It’s that time of year again, Mr. President.
Time to celebrate the lingering Yuletide spirit and the bright promise of the year to come. Time to savor the companionship of friends and family.
Time to donate your underpants to a charitable organization so you can later claim a deduction on your 1993 tax return.
If the recent past is any guide, Bill Clinton and his wife, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, have been spending the past few months gathering up unwanted belongings — from old shoes to shower curtains to jogging shorts to, yes, apparently used underwear — carefully enumerating each item alongside dollar amounts on handwritten lists, and giving the lot to such worthy causes as the Salvation Army and Goodwill Industries.
The Clintons’ tax returns over the past decade — which “obviously were prepared with an eye toward being released,” according to White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers — are rife with detailed supporting documents that may someday prove a rich boon to historians and psychohistorians studying the forces that shaped the Clinton presidency.
As political figures are wont to do, particularly those with White House aspirations, the Clintons have over the past few years thoughtfully disclosed their tax returns, providing citizens with a fascinating window on a heretofore unexamined aspect of their lives.
Several experts were consulted about Clinton’s tax-deductible donations, especially of underwear. Paul Offenbacher, a longtime Washington-area tax accountant, said it is highly unusual to take an itemized deduction on donated underwear; indeed, he had never heard of such a thing. Adelphi University psychology professor George D. Goldman, a New York-based psychoanalyst who studies the unconscious symbolic meanings in human behavior, said the donations are, at the very least, fodder for intriguing speculation.
“Obviously I can’t tell you what Clinton’s individual symbols mean; all I can do is give you my own analysis — which is that he’s airing his dirty wash or maybe trying to take his dirty wash and make it cleaner,” Goldman said. “I’m a lifelong Democrat, and I voted for him, but there’s something, let’s say, grandiose, both too personal and a bit inappropriately intimate, to give your underwear away for someone else to wear, and then to think that your underwear is worth giving this sort of a valuation to.”
But another clinician, psychologist John Marr, pooh-poohed as fanciful such theorizing about a guy who donates underwear, itemizes the donation, and then discloses it to the public.
“Whether you’re a Freudian, a Jungian or a behaviorist, you always have to look for the simplest explanation first,” said Marr, who practices in Fayetteville, Ark., where, coincidentally, he has played poker with Clinton. “If you donate, you have to itemize what you donate.”
“We don’t get too much underwear here; I don’t think people want that too much,” said Joe Cheslow, a senior resident at the Union Rescue Mission, a haven for homeless people in Little Rock, Ark., that has been a frequent beneficiary of the Clintons’ tax-deductible largess. The mission thrift shop has been known to sell used underwear, displayed in bins, at 95 cents a pair.
