On not rendering to Caesar
Langley, Tim
ment," it defines indigenous peoples' present-day situation as one of "neo-colonialism." In the face of this control by modern nation states, the document reaffirms the "selfo determination" of...
...This is not to deny the social utility of civil disobedience, particularly on a massive scale...
...Although it helped form some of our most important plays -- Death of a Salesman, The Glass Menagerie -- it carried the seeds of its own corruption, a tendency to analyze the drama to death...
...Certainly he accomplished little else...
...By~ 1937 a working girl in Pins and Needles would insist, "Sing Me a Song with Social Significance...
...The penalty for frivolity in the United States today is a fine of $500, plus accumulated interest in the event of failure to pay promptly...
...But light is not the only reason you build a bonfire, and probably not the most important reason at that...
...What they say is not without merit...
...Much uncertainty about the validity of civil disobedience stems from the widespread assumption, shared lay proponents and critics alike, that the goal of civil disobedience is the same as that of conventional political action: to achieve social change...
...So we are led to look elsewhere for the source of the meaning and validity which we cannot deny We are led to discover the broadly religious foundations of the impulse to resist state crimes...
...The point of refusing to pay for bombs is to get out of paying for bombs...
...This is because in the United States citizens have access, however imperfect, to the process of social decisionmaking...
...threatens that integrity...
...Amen Corner, which came and went quickly in the Fall, was the first of this season's family musicals...
...acknowledges the precedence of international law over the Code itself, and which forbids the collection of taxes where that would conflict with any treaty to which the United States is a party...
...Since the United States is a party to any number of human-fights and warfare-limitation conventions which appear to proscribe the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants, and since the same United States nevertheless finances with tax monies a global warmaking system which is designed to do precisely that, my wife and I reasoned that the portion of taxes collected in support of this system was being collected illegally, and that all Americans were therefore entitled to a substantial deduction...
...Tragedy, irony, real wit (as against mask-over-angst smart talk) dried up in plays in which presumably serious dramatists confused their job with that of counselors...
...But the text goes on to stress that, "Indigenous populations are the people of the land, in that the way of life of many indigenous populations is intimately related to the natural environment, as manifest through beliefs and practices which hold this relationship to be a primary consideration in the determination of the form of ownership and manner of use of the land...
...It is'a troublesome question because, i suspect, most of us are made rather uncomfortable and even frightened by someone who would do what Franz Jaegerstaater did in those circumstances, for those reasons...
...A third common misgiving upholds civil disobedience in principle, but insists that it must be organized on a mass scale to be valid...
...My wife and I are also involved in the nuclear freeze campaign and other more broadly based, conventional means of public persuasion...
...We who do know the story of Franz Jaegerstaater, however, mu~lt wrestle with the question of whether his resistance, his act of civil disobedience, had any validity...
...Indian religious freedom depends on contact with particular areas of land, the material and spiritual sources of life...
...I am all for it...
...Throughout his ordeal, ably documented by Gordon Zahn in his 1961 book In Solitary Witness, Jaegerstaater's primary motivation for resisting appears to have been the avoidance of complicity in what he regarded as the mortal sin of Nazism...
...With rare exceptions, musicals have happy endings which, in this context, means that parents and children can embrace and erase a lifetime of misunderstanding with a few words or a song or, as in The Rink, an uplifting silhouette of the generations joined...
...Though the strategist and the organizer may prepare the way for this moment, and though they may be needed to take full advantage of its power when it does arrive, the timing of its arrival is finally not under their control...
...We wrote back assuring them that we had never been more serious in our lives...
...What we hope to change by our actions is not so much U.S...
...If the meaning and validity of an act of civil disobedience is equal to its contribution to positive social change, then the act of Franz Jaegerstaater had no meaning, no validity...
...What we discover is that acts of civil disobedience are inherently religious in nature: not just in Jaegerstaater's mind, but, as it were, objectively...
...The moment of ripeness for mass tax resistance has not yet come, so the argument runs, and tax resisters need to consider whether they axe not perhaps trying to build their sand castles at high tide...
...Therefore, the document supports the fight of indigenous peoples not only to their religious beliefs but to free "access to areas of land or natural formations" that they deem sacred...
...Social change is to civil disobedience as light is to a bonfire...
...They informed us that our tax returns had been declared to be frivolous, and that we now owed the government $500 for being smart flecks...
...The feeling in the gut of Gandhi as he burned his passbook, or in the gut of Rosa Parks as she refused to surrender her bus seat, or in the guts of the eight as they smashed the warhead nosecones, is the same cold feeliqg of fear and exhilaration for all...
...People who share both our faith and our opposition to the state violence of nuclear weaponry advance a number of arguments against tax resistance as a tactic, one of which can be summarized in those three despairing words...
...This is the season of "Sing Me a Song of Family Counseling...
