Half-Hours with the Idiot

by John Kendrick Bangs

"Even so," said the Idiot, "or at least that is the way I understand it. You've not only got to tell how much you've got, but you must also disclose the sources of your revenue. If you found a cent on the corner of Main Street and Desdemona Alley on the fifteenth day of December, 1916, thereby adding that much to your annual receipts, you have got to enter it in your statement, and so clearly that the authorities will understand just how, when, and where it came into your possession, all under oath; and you are not allowed to deduct your current living expenses from it, either. If in stooping over to pick up that cent you busted your suspenders, and had to go and pay fifty cents for a new pair, thereby losing forty-nine cents on the transaction, you aren't allowed to make any deductions on that account. That cent is 'Net'—not 'Nit', but 'Net.' Same way if in a crowded car you put your hand into what you presumed to be your own pocket, and pulled out unexpectedly a roll of twenty dollar bills amounting to two hundred dollars in all, and then in an absent-minded moment got away with it before you realized that it belonged to the man standing next to you, you'd have to put it down on your statement just the same as all the rest of the items, under penalty of prosecution for concealing sources of revenue from the officers of the law. Oh, it's a fine mess we smart Alexanders of the hour have got ourselves into in our effort to establish a pipe line between the plutocratic pocketbook and the United States Treasury. We all hypnotized ourselves into the pleasing belief that the income tax was going to be a jolly little club with which to hit old Brother Plute on the head, and make him fork over, while we Nixicrats sat on the fence and grinned. It was going to be great fun watching the Plutes disgorge, and we all had a notion that life was going to be just one exgurgitating moving picture after another, with us sitting in front row seats gloating over the Sorrows of Crœsus and his coughing coffers. But, alas for our dreams of joy, it hasn't worked out quite that way. The vexation of the blooming thing is visited upon every one of us. Them as has has got to pay. Them as hasn't has got to prove that they don't have to pay, and I tell you right now, Mr. Bib, it is going to be a terrific proposition for a lot of chaps in this land of ours who are skinning along on nothing a year, but making a noise like a ten-thousand-dollar proposition."

"I fear me their name is legion," said the Bibliomaniac.

"I know one named Smythe," said the Idiot. "If a painter were looking around for a model for Ready Money in an allegorical picture Smythe would fill the bill to perfection. You ought to see him. He walks about the streets of this town giving everybody he meets a fifteen-thousand per annum look when, as a matter of fact, he hasn't got ten cents to his name. If he was invited to a submarine masquerade all he'd have to do would be to swallow a glass of water and go as a sponge. He makes about as big a splurge on a deficit as you or I could make if our salaries were raised nine hundred ten per cent., and then some. As a weekender he is in the A 1 class. He hasn't paid for a Sunday dinner in five years, nor has he paid for anything else in earned cash for three. His only sources of revenue are his friends, the pawn-shops, and his proficiency at bridge and poker. His only hope for staving off eventual disaster is the possibility of hanging on by his eyelids until he dawns as the last forlorn hope on the horizon of some freckle-faced, red-haired old maid, with nine millions in her own right. He owes every tailor, hatter, and haberdasher in town. When he needs twenty-five dollars he buys a fifty-dollar overcoat, has it charged, and takes it around the corner and pawns it, and ekes out the deficiency with a jackpot or a grand slam, in the manipulation of both of which he is what Socrates used to call a cracker-jack. If you ever saw him walking on the avenue, or entering a swagger restaurant anywhere, you'd stop and say to yourself, 'By George! That must be Mr. Idle Rich, of whom I have heard so much lately. Gosh! I wonder how it feels to be him!'"

"Him?" sniffed the Bibliomaniac, always a stickler for purity of speech.

"Sure thing!" said the Idiot. "You don't stop to think of grammar when you are dazzled by that spectacle. You just give way, right off, to your natural, unrestrained, primitive instincts, and speak English in exactly the same way that the caveman spoke his tongue in those glorious days before grammar came along to curse education with its artificial restraints upon ease of expression. 'Gosh! I wonder how it feels to be him', is what you'd say as old Empty Wallet passed you by disguised as the Horn of Plenty, and all day long your mind would continue to advert to him and the carefree existence you'd think to look at him he was leading; and you, with a four-dollar bill within your reach every Saturday night, would find yourself positively envying him his wealth, when, as a matter of fact, he hasn't seen a single red cent he could properly call his own for ten years."

