Zebra Mussels Quotes

Nevertheless, you can float many a hefty tax scheme on the back of a righteous-sounding and energizing war. Wars focus the attention; people don’t want to feel or even appear disloyal at such times. Scare them with the thought that they themselves may be looted and pillaged by bands of slavering, subhuman barbarians who will roast and eat their children and ravish and eviscerate their women, don’t laugh, it’s happened, and they’ll fork over with remarkable docility, if not eagerness. Just to remind you: the income tax was begun in Great Britain in 1799, to finance the Napoleonic Wars. In the United States, it began in 1862, to support the Civil War. In Canada, in 1917, incomes were first taxed as a temporary measure to finance the First World War. And taxes are like zebra mussels: once they’ve been introduced, they’re very hard to get rid of. The wars the income taxes were meant to pay for have come and gone, but the income taxes themselves persist. Oh well, it’s better than a tax on windows, or beards, or bachelors, all of which have also had their day.

Take a picture of yourself standing on your lawn, and you have a Wanted Dead or Alive poster for the most invasive plant and animal in North America—garden grass and Homo sapiens. No kudzu-choked hillside, no river cursed with purple plantain, no spotted knotweed waste compares to the green deserts of our yards in terms of water waste, herbicide and fertilizer, gasoline and lawn mower. And no zebra mussel, nutria, mustang, or gypsy moth has, like Homo sapiens, driven to extinction a single species or threatened to erase entire ecosystems, such as our prairies and our longleaf stands. The despised chestnut blight decimated but a single species, after all. We humans have killed off no one knows how many.