You Get What You Pay For


Every time I hear people cry about taxes I am reminded of the stereotypical middle-class, American adolescent – well-fed, comfortably housed, clothed, a car of his own , his own phone, TV and VCR, sulking around uncommunicatively with a lack of appreciation that would suggest he is a prisoner at Dachau. The average American believes freedom from taxes is some kind of a "right", like an amendment in the Constitution. They remember something about "no taxation" from some Junior High history class, and forget the rest of the sentence, "without representation."

Americans who complain about taxes and government spending might do well take a trip to any one of those twenty-odd countries down there below the Rio Grande River. As soon as they land at the airport in Tegucigalpa, Quito or Buenos Aires they will see soldiers instead of policemen. You don't want to pay taxes for police? O.K. fine, since we can't afford a police force we'll just use the army. So you think police brutality is a problem? You think Rodney King was mis-treated? Try explaining yourself to a couple humorless soldiers in their Ray Bans, bullet-proof vests and jungle boots trained by paranoid Israeli counter-insurgency experts. While they look through your passport and you stand there in the hot sun with the business end of an M-16 pressed against your sternum, the last time you were stopped by the Highway patrol for speeding will well up in your memory with the warm glow of good sex.

So anyway, after paying your way through customs -- I say paying because that is the custom -- there will be "something" wrong with your passport, your luggage or whatever -- something which the unsmiling fellow welcoming you to his country will find wrong and you will have to pay him to overlook this little trifle just so you can get in, (this is not to suggest that U.S Customs Agents are paradigms of courtesy).

You decide you'd like to get some of the local currency. Several sleazy, and I mean sleazy, guys crowd around you offering the best rates on the black market. They all wave little calculators in your face and you pick the least obnoxious of the bunch and give him a twenty-dollar bill. The others vanish at the sight of this petty cash. You take a handful of dirty, soggy bills and walk outside to catch a bus or cab.

You might not even have a choice because the infrastructure has collapsed and busses are few and far between. If you are dumb you will just get in a cab and tell the driver to take you to your hotel. At first you don't notice that he doesn't have a meter. Twenty minutes later you pay the guy thirty dollars for a three dollar ride because you did not "bargain" and there are no regulations or people to enforce "regulations" so you have to pay the exorbitant rip-off fare. It could have been worse though. One taxi driver told a woman to put her necklaces and bracelets in her luggage which he then "locked" in the trunk, because the "thieves" were so bad. En route, his car got a "flat tire". He "fixed" the tire and they all arrived safely at the hotel where the taxi driver reminded her again to be careful with her jewelry and put it in the hotel's safe. Do I need to tell you what she discovered when she got to her room and looked in her luggage which had been "locked" in the trunk along with the "spare" tire?

You notice a new building going up -- the rickety, tied-together wooden scaffolding hanging to the side of the new walls like a giant spider web, the helmetless, barefoot workmen climbing up and down with hundred-pound bags of cement on their shoulders... you remember your college days working construction, you know the dangers: things fall, ditches cave in, cables snap. And you also know that the owners could care less about such things. An Occupational and Safety Hazards Act is not going to happen in an oligarchy.

It is hotter than hell. As a matter of fact, if you can separate yourself from the momentary thrill of being in a new country, you will see and feel and hear what could not be described by even the most imaginative travel writer as anything but chaos. Despite the fact that the light is red, your driver lays on his horn out of habitual indifference to the pandemonium surrounding him. A veritable ensemble of horns is testimony to aural ossification. The street is lined with venders selling everything from bicycle tires, shampoo, razors, batteries, deodorant, bras and panties, pots and pans to aspirin and birth control pills. Buses, trucks, cars, horses and all kinds of people vie for space between the "colorful" stalls on both sides of this main thoroughfare into town. The thick pall of acrid exhaust from the un-tuned engines, burned valves and worn-out rings is enough to make one pine for downtown L.A in a "smog alert."

There might have been stretches of decent highway -- some anomalous piece of smooth concrete, more than likely advertised as the benevolent project of some past Generalisimo-president of the republic, between the airport and the center of town, but it will be a thin ribbon through dirty industrial parks, slums, eroded hills and filthy rivers. You can be sure there is not one drop of clear water flowing through any Latin American city. What good road there is will soon end in crowded, potholed streets lined with litter, broken cars, venders and the ubiquitous, broken-glass-topped walls covered with peeling posters from the last political campaign and versions of "Yanqui Go Home!" scrawled in black spray paint. An occasionally nice home will sit strangely next to a motorcycle repair shop. You pass the National University with armed guards at the gate and no crosswalk for students rushing to catch the crowded buses.

