Pound of Flesh

The fallout from the suicide-plane attack in Austin yesterday continues to litter the internet. Condemnation of Andrew Joseph Stack is by no means universal, and that has everything to do with the target of his rage. There is nothing more American then hating taxes and the agency charged with collecting them. And while most commentators will be careful to draw a distinction between despising the taxman, and trying to kill him, literally no one is lining up to defend the IRS. So, we now have what appears to be an obvious case of domestic terrorism, yet few are willing to label it as such. The preferred description appears to be "Kamikaze attack", which is an imprecise, and perhaps intentionally misleading, choice of words.

Since I enjoy trying to put things into an historical perspective, I offer the following example to highlight the IRS's well-deserved reputation for ruthless and vindictive enforcement of it's mandate. During the Second World War, heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis fought two title defenses, for which he received payments that he immediately donated to the Army and Navy relief funds. Meaning that he donated both his purses, in their entirety, to charity. That set into motion a decades-long battle with the IRS, a battle that left Louis a broken (and broke) man.

In 1938, scarcely more then a year before Hitler would send his armies into Poland, Joe Louis defended his title against German fighter Max Schmeling. Given the state of affairs in the world at that moment, it was inevitable that this particular fight would stand for something much greater then either of the two combatants. Schmeling shouldered the unwanted burden of representing Hitler's master race, while Louis became the standard-bearer for American freedom and democracy. Which meant that Joe Louis, an African-American fighter, was defending a status quo that systematically denied him, and his people, many of the basic human rights enshrined in the Constitution.

I found a short video that does an excellent job of telling the story and will embed it below...