So I guess I love the challenge. I can’t think of any other reason why it should fill me with pleasure to sit for hours at the kitchen table, reading and re-reading instructions that say, “Skip lines 1 through 3, enter on line 4 the amount from line 38, minus the total of any amount from Form 8914, line 2, and, if you are claiming the standard deduction, any amount from line 6. Then go to line 5.” And no, I didn’t make that up. It’s from the instruction book for Form 1040 — yet another reminder of what a funny country we live in (and love).
Last Sunday, sidelined with a sore throat, I sat and watched all of the Sunday-morning political shows, beginning with “Meet the Press.” Much of the discussion was about the proposed “stimulus package,” and House minority leader John Boehner, who is compellingly good-looking and impossible to ignore, maintained at length and in the gravest tones that his liberal Democrat colleagues didn’t know anything about how to fix the economy.
Later in the day, speaking on the phone with my brother, I said, “Setting aside the fact that I thought our representatives were going to quit labeling each other, hasn’t Congressman Boehner been around for a while? Weren’t his party’s policies the very ones that sent our economy into crash mode? How can he sit there and claim that he alone knows what to do? How does he have the, um, the — “
My brother laughed. “Don’t you remember Steve Allen and his unmitigated gall?” he said. “He kept a jar of it at his desk, and on occasions like this, he’d say, ‘What unmitigated gall!’ and throw some of it at the wall.”
“Wow! No. Really?” I said. “Was it brown? Or green? Sort of sludge-y looking?” But of course, those were the days of black-and-white TV. It was just some dark-looking stuff in a jar. But how perfect, I thought.
That evening, watching “60 Minutes” and seeing, up close and in color, how the Israelis are treating their Palestinian neighbors, harassing them with multiple checkpoints, denying them the ability to go to work, throwing them out of their apartments (having already thrown them off of their land), and, in every way they can think of, trying to make a two-state solution impossible, I was ready to reach for the gall jar myself. I have a Palestinian friend — Christian, as it happens — whose family lost everything and came to America to start over, and it has taken her a long time to recover from the fear, the sorrow, and the loss. She still startles if a door slams, because in her youth those loud sounds were guns going off outside her family’s home.
Can we ever finally give up all of that and settle down? My favorite bumper sticker says, “When the power of love is greater than the love of power, there will be peace.” Then we can all sit around quietly and happily, working on our taxes.
Susan Harper is director of the Commerce Public Library. She lives in Commerce.
