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The Fleas Are in the DetailsMarch 05, 2008 Yesterday I had a job to e-mail off to the publisher, so what did I spend the morning doing? Writing a letter to the editor of the Martha's Vineyard Times. True, the job, a book with close to 450 manuscript pages and a bunch of tables and charts, only needed a quick once-over and cleanup (e.g., make sure that no SJS CHECK . . . comments remained unanswered and embedded in the text), but even a skim through 400-plus pages takes some time, and when I wrapped up the letter at half past noon I did wonder for a moment if I'd cut it too close. What the hell, a little adrenaline surge never hurt anyone, and often an imminent deadline helps me focus. If I've got too much time, it's too tempting to revisit, rethink, and second-guess stuff that doesn't need to be revisited, rethought, or second-guessed. So the letter got writ and the deadline met, and I was at the barn by four o'clock. The thing about this letter that I had to write is that it was a response to a letter in last week's paper that was so muddled that an uncharitable soul might even call it, and possibly its author, stupid. (I am occasionally that uncharitable.) So why bother? Well, it addressed one of my current favorite subjects, the subject that's prompted me to attend more meetings in the last month than I'd attended in the previous two years: the FY2008 property tax bills for the town of West Tisbury, and particularly the valuation and assessment process by which these taxes were arrived at. As a chronic renter, I'm only indirectly affected by property taxes -- it's one of the factors that make rents keep going up, but like the other factors I have virtually no control over it so I treat it pretty much the way I treat the weather, which is to say: get used to it. However, with my three siblings I also co-own a camp on Tisbury Great Pond, which ordinarily ranks near the bottom of my list of things to obsess about, way behind making rent and the board bill, getting Mud of the Place into print, and do I have enough beer to get through the weekend. In the heartbeat between FY2007 and FY2008, the assessed valuation of the place doubled and the tax went up 83%. Tax bills, I discover, can be like deadlines in their capacity to focus one's attention. Property taxes have zoomed up from the back of the pack and are now serious contenders for my attention, right behind rent, board, Mud, and beer. Some months ago I got going about holograms -- how the big picture is contained in little bitty pictures, and understanding the little bitty picture can tell you a lot about the big one; and, of course, vice versa. The big picture in this case is that markets make pretty good engines but that the U.S. of A. has long been in the grip of an ideology that elevates The Market to the status of a god -- an omnipotent, omniscient entity over whom mere mortals have as much control as we do over, say, the weather. People disagree over whether it's God or the Devil that lurks in the details, but in my born-again zeal to understand the mechanics and assumptions behind property taxes I'm learning plenty about why markets make lousy gods and that whoever's down there testifying in the details (maybe the serpent who was so fond of apples?) is worth paying close attention to. So that's why I spent yesterday morning responding to a muddled and possibly stupid letter: to direct people's attention to the details and maybe inspire one or two or three of them to stop throwing up their hands and saying "You can't fight city hall" or "It's the will of God," which is pretty much the same thing. It's one thing to hang everything on "the will of God" when you really don't know what's causing it, but it's another to push off on God what you're too lazy to figure out for yourself. "Trust in God but tie your camel," as the saying goes. When you chunk big pictures -- city hall, town hall, the goddamn market -- down into teeny tiny details, they become more manageable, true, but manageability comes at a price: you're going to have to sit down, lie down, and otherwise consort with people who drive you up a wall, some of whom you don't trust and may even loathe (and if you don't now, you probably will in the not-too-distant future). "Lie down with camels, get up with fleas" goes another saying -- I've got camels on the brain today -- but there are worse afflictions in the world than fleas. On my high school yearbook page I quoted Brecht: "Sink down in the slime, embrace the butcher, but change the world; it needs it." Later, and for quite a few years, I thought "butcher" meant meatcutter and cringed from the classism of it, on my behalf and Brecht's, but now I suspect the butchers Brecht had in mind were more along the lines of Dick Cheney and Saddam Hussein. Rising up with fleas seems far preferable to embracing one of them, but in some circumstances keeping your hands clean, or your shirt, isn't a good enough excuse. Paying close attention to the details seems to inoculate people against conspiracy theories -- which have, I can't help noticing, a fair amount in common with religions: they thrive when humans can't or won't figure out what's happening, and when they shrink from embracing slime, camels, butchers, and people who piss them off. So I wrote my letter, and you can read it here.
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