Ben Metcalf wrote a satirical article in Harper’s that you should show to anyone who wants to pay his taxes this year.

I know that roughly 23 percent, or $1,400 (also more than I have given at any one time to any other cause), went immediately to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which our current administration, the second Bush, claims already to have won.

Thank God for that lie. Without it I might be doomed to live out my days in peacetime’s frigid shadow, where the opportunities for legalized butchery ever shrink and fade. I might give money to the capital-punishment lobby, yes, and hope for a small satisfaction there; or I might cruise the city streets in search of slow-footed jaywalkers and sympathetic witnesses; or I might buy land in rural Texas and pray to take advantage of the laws there that still allow one to shoot a trespasser on sight; but for murder done properly, from a relaxed position on the couch or the bed, with one’s return safely filed and one’s withholdings well at work in the glow of the television set, war, true war, is required.