Tax Day Protests in Georgia and New Hampshire

has come and gone, and the news about Tax Day protests is starting to trickle in. Robert Randall reports on some protests in Georgia:

Wow! We really mis-calculated on the number of pie chart flyers we could have given out today. We had ordered 500 from the War Resisters League and divided them between the downtown Brunswick (GA) and the St. Simons Island post offices. I was worried we’d have dozens left over after a full day of leafletting.

Uh-uh. They were all gone at both P.O.’s by ! At the Brunswick P.O. we fortunately had a couple of hundred “Cost of War” flyers left over from last Fall, highlighting the costs of the Iraq War to Georgia and the 1st congressional district, and we promptly gave out of them, too. We were headed home by .

Eight protesters from the New Hampshire Underground protested in front of the post office in Keene. One reported: “Lots of horn honks and other gestures of support. Even some from the police.”

Protesters in the New Hampshire Underground braved soggy weather to protest at the Keene Post Office. Photo by Michael Hampton.

Who Is IOZ? has been blogging , but I’ve just recently been clued in. Good stuff, and a great attitude. His latest screed rips into the tax-loving liberals, who are aghast at what the government is doing with their money and with the people who are spending it, but who nonetheless swell with civic pride as they imagine their money going to the Treasury.

Now since we all pay taxes — if we avoid ’em on income, we still get ’em on cigarettes and booze, or whatever — this is a little like taking pride in pooping. Not, in other words, something that an adult is supposed to do, though perhaps fit for a child. The basic idea is we’reallinthistogether, a Kumbaya paean to a naive One-Countryism in which your tax dollars are, as the saying goes, hard at work. This is the sort of thing that leaks out in the nocturnal emissions of bowdlerized Keynsians, a bare-breasted WPA workathon in which the money flows from the coffers straight into the mighty dams and highways and byways of the US of A. There is a feint in the direction of shared responsibility for The Bad Shit — it is “our war” — but the general tone and tenor is identical to the sentiment more concisely illustrated by “Freedom Ain’t Free” on the bumper sticker.

But the real underlying sentiment here is the old Bill Clintonism: You can’t claim to love your country and hate its government. The idea is that the country is the government, that peoplehood is just a collection of political institutions and symbolic traditions, and that but for the Risen Lord Baby Jesus himself, there is naught holier in this world than The Two-Party System, and all of its spending priorities, by god.…