"Oh, well—what of it?" said the Bibliomaniac. "Of course, there are sponges and snobs in the world. What are they to us?"

"Why, nothing," said the Idiot, "only I wonder what Smythe and his kind are going to do when the income tax collector comes along and asks for his little two per cent. of all this showy exterior. It will be a terribly humiliating piece of business to confess that all this ostentatious show of prosperity is nothing but an empty shell, and that way down inside he is only an eighteen-karat, copper-fastened, steel-riveted bluff; fact is, he'll have the dickens of a time making the tax collectors believe it, and then he'll be face to face with a federal indictment for trying to dodge his taxes. And that business of dodging—that brings up another phase of this income tax that I don't believe many of us realized when we were shouting for it as a means of shackling Mr. Plute. Did you ever realize that it won't be very long before the government, in order to get this income tax fixed right, will have a lot of inspectors who will be delegated to do for you and me, and all the rest of us, what the Custom House inspectors now do for travelers returning from abroad? Every man and woman traveling upon the seas of life, Mr. Bib, will be required to enter the port of taxation and there submit a declaration of the contents of their boxes to the tax inspectors, which will be followed, as in the case of the traveler from abroad, by a complete overhauling of their effects by those same inspectors. The tesselated pave of your safe deposit companies and banks will look like the floor of an ocean steamship pier on the arrival of a big liner, only instead of being snowed under by a mass of shirts, trousers, Paris-made revelations in chiffons, silks, and brocades, necklaces, tiaras, pearl ropes, snipped aigrettes, and snowy drifts of indescribable, but in these free days no longer unmentionable, lingerie, it will be piled high with steel bonds, New Haven deferred dividends, sinking fund debenture certificates, government five eighths per cent. bonds, certificates of deposit, miscellaneous stocks, mining, industrial, railway, gilt-edged and wildcat, in one red unburial blent; while the poor owner, fearful lest in the excitement of the ordeal he may have neglected to mention some insignificant item of a million or two in Standard Oil, will sit by and sweat as the inspector tears his ruthless way through his accumulated stores for wealth."

"It will be almost enough to make a man sorry he's rich," said the Doctor.

"Oh, no," said the Idiot, "for the rest of us will be in the same pickle, only in a more humiliating position as the intruder reveals that the sum total of out lifetime of endeavor consists chiefly in unpaid bills labeled Please Remit. The Custom House inspectors are harder on the man with nothing to declare than they are on those whose boxes are full. They slam their things all over creation, and insult the owner with the same abandon with which they greet a recognized past-mistress in the arts of smuggling. Innocence is no protection when a Custom House inspector gets after you, and it will be the same way with the new kind. None of us can hope to escape. The income tax inspectors will come here just as eagerly as they will go to that palatial mausoleum in which Mr. Rockernegie dwells on the corner of Bond Avenue and Easy Street, and they'll rummage through our trunks, boxes, and bureaus in search of such interest-bearing securities as they may suspect us of trying to get by with. Mr. Bib will have to dump his bureau drawer full of red neckties out on the floor to prove to Uncle Sam's satisfaction that he hasn't got a fourteen-million-dollar bond issue concealed somewhere behind their lurid glow. The Doctor will have to sit patiently by and unprotestingly watch the inspectors going through the pockets of his unrivaled collection of fancy waist-coats in a heart-breaking quest for undeclared interests in mining enterprises and popular cemeteries. Trunks, chests, hatboxes, soapboxes, pillboxes, safety razor boxes—in fact, all kinds of receptacles in this house, from Mrs. Pedagog's ice chest to Mr. Whitechoker's barrel of sermons—will be compelled to disgorge their uttermost content in order to satisfy the government sleuths that we who dwell in this Palace of Truth, Joy, and Waffles, have not a controlling interest in Standard Oil hidden away lest we be compelled to pay our due to the treasury."

"You don't mean to say that the law so provides, do you?" said the Bibliomaniac.