December 15, 2018
Hello again, dear Reader of the Future! I have returned to regale you with the details of another thrilling day in “Middletown” (yes of course we all know it’s Muncie, but since the charade seems important to someone, we’ll let it stand). Presumably I’ve been assigned some identifying number so you know me from my previous entry in September. I don’t have a good grasp of how the mechanics of this project work—for instance, I had no idea I was expected to write more than one of these diary entries until a few days ago—but I will press onward in spite of my ignorance, because I am human and humans have always gone on despite/because of the impenetrable darkness of our unknowing.[1]
I have decided to forego trying to timestamp my entries out of respect for your intelligence and patience. I have very little in the way of play-by-play action to relate today.[2]
As luck would have it, I am once again writing in the aftermath of one of our actually quite rare parties, this one a Christmas party for W.’s students. There’s probably a lesson there about our expectations of supposedly random samples, or perhaps it’s just coincidence being coincidence. In any case, the party went well, although again we find ourselves with a good deal of leftover food to eat and a few messes and loose ends to tidy up.
It’s a cold (well, very cool), dreary, rainy day. Donald Trump still clings to the Presidency, although the general sentiment among that subset of the chorus of Americans that I choose to listen to[3] is that he might not cling for much longer. Once again, Reader, I envy you the more complete knowledge and clinical objectivity your place in time ostensibly affords, although my contentless reportage is likely of no help at all.
Still, I imagine you are interested in what it feels like to be one of us, in our fecund moment, on the cusp of whatever we are on the cusp of. Over the past few days, I’ve begun reading[4] Hermann Broch’s trilogy The Sleepwalkers, considered a masterpiece of high Modernism. The first book, which takes place in Berlin and East Prussia in 1888, concerns a young military officer and member of the landed gentry named Pasenow, and his friend Bertrand, who, though of similar background, has left the military to become a member of the burgeoning new commercial class of businessmen. Broch plays Pasenow’s hidebound rigidity, naivety, and lack of imagination against the canny street smarts of his old friend; and although I haven’t finished reading it (and have provided only a superficial gloss here), there seems to be momentum building toward an unhappy ending for Pasenow and his entire social class, as indeed there would be a reckoning for the Junkers thirty years hence when Germany lost the First World War, and more complete reckonings, directly proceeding from this, in 1933 and 1945 (although these occurred after Broch finished his novel). All of which leads me to reflect on the precarity of the present, in which the inertia of our vast social and economic machinery prevents us from stopping, or even acknowledging, our headlong slide into painfully-foreseeable disaster—a disaster the outlines of which I must assume you can better see, more or less clearly, in hindsight.[5]
But I digress.
Our lives—those of my wife and I, and most of our friends and my wife’s colleagues—are yoked to Ball State, Muncie’s university, and to the fortunes of a regime of Higher Education that has perhaps outlived its moment, having become a crass tool in the service of commercial accreditation, in which money and time are converted into entry passes to the world of coveted, credentialed white-collar positions in the marketplace. The mass democratization of Higher Learning ushered in by the GI Bill seven decades ago—which by means of taxpayer subsidies opened up access to university studies to a cohort of students formerly barred by considerations of money and class—has effectively ended, and now university graduates often spend much of their working lives saddled with considerable tuition-loan debt. Meanwhile, we look ahead to your time, Reader, and the possibility that most work will soon be automated, that most remaining wealth will soon be effectively consolidated in the hands of a relative few, and that the waste products of our economy’s primary energy source will continue to warm the climate and poison the biosphere. Our markets seem incapable of taking these threats seriously, but those who suffer the most cannot mount effective protest in the face of mass surveillance and threat of incarceration.
Otherwise, it’s Paradise now. You can get a decent burrito in most of America most of the time.[6]
On Monday, I must attend a training meeting for the tax preparation service that AARP volunteers offer in the Spring. This year I have been promoted to Site Administrator for the Delaware County Senior Citizens Center, which means that in addition to preparing taxes for retirees and other underserved persons, I have to perform various managerial and supervisory operations as well.