...and the survival of the environment -- under attack from transnational corporations, agribusiness, energy developers, governmental agencies, and an underlying value system that finds nature devoid of worth except as a resource -- depends on Indians' continuing ability to tend their Mother Earth...
...When committed people succumb to their impatience and take action outside the sanctioned channels of this system, they set precedents more dangerous than they may know...
...My wife and i resist taxation fundamentally because we know what our money is buying, and we wish to avoid doing what is wrong...
...The priorities of Amen Corner were clear, the sentimental drama over the musical...
...Commonweal: 210...
...Beyond that, I venture, even for resisters who do not believe in God, all is in God's hands...
...I __ ~ - 2 1 _ l l l l l . ! l L t l / I J _ _ _S].aai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . _ . . . . THE RELIGIOUS MEANING OF TAX RESISTANCE I i...
...Of late has been the season of the Gene Sharp books, the Gandhi movie, and the reenactment of the King march on Washington...
...He was the only citizen of his village to refuse to accept Nazi farm subsidies...
...We can write letters to the editor and to the Congress, we can organize petition campaigns and ballot initiatives, we can take part in public demonstrations, and, of course, we can vote...
...i AEGERSTAATER was a high-school-educated Catholic farmer born in Austria in 1907...
...And off we go, into a discussion which I am not sure is the one we should be having...
...No one who witnessed his resis6 April 1984:209 tance was moved to join him...
...Their point is that the government will get its money in the end, maybe more than you owed in the first place, and in the meantime what you may have envisioned as a bold witness will have degenerated into an unnoticed, dreary tug-0f-war with uncomprehending bureaucrats who are no more or less responsible for the nuclear arms race than anybody else...
...The IRS was not amused...
...These propositions appear secularly pragmatic -- Indians are trying to protect their future by protecting their environmental land base...
...On not rendering "i to Caesar TIM LANGLEY crime~ deduction" There is an article in the IRS Code which T HE STERN PURITANS of the Massachusetts Bay Colony would have smiled...
...For this last, he was imprisoned for two years and finally beheaded in 1943...
...I'm not so sure about that...
...Perhaps part of the appeal of Peter Brooks's production of la trag~die de Carmen at Lincoln Center is that Carmen and Don Jos~ do not sit down and talk/sing their troubles away...
...Therefore the preservation of the society and culture of indigenous populations represents a means of protecting and preserving the natural resources of the earth, including the air, water, land, flora and fauna, and those natural ecosystems contained within the territories of the indigenous populations [emphasis mine...
...Still, it seems to me, there is a fundmental difference between what we hope to accomplish with the one sort of tactic, and what we hope to accomplish with the other...
...We elaborated on the religious basis of our convictions...
...Well, who can argue with that...
...It stuck close to the James Baldwin play on which it was based, a coming-of-age drama in which.young David finds his own way after negotiating the troubled territory between his life-denying mother, a storefront preacher, and his life-embracing father, a jazz musician...
...Today he is not much celebrated evan in his own village, and his story is not well known even in the peace movement...
...Last year my wife and I decided not to pay half the income taxes on my salary...
...Autres temps, autres moeurs - that's French for you pays your therapist and you takes your choice...
...The Indians in council at Phillip Deere' s roundhouse hope to gather to themselves the spiritual traditions of their people in order to retain and regain an autonomous identity, serving in the process of renewal as guardians of the environment and contemporary prophets who can lead Americans, and perhaps the peoples of the world, to their spiritual center...
...It is not that we discover that Franz Jaegerstaater was a religious man, for we knew that already, and it may not have any significance...
...COMMONWEAL ASSOCIATES Patron Member $200 or more , Charter Member $ i00 Sustaining Member $50 Commonweal Associates, 232 Madison Ave...
...When the musical comedy began to turn serious in the 1940s, to use the book as more than a skeleton on which to hang songs, it was inevitable that the material would echo straight plays...
...The IRS responded by informing us that we now owed them $507 for being both smart alecks and deadbeats, it is difficult to make an impression on a computer...
...We cannot, I think, affirm the validity of Franz JaegerstaaIer's witness without acknowledging the essentially and irreducibly religious nature of saying "no" to the state...
...But, at that moment, what will come of it is not the ~oint...
...So why bother...
...The minute we began doing it, it worked...
...He liked motorcycles...
...The point, at that moment, is to cease contributing to that which is wrong, to cease participating by inertia in the maiming activity of the state, to stop being on the state's side in wrongdoing...
...In the face of this control by modern nation states, the document reaffirms the "selfo determination" of indigenous peoples, emphasizing the need of these peoples to "land as the territorial base for the existence of indigenous populations as such...
...It was characteristic of the production that after lifting the audience up with the spirited "In His Own Good Time," the first act curtain came down to the extended whine of "Every time We Call It Quits...
