Martin Bashir is upset about the recent bloom in anti-IRS sentiment. He thinks "IRS" is the new euphemism for the n-word (whacka whacka), but anti-revenooer sentiment is nothing new.
Now the revenue man wanted grandaddy bad
He headed up the holler with everything he had
It's before my time but I've been told
He never came back from Copperhead Road
It's a lot older than Steve Earle, too:
Wake up, wake up, Darlin' Corey
What makes you sleep so sound
The revenue officers are comin'
Gonna tear your stillhouse down.
For that matter, tax collectors weren't popular in the Bible. That seems to have been a function not so much of an unwillingness to pay one's fair share of public expenses as of their unpleasant habit of overcharging for personal gain, but there you are.
I notice that a YouTube search for either "Copperhead Road" or "Darlin' Corey" yields a fair sprinkling of videos touching on the current IRS scandals. I'd be careful about with whom I tried to associate the IRS in the public mind.
6 comments:
Family lore holds that my great-great grandfather once cut the head off a man who had ratted his still out to the revenuers, and posted it on a tobacco pole in the middle of town. Allegedly he was acquitted of all charges by a jury of his peers. This was in post-Civil War Tennessee.
Bashir link doesn't work.
I think she must mean the video you can see here.
Tax collectors in the Bible? Well, Matthew seemed to come out all right.
Not that they were all bad, but boy, they weren't popular; Christ took serious flak for associating with them. And they got advice like, "You'll be OK as long as you collect only what's owed instead of indulging in extortion and terror."
When my Great Aunt Barbara came to America, she set about doing just what she did in the old country, making the smoothest tater vodka this side of Moscow.
This was in a company town, and the detectives left her alone as long as she didn't sell to miners who were going on-shift. She became quite well-to-do, but karma gave her a 24-caret alcoholic for a husband.
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