This requires some unpacking:
- S. residents are required to pay annual state and federal tax on their income, a process rendered as arcane and opaque as possible so that a professional class of tax preparers, accountants, and attorneys have something to do that no one else is qualified to do. (See my mini-rant regarding professional credentialing above.)
- Not everyone can afford to pay a professional to prepare their taxes, yet everyone is equally subject to penalties for nonpayment or insufficient payment. If this seems inequitable, it is.
- The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) is a large political lobbying and interest group for Americans over 50. The bit about “retired persons” reflects an already largely-moribund tendency for the elderly to have worked and retired from work by age 65 (presumably with pension and benefits) from a lifelong contract of employment to a single company. Persons who are under 50 in 2018 are known to laugh bitterly or groan at this holdover notion from the time of the New Deal and postwar prosperity, because most people today who were not born into wealth will likely never be able to “retire” fully from wage labor, even many people who have the benefit of a university degree.
- Because those persons who are currently retired often cannot readily afford to pay a professional tax preparer to prepare their tax returns, volunteers are sought out to do perform this service. I am one of these volunteers.
- Because the volunteer organization that is supposed to assist younger, non-retired, persons who cannot afford a professional tax preparer has stopped serving greater Delaware County (and adjacent counties as well), we AARP volunteers have stepped in to prepare their taxes, too.
- And because the volunteers who perform this service are largely retired, older, persons themselves, they require extensive training in modern (for us) computer-assisted tax preparation.
- Finally, because last year Congress passed a new regime of tax law, known cynically as “Tax Reform,” though it is a regressive set of changes designed to allow the wealthy to pay less tax at the expense of future generations (i.e., you, dear Reader), this year everything is different.
Enough woolgathering. I have just returned from a dog walk, which handily provided me with two small events that I hope will give you a taste of daily experienced life in Muncie:
First, some random motorist slowed as she drove by us so that a passenger in her car could yell out, “I LIKE YOUR DOG!” Hoosiers, more than most city people, more than most people who live in the North American coastal regions, seem to enjoy making unsolicited comments to strangers when silence would suffice. These remarks are never smart, witty, or perceptive, are in fact almost always notable only for their banality and/or obviousness and/or passive-aggression. I have never been able to account for this habit, which a number of Hoosiers have informed me is born of an excess of friendliness. It has seldom felt like anything friendly to me.[7] Rather, it has usually felt more like an insidious intrusion—a micro-aggression, it is now called, an assertion of defiance by a member of the endangered minority of white people whose folkways are being supplanted by modernity, or even a type of norm-policing, a way of pointing out that I am “different,” which is the worst adjective most Midwesterners can think of. The retort that always forms in my mind (usually far too late to deploy against the speaker, who has moved on) is that I am not the cause of the forces of history that are sweeping away the old white Midwestern folkways, but only the symptom…
Second, we came across a man dragging large pieces of lumber out of his garage and piling them into the bed of a truck that was missing both front wheels. This seems apt to me, this image of almost perfectly purposeless, unproductive activity, for the purpose of appearing productive; paired with an obdurate refusal to admit to the manifest facts of the case. Perhaps I am missing an important piece of information. I’m sure you can think of other instances in which the people of my time have failed to plan ahead for the future, thus leaving it up to the next generation—you, or your ancestors—to deal with our failure of forethought.
[1] To summarize several thousand pages of Beckett.
[2] My promise to relate thrilling details is already as empty as the looming expanse of blank white page before me. Why did you ever trust me?
[3] On social media, naturally.
[4] In translation, since my German isn’t what it used to be, which was never much to start with.
[5] Reader, I do not expect from you the same rapt attention that I give to Broch. Maybe if I had done this as a podcast or vlog…
[6] Sarcasm.
[7] I attract more than my fair share of such unwanted remarks for some reason.