Hmm…bass guitar seems easy enough…maybe I should take up piano…
The case of Joseph Stack is a bizarre one.
Man is disgruntled with the state of his nation – in particular the tax authorities – man snaps, man flies plane into Internal Revenue Services building, man dies in crash, injuring two people with one other ‘unaccounted for’.
Another pointless death or two in Usania.
Stack left a rambling 6 page suicide ‘note’ :
Stack complained that anyone who stood up for the principal of “no taxation without representation” was now labelled a “crackpot.” He accused corporate leaders of being “thugs and plunderers” guilty of “gluttony and overwhelming stupidity” and politicians were “thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags.”
He said the US health system was a “joke” and accused drug companies of “murdering tens of thousands of people a year” but his strongest words were reserved for the tax system.
Stack said: “Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand.
“The law requires a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing. If that’s not duress then what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.”
Stack claimed his attempts to get to grips with the tax system had cost him more than $40,000 (£24,000) and 10 years of his life.
He said: “It made me realise for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie.” Stack claimed tax legislation in the 1980s had made him a “criminal and non-citizen slave.” Stack then spent $5,000 (£3,000) and 1,000 hours of his time writing to politicians about tax.
Much of which I find hard to disagree with, particularly the first paragraph above. So, whilst I can’t approve of the way in which he expressed his anger and frustration I can understand why he felt that way if not why he chose such a drastic method to express it.
However, in a surreal moment he also states:
“Here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle.”
A piano?
However, it’s the little piece of coding that places ‘related’ adverts after news stories in the Telegraph which must surely have the last ironic word on the subject:
You really can’t make this shit up.
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