A block later you see a sorry excuse for a school. At least from the number of kids running around in the "playground" you assume it is a school. There are some remains of teeter-totters and swings, but little else to suggest an adult concern for the safety and joy of childhood; just a hugely hostile acre of bare dirt surrounding a building which has more in common with a penitentiary than a school.

As you approach the canter of town the traffic becomes a free-for-all; every intersection a complex web of vehicles weaving in and out of each other with reckless abandon. The presence of an actual stop light is a surprise and your driver goes right through the red. There is another surprise when a police siren blows and the driver stops at this intrusion to his "freedom of driving". The motorcycle-policeman approaches wearing his Ray Bans and high, black leather boots, ticket book under one arm as he ceremoniously takes off his soft leather gloves one finger at a time. His look is one of unhurried, studied contempt. He scolds the driver for running the red light. The driver argues that the light was yellow. The cop asks to see his license. The driver doesn't have a license. The cop begins to write out a ticket. The cop hands the ticket and clip board to the driver for his signature and instead of signing it the driver slips a twenty dollar bill beneath the clip and hands it back. The cop looks at this intently and then, with a gaze far into the distance of haze and corruption in the direction we are going, he waves us on.

At the hotel you unpack and decide to go for a walk and get a bite to eat. Back in the states you are healthy and exercise and eat a mostly vegetarian diet. You are not two blocks from your hotel when you realize the health you guard so preciously at home is threatened every time you cross the street; pedestrians are merely inconvenient obstacles, targets in the rush of hostile, arrogant drivers. The sidewalks are not much safer with gaping holes that yawn into cavernous depths of unknown significance. You find a restaurant and go for the local rice and beans and a big green salad. You eat with relish and wash it all down with a glass of ice water. It'll be about twenty-four hours before you discover that the stuff that comes out of the tap at home and the stuff that comes out of the tap in Latin America are only remotely similar in the basic structure of H2O.

You buy some presents and go to the post office to mail them home to your family. You spend eight dollars for stamps which you stick on the package and hand it back and walk out thinking how nice it feels to have sent these little native trinkets home. Happily, it will be several weeks before you discover that they never made it back to the states because almost as soon as you walk out of the post office somebody is already scraping off the eight dollars (a day’s wages) worth of stamps from your package.

Later, you take a trip out to one of the "National Parks." Of course you have been to Yosemite, Yellowstone and others in the States. You turn off on a small dirt road where a broken sign says: "Parque Nacional." A few miles down the road is a shack and a pole across the road. The entrance fee is one dollar, five for foreigners. You follow the dirt road about two more miles until it ends at a bluff overlooking the ocean. That's it. That is the "national park"; no visitor center, no campgrounds, nothing except a jeep road through the jungle ending in a cliff above the ocean. As you drive back to the highway you wonder why the "rangers" can't at least pick up the trash along the side of the road. You stop to ask the "ranger" for directions back to town and show him the map. He looks at the map upside down for some moments before you realize he cannot read.

The next day when you are curled up on your bed for two minutes between trips to the toilet, you wonder about these things -- clean air, clean water, noise, garbage, education, infrastructure, police and corruption and the public weal. You make another trip to the toilet putting the (news)paper in a wastebasket instead of flushing it down where it belongs. You are disgusted. The noise from the traffic outside sounds ten decibels higher today. You wonder if there is a law forbidding mufflers on motorcycles. You are too sick to make an appointment that afternoon and so you go downstairs to find a phone. You call your friend and finally get through after several tries and then you can barely hear him because of the bad connection. The sweat is running down your face, spasms rack your intestinal system crying for the toilet and you yell to your friend that you cannot make it that afternoon and you rush back to your room and the momentary relief of the toilet, the bed, the cheap little fan that moves the hot air over your naked body. You lie there looking up at the bare bulb, the lugubrious fan, the circling flies, the heat and nausea pressing down, and you begin to compose a "thank-you" note to the IRS.