mars books. My own inner storytelling mechanism was vivid. At any one time, I had at least three serials going as well as a number of tried and true reruns. I mined Burroughs largely for source material. When he went to the center of the earth à la Jules Verne (much too fancy a writer for one’s taste), I immediately worked up a thirteen-part series, with myself as lead and various friends as guest stars. Sometimes I used the master’s material, but more often I adapted it freely to suit myself. One’s daydreams tended to be Tarzanish pre-puberty (physical strength and freedom) and Martian post-puberty (exotic worlds and subtle combinazione to be worked out). After adolescence, if one’s life is sufficiently interesting, the desire to tell oneself stories diminishes. My last serial ran into sponsor trouble when I was in the Second World War, and it was never renewed.

  Until recently I assumed that most people were like myself: daydreaming ceases when the real world becomes interesting and reasonably manageable. Now I am not so certain. Pondering the life and success of Burroughs leads one to believe that a good many people find their lives so unsatisfactory that they go right on year after year telling themselves stories in which they are able to dominate their environment in a way that is not possible in the overorganized society.

  According to Edgar Rice Burroughs, “Most of the stories I wrote were the stories I told myself just before I went to sleep.” He is a fascinating figure to contemplate, an archetypal American dreamer. Born in 1875 in Chicago, he was a drifter until he was thirty-six. He served briefly in the U.S. Cavalry; then he was a gold miner in Oregon, a cowboy in Idaho, a railroad policeman in Salt Lake City; he attempted several businesses that failed. He was perfectly in the old-American grain: the man who could take on almost any job, who liked to keep moving, who tried to get rich quick but could never pull it off. And while he was drifting through the unsatisfactory real world, he consoled himself with an inner world where he was strong and handsome, adored by beautiful women and worshiped by exotic races. His principal source of fantasy was Rider Haggard. But even that rich field was limited, and so, searching for new veins to tap, he took to reading the pulp magazines, only to find that none of the stories could compare for excitement with his own imaginings. Since the magazine writers could not please him, he had no choice but to please himself, and the public. He composed a serial about Mars and sold it to Munsey’s. The rest was easy, for his fellow daydreamers recognized at once a master dreamer.

  In 1914 Burroughs published Tarzan of the Apes (Rousseau’s noble savage reborn in Africa), and history was made. To date the Tarzan books have sold over twenty-five million copies in fifty-six languages. There is hardly an American male of my generation who has not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape as it issued from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, to the accompaniment of thousands of arms and legs snapping during attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the Republic. Between 1914 and his death in 1950, the squire of Tarzana, California (a prophet more than honored in his own land), produced over sixty books, while enjoying the unique status of being the first American writer to be a corporation. Burroughs is said to have been a pleasant, unpretentious man who liked to ride and play golf. Not one to compromise a vivid unconscious with dim reality, he never set foot in Africa.

  With a sense of recapturing childhood, I have just reread several Tarzan books. It is fascinating to see how much one recalls after a quarter century. At times the sense of déjà vu is overpowering. It is equally interesting to discover that one’s memories of Tarzan of the Apes are mostly action scenes. The plot had slipped one’s mind…and a lot of plot there is. The beginning is worthy of Conrad. “I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the
beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.” It is 1888. The young Lord and Lady Greystoke are involved in a ship mutiny (“there was in the whole atmosphere of the craft that undefinable something which presages disaster”). The peer and peeress are put ashore on the west coast of Africa, where they promptly build a tree house. Here Burroughs is at his best. He tells you the size of the logs, the way to hang a door when you have no hinges, the problems of roofing. One of the best things about his books is the descriptions of making things. The Greystokes have a child, and conveniently die. The “man-child” is discovered by Kala, a Great Ape, who brings him up as a member of her tribe. As anthropologist, Burroughs is pleasantly vague. His apes are carnivorous, and they are able, he darkly suspects, to mate with human beings.

  Tarzan grows up as an ape, kills his first lion (with a full nelson), teaches himself to read and write English by studying some books found in the cabin. The method he used, sad to say, is the currently fashionable “look-see.” Though he can read and write, he cannot speak any language except that of the apes. He also gets on well with other members of the animal kingdom, with Tantor the elephant, Ska the vulture, Numa the lion (Kipling was also grist for the Burroughs dream mill). Then white folks arrive: Professor Archimedes Q. Porter and his daughter Jane. Also, a Frenchman named D’Arnot who teaches Tarzan to speak French, which is confusing. By an extraordinary coincidence, Jane’s suitor is the current Lord Greystoke, who thinks the Greystoke baby is dead. Tarzan saves Jane from an ape. Then he puts on clothes and goes to Paris, where he drinks absinthe. Next stop, America. In Wisconsin, he saves Jane Porter from a forest fire: only to give her up nobly to Lord Greystoke, not revealing the fact that he is the real Lord Greystoke. Fortunately in the next volume, The Return of Tarzan, he marries Jane and they live happily ever after in Africa, raising a son John, who in turn grows up and has a son. Yet even as a grandfather, Tarzan continues to have adventures with people a foot high, with descendants of Atlantis, with the heirs of a Roman legion who think that Rome is still a success. All through these stories one gets the sense that one is daydreaming, too. Episode follows episode with no particular urgency. Tarzan is always knocked on the head and taken captive; he always escapes; there is always a beautiful princess or high priestess who loves him and assists him; there is always a loyal friend who fights beside him, very much in that Queequeg tradition which, Professor Leslie Fiedler assures us, is the urning in the fuel supply of the American psyche. But no matter how difficult the adventure, Tarzan, clad only in a loincloth with no weapon save a knife (the style is comforting to imitate), wins against all odds and returns to his shadowy wife.