The tax rant — an electorate that demands services, punishes tax-raisers, and encourages the lying it despises…
echoes
From: DFW with Christopher Lydon — The Connection, WBUR Boston (February 21, 1996; the rediscovered 'lost' interview)
- Early text:
[scene] Watching the 1996 primary, he finds the
contortions over taxes bizarre: an industrial nation among the world's
most lightly taxed demands services, punishes politicians who raise
taxes, and
dislikes them for lying when we encourage the lie; he wishes his
generation understood it would feel better — inside, in the stomach — to
pay more to house and feed the poor, for our own sake, so that we
would be a society that refuses to let people die; instead we are lethally
selfish and self-indulgent, and doing the book was hard because it asked
why [00:24:14–00:25:02]
- IJ echo: the political layer the novel builds from exactly this
pathology — a telegenic leader elected by a want-it-both-ways electorate,
waste exported rather than faced, the Concavity as the price nobody
would pay in taxes
- Weight: shared-preoccupation