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Twice each year we receive a crisp white envelope fashioned of the finest acid-free paper. No expense has been spared to engrave it with the glossiest, most luxuriant velvety black ink. It contains many enclosures, each a monument to the printer's art flourishing within our culture and emboldened by our technology. Crisp yet soft, those many pages caress our fingertips like a lover's sigh. No postage stamp defaces this splendid envelope, for it is a biannual missive from our government pen pal Smilin' Bob, the County Tax Assessor. Smilin' Bob has spent a buck or two of our money to dispatch this emotionally moving stationery with its pre-paid postage permit that we might delight in the opportunity to cough up a thousand dollars or be turned out into the street by the Marshall - and be billed for that, too.
This last offer of remunerate or be destroyed was accompanied, I suppose single letters suffer emotional travail when traveling alone, by an identical crisp white envelope fashioned of the same superb acid-free fine white paper. Smilin' Bob's name artfully embellished this one as well, as did his tax-paid postal permit. Times are hard in Orange County. Smilin' Bob knew that we would gladly fork over another $15 to chaperon the first $1000, thereby avoiding affective despair and irreparable psychological trauma to that check during its return trip. He knew that it was worth wasting another outer envelope, more postage, duplicate forms, and another return envelope to do it. We are lucky indeed that the Marshall never gets lonely. He is not an unpleasant man. He just spent his childhood pulling the wings off butterflies and pigeons, and got real close to God.
I thought of the many advantages in which we bask, each emanating from the funds so extorted from our retirement savings. Consider the public schools. Judging from the tenuous stratum California children occupy in state and national standardized tests of educational achievement - desperately grasping the bottom percentiles lest they fall off altogether - our tax money is obviously well spent. Not invested, mind you, just well spent. In any case, we ourselves have no children.
Smilin' Bob spends our money on flood control. It says so right here on the receipt. We sure are getting our money's worth after seven years of record drought! The rates go up each year. I suppose it gets increasingly harder to find floods to control when it does not rain. We certainly have first class floods when it does rain.
We are privileged to be amortizing a municipal water bond. Its issuance was essential to rationalize the water billing rate's continual enlargement. Conservation has decreased water usage 30%. The water district must massively increase its assets, or developers cannot demand the construction of thousands of new condominiums to consume excess capacity. Do you wonder wherefrom Smilin' Bob's smile sprouts?
Our tax dollars finance Vector Control. The lowland mangrove swamps of Irvine, California disappeared sometime during the Cretaceous Era, but you know how tricky mosquitoes can be. Vampire bats, gila monsters, Democrats, and Komodo dragons are mostly under control. At least they do not litter the streets, filling the potholes and plugging the cracked asphalt. South African clawed frogs accidentally loosed by the University of California/Irvine, ten pound carnivorous amphibians the size of serving platters wielding rows of teeth all pointing down their ravenous gullets, are holding their own. The olive drab beasties are called Xenopus; the divers that hunt them are called frog chow. Irvine is the flea capital of the world, but fleas must be scalars because Vector Control cannot be bothered. When Smilin' Bob scratches his butt it is only as an aid to thought.
The list of good deeds financed by our impoverishment liberally decorates Smilin' Bob's letterhead, running eighteen lines on the first page alone. Red lines and blue arrows abundantly adorn the black text, intimating that three passes through a printing press have undoubtedly raised the ante for our next tax bill due. Perhaps that one will be scribed upon parchment, gilded and illuminated in the finest Medieval traditions. Perhaps it will be pre-lubricated for easy insertion.
Each night we pause, my woman and I, kneeling at the foot of our bed and expansively thanking whatever deities there might be that we do not get all the government for which we are billed. We then slide under the covers and rest, secure in the belief that both Smilin' Bob and the Marshall are deliciously preoccupied with the day's catch of pigeons.
[It turns out Smilin' Bob was investing about $5 billion in Orange County, CA public funds using a ouija board and a couple of astrologers. Toward the end he grew enamored of a financial instrument called derivatives and, betting against himself, lost about $4 billion. He was then declared insane and told not to do it again. He retired with a six-figure public pension.]
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