Imbeciles At Home

If you don't suffer from high blood pressure, then hovercrafting through the vast, foul swamp of the Middle American mind can offer the voyeur a sick thrill.

Take any issuesay, the estate tax.

Last week, the House voted to repeal all inheritance taxes after 2010. Currently, estates worth $1.5 million for individuals and $3 million are taxed, affecting only a few thousand families. The repeal is going to cost the government up to $740 billion in the decade after 2010a debt that the rest of the 295 million Americans minus a few thousand will have to carry.

And yet, as the Republicans rightly point out, polls show that most Americansup to 80 percentsupport the total repeal of the inheritance tax. It gets funnier: According to a poll last year by McLaughlin & Associates, 85 percent of those who earn under $40,000 found such a tax on "large estates" to be "unfair," whereas only 78 percent of wealthy people earning over $100,000 found the tax "unfair."

Just for the sick rubber-necking thrill of it all, I went dumbshit-trekking on the Net, and what I found would break Thomas Frank's heart. I spotted Richard Williamson, who posted an open letter on a small suburban Atlanta community website calling on his local Republican Congressman "to eliminate the 'death tax.'" Williamson, we learn, "works for the DeKalb County school system."

On another blog, James Emerson proclaimed that a "carbon tax to replace the death tax" is "one tax I'll gladly pay!" If we assume that the few thousand Americans rich enough to pay estate taxes don't post comments on other people's blogs, then we can conclude that James Emerson would "gladly pay" a massive tax on his own gasoline consumption to drastically lower taxes on a few thousand people who would have Emerson stun-gunned if he came within 100 yards of their homes.

The comedy turns to irony in the case of Dave Hamrick, "editor-at-large" at the Fayette Citizen in rural Georgia: "Eliminate the death tax," he wrote, adding that the Republican Congress's attempts to do so, "makes me want to cheer." Three years after this op-ed, Hamrick, 51, dropped dead during halftime of an over-40 community soccer match in Fayetteville.

There is no way in hell that Hamrick's wife benefited from the estate tax cuts he cheered. Fayette county was named the "67th best place to live in rural America" by the Progressive Farmer. However, benefiting isn't the point with Middle Americait's cheering on the rich from the cheap seats that gives them their greatest joy.

Middle America's position on the estate tax reminds me of a line from the slave memoir of Lucius Holsey, who wrote about his master, "I felt as much interest in his well-being as I have felt since in my own." That is the best explanation for why Hamrick, and the 80 percent of Americans with him, are cheering. Their masters are, at long last, being treated like masters again.