Build Thee More Stately Mansions, O My Soul! And Tax The Crap Out Of Them.

              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