It is impossible to overstate the importance of this feature. Consider, from the Service’s perspective, the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy. For the great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting. People are drawn to secrets; they can’t help it. Keep in mind that the period we’re talking was only a decade after Watergate. Had the Service tried to hide or cover up its conflicts and convulsions, some enterprising journalist(s) could have done an exposé that drew a lot of attention and interest and scandalous fuss. But this is not at all what happened. What happened was that much of the high-level policy debate played out for two years in full public view, e.g., in open hearings of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Senate Treasury Procedures and Statutes Subcommittee, and the IRS’s Deputy and Assistant Commissioners’ Council. These hearings were collections of anaerobic men in drab suits who spoke a verbless bureaucratese — terms like ‘strategic utilization template’ and ‘revenue vector’ in place of ‘plan’ and ‘tax’—and took days just to reach consensus on the order of items for discussion. Even in the financial press, there was hardly any coverage; can you guess why? If not, consider the fact that just about every last transcript, record, study, white paper, code amendment, revenue-ruling, and procedural memo has been available for public perusal since date of issue. No FOIA filing even required. But not one journalist seems ever to have checked them out, and with good reason: This stuff is solid rock. The eyes roll up white by the third or fourth ¶. You just have no idea.25
Fact: The birth agonies of the New IRS led to one of the great and terrible PR discoveries in modern democracy, which is that if sensitive issues of governance can be made sufficiently dull and arcane, there will be no need for officials to hide or dissemble, because no one not directly involved will pay enough attention to cause trouble. No one will pay attention because no one will be interested, because, more or less a priori, of these issues’ monumental dullness. Whether this PR discovery is to be regretted for its corrosive effect on the democratic ideal or celebrated for its enhancement of government efficiency depends, it seems, on which side one takes in the deeper debate over ideals vs. efficacy referenced on p. 82, resulting in yet another involuted loop that I won’t tax your patience by trying to trace out or make hay of.
To me, at least in retrospect,26 the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us27 spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly… but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows28 it’s about something else, way down.
The memoir-relevant point here is that I learned, in my time with the Service, something about dullness, information, and irrelevant complexity. About negotiating boredom as one would a terrain, its levels and forests and endless wastes. Learned about it extensively, exquisitely, in my interrupted year. And now ever since that time have noticed, at work and in recreation and time with friends and even the intimacies of family life, that living people do not speak much of the dull. Of those parts of life that are and must be dull. Why this silence? Maybe it’s because the subject is, in and of itself, dull… only then we’re again right back where we started, which is tedious and irksome. There may, though, I opine, be more to it… as in vastly more, right here before us all, hidden by virtue of its size.
§ 10
Notwithstanding Justice H. Harold Mealer’s famous characterization, included in the Fourth Appellate Circuit’s majority opinion on Atkinson et al. v. The United States, of a government bureaucracy as ‘the only known parasite larger than the organism on which it subsists,’ the truth is that such a bureaucracy is really much more a parallel world, both connected to and independent of this one, operating under its own physics and imperatives of cause. One might envision a large and intricately branching system of jointed rods, pulleys, gears, and levers radiating out from a central operator such that tiny movements of that operator’s finger are transmitted through that system to become the gross kinetic changes in the rods at the periphery. It is at this periphery that the bureaucracy’s world acts upon this one.
The crucial part of the analogy is that the elaborate system’s operator is not himself uncaused. The bureaucracy is not a closed system; it is this that makes it a world instead of a thing.
§ 11
From Assistant Commissioner of Internal Revenue for Human Resources, Management & Support’s Office of Employee Assistance & Personnel Overview Internal Memorandum 4123-78(b)
Conclusion of ACIRHRMSOEAPO Survey/Study 1-76—11–77: AMA/DSM(II)-authorized syndromes/symptoms associated with Examinations postings in excess of 36 months (average term of posting on report: 41.4 months), in reverse order of incidence (per medical/EAP service claim per IRSM § 743/12.2(f-r)):
Chronic paraplegia
Temporary paraplegia
Temporary paralysis agitans
Paracatatonic fugues
Formication
Intracranial edema
Spasmodic dyskinesia
Paramnesia
Paresis
Phobic anxiety (numerical)
Lordosis
Renal neuralgia
Tinnitus
Peripheral hallucinations
Torticollis
Cantor’s sign (dextral)
Lumbago
Dihedral lordosis
Dissociative fugues
Kern-Børglundt syndrome (radial)
Hypomania
Sciatica
Spasmodic torticollis
Low startle threshold
Krendler’s syndrome
Hemorrhoids
Ruminative fugues
Ulcerative colitis
Hypertension
Hypotension
Cantor’s sign (sinistral)
Diplopia
Hemeralopia
Vascular headache
Cyclothymia
Blurred vision
Fine tremors
Facial/digital ticcing
Localized anxiety
Generalized anxiety
Kinesthetic deficits
Unexplained bleeding
§ 12