...Non-lndians would do well to understand the currency of Indian spiritual politics, its vitality today and the power it can generate...
...But when we recommend civil disobedience primarily and essentially as a successful means of social change, we invite critics to present counter-examples in which civil disobedience failed, or counter-examples in which the political process alone sufficed, or speculations about why civil disobedience is not a good tactic for this issue, in this place, at this time...
...So perhaps we have hedged our bets...
...The Danish resistance to the Nazis, Gandhi's Salt March, and the lunch counter sit-ins are cited as paradigms for the anti-nuclear movement, paradigms of how the intentional breaking of unjust laws can shake the foundations of unjust social structures...
...The resistance of Franz Jaegerstaater illustrates this point with such force and clarity precisely because it had no social utility: the Nazi state was powerful enough to suffocate any such reverberation...
...Something in both his reasoning and his courage is alien to us...
...We will not have to wait a year or a decade or until after we're dead to discover if our action worked...
...Finally, it attempts to prohibit states from polluting earth, air, water, and other nature materials upon which indigenous peoples depend for their survival...
...It is of immense importance to us who ask it...
...The agency of enforcement is the Internal Revenue Service, a branch of the government which presumably knows frivolity when it sees it...
...There is vigor in the shout songs Garry Sherman wrote for the church scenes -- as one might expect from the composer of Purlie -- but the plot songs are tedious...
...In the accompanying discussions, the accent has been on the utility of the civil disobedience...
...Most plays that bring down the curtain in a wash of new understanding are dramatically unsatisfying to me -- all tell and no show -- and it hardly helps matters for the characters to sing their family grievances...
...It states that "in no case may an indigenous nation or people be deprived of its own means of subsistence" and it defends the "fight" of these peoples "to protect the environmental integrity of their territories by refusing to allow any form of development which...
...We were taking ours...
...His articles on the arms race and other subjects ranging from homiletics to religious formation in parochial schools have appeared in various journals, including the National Catholic Reporter...
...The suggestion has also been made from friendly quarters that not only is tax resistance a waste of time, it is positively wrong...
...Yet something in us wants to stand up and cheer...
...These objections to civil disobedience have a long history...
...When the time came to file our 1982 returns we told the IRS what we had done, and that we considered the money we had withheld from them to be a "war - - i ___ . . . . . . TIM LANGLEY is a tax resister and the director of the South Dakota Peace and Justice Center...
...We have all become intoxicated with the nonviolent resistance of Gandhi...
...Or rather, they would have approved...
...He had a wife and three daughters...
...With perhaps the best of intentions they contribute to the erosion of all law, all process, which ultimately, and ironically, reinforces the appeal of totalitarianism in social decision-making...
...We reiterated that the money we had held back had been placed in an escrow acCommonweal: 208 count, payable to the IRS at such time as the government could arrange to accept it without spending it in ways which violated our freedom of religion...
...He was the only citizen of his village to refuse induction into the Nazi army...
...At the moment when wrong laws are broken, those who break them are not privileged to experience in advance their vindication...
...Let's organize...
...What he did affected the Third Reich not a whit...
...The generation gap, to use the easy label, is one of the persistent themes of American drama (or any drama: v., King Lear...
...Whatever the utility of civil disobedience as a tactic for social change, its validation lies elsewhere...
...We should sober up by reflecting on the nonviolent resistance of Franz Jaegerstaater...
...The answer to this question is of no importance to Franz Jaegerstaater...
...10016 Stage 'DON'T AH ME ME' MUSICALLY SPEAKING B ACK IN 192 I, Sigmund Romberg could still dish up a Schubertian "Song of Love" in Blossom Time...
...not just in Jaegerstaater's case, but universally...
...IITC is depicting Indians (and by extension, other indigenous peoples) as guardians of their Mother Earth, whose strength of defense rests upon their spiritual tradition and political autonomy...
...They also, I might add, have a long future, and my intention here is not to cut that future short by locating the decisive rejoinders, point for point...
...Franz was the only citizen of his village to vote against the forced incorporation of Austria into Germany in 1938...
...No one knows for sure what will come of it, if ianything...
...Although talking things out may sometimes work in therapy sessions, talking at cross purposes is the verbal life blood of theater...
...This system represents a stable and nonviolent means of social change, though the pace may be slow and the outcome uncertain...
...For that to happen, the time must be ripe, and such ripeness cannot be willed into being...
...New York, N.Y...
...nuclear policy as our own complicity in that policy...
...For this reason I wonder if what we are doing can properly be called a "tactic" at all...
...But that is not true...
...I accept that people will always be saying these things...
...Behind every such "no" authentically uttered to the state lies a "yes" to a sacred reality which supersedes the state, and which is prior to all considerations of social utility...
Vol. 111 • April 1984 • No. 7
