Out-of-towners, this is a Radio-Free Robin column
I wrote about a highly local school-tax ish here in Dade County. Dade Countians: For reference, see my nooz piece on last Thursday’s county
commission meeting in this week’s Sentinel.
Build
Thee More Stately Mansions, O My Soul!
And Tax The Crap Out Of Them.
By
Robin Ford Wallace
My darlings! If irony were acorns, and your narrator a
chipmunk, after the November Dade County Commission meeting my little jaw sacs
would be stuffed full enough to last the winter. Even one of those long, blizzardy ones you read about in the
Laura Ingalls Wilder novels, that happen after the old Indian hobbles into the
trading post and warns, “Heap big snow coming” – heck, I’d still be spitting
out hulls come March.
The star of
Thursday’s agenda was Dade’s duly and newly elected voice in Atlanta, whom we
shall not name here except by the colorful descriptive phrase used more and
more often about him locally: Mr.
He-Don’t-Come-‘Round-Here-No-More.
He-Don’t-Come was
to speak and be spoken to about the Board of Education’s proposed modification
of the so-called 65/5 school tax exemption, because this would require
legislation at the state level. But
Reader, can you guess how Rep. He-Don’t-Come started the evening?
Bingo. Pleading a last-minute prior engagement, or
something, He-Don’t-Come didn’t come.
But the other players were lined up in the wings, shuffling their notes
and rarin’ to go, so the show went by God on and the speakers spoke their
pieces whether or not there was anyone there to listen but the commission and
members of the ravenin’ press.
(Who were not
unappreciative. They say we small-town
journalists are under-rewarded, but not only did I recently receive from a
friendly interviewee a free T-shirt with a fart joke on front, Thursday night
afforded harmless entertainment enough to keep a girl through Christmas.)
First, speaker No.
1, whom we’ll call here Mr. T. Bagger:
T. Bagger was Dade’s chief executive for four rollicking years in which
the foolishness of electing people to government who don’t believe in it was
made flesh. During his term, Mr. B. almost
managed to restore Dade County to primordial chaos, though not so much as a
matter of policy as from the irritation factor. I’m probably exaggerating when I say Mr. B’s in-your-face
leadership style would have inspired b-slaps from Mother Teresa, but not when I
say he couldn’t pass around doughnuts without starting a fistfight. I was there. The man conducted budget hearings like Caligula!
Mr. B had come
tonight to defend 65/5. It was, after
all, the issue he had ridden into office.
Though then, of course, he had gone off home to the compound and left
the damn thing there, noisily huffing up oats and pooping in the schoolyard,
while the remaining politicos tore out their hair fretting how to get rid of it
without seeming pro-tax. (It’s why most
of them have bald spots.)
Now, ladies and gentlemen, let us move to the other
corner, to speaker No. 2: Mr.
Education. Yes! That camo-wearin’, “yo”-callin’, ex-Army
schools superintendent who campaigned for ESPLOST, then forgot to put it on the
ballot, was now at the meeting calling for a new referendum, this one to amend
65/5. The guy who OK’d $400,000 for
sooper-dooper security in a town where the worst school invasions come from
swarming ladybugs, but couldn’t find $38K for the library, marched right up to
the podium and quoted Oliver Wendell Holmes:
“Taxes are what we pay for civilized society."
You want irony, my
dears, I give you Mr. Education riding into town to proclaim himself the savior
of civilization, fresh from gunning down the Dade County Library. It don’t get no better than this, Earl!
As for Mr. E.
quoting literature, interviewed earlier (during his maiden-voyage book-banning
pogrom, BTW), he wasn’t able to name one of the Canterbury Tales, not even the
Miller’s Tale, which is mostly a fart joke.
So I expect
somebody Googled the tax quote for him.
But here’s a further irony: Me,
when I think “Oliver Wendell Holmes,” I think “Chambered Nautilus,” as in:
“Build thee
more stately mansions, O my soul!”
And stately mansions are what 65/5 is all
about. It exempts people 65 and older
from paying school taxes on five acres and their houses, no matter how
stately.
Mr. Education
wants to reverse that. He thinks people
who come to Dade to build $500,000 mansions can afford to pay school tax. But T. Bagger says making them pay would be
against everything the Founding Fathers wanted for America.
Mr. B. says he
conducts Constitutional-law-slash-target-practice sessions at his shooting
range (does that make anybody else go “EEE?”) and he and the boys have
concluded between BLAMs that the whole purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to
protect rich people’s right not to pay taxes.
What I take away
from all this, besides the irony, is the utter uselessness of Big Ideas in
government. We need government for
practical things we can’t achieve individually – for most of us, roads, law
enforcement, schools; for some who need not be named here, clean water piped
into their isolated armed compounds.
With limited
revenues, our sitting county commissioners supply us these things through a responsive,
practical, push-pull democracy which you, too, would admire if you spent as
much time staring deeply into their bald spots as I do. Whereas when T. Bagger with his grand
notions called the shots, county business pretty much shut down while everybody
gritted teeth and tried not to slug him.
It’s the same with
65/5 and Mr. E. Call me a commie but
I’d rather hear Dade County described as having good schools than as a great
place to dodge property taxes. Saving
civilization is a wonderful idea.
But maybe if the
Board of Ed wants some help with that, it should redefine “civilization” to
include books, learning and libraries.
Until then – well!
We’ll see how far
through the heap-big snows we can all live on irony.
END
