Go read ‘Turk and Taibbi and come back.
Because Christ Almighty, let’s make a list of people who make too much money, okay? Two-thirds of Congress and everybody who works for them. Rick Santelli. The fatheads at talk radio everywhere. Bob Costas, Joe Buck, Bryant Gumbel, everybody associated with the Today show, and the literary estate of Norman Mailer. “Fundraising” consultants who sell nonprofits a foolproof system to make money — which IS their foolproof system of making money — like, go rob a liquor store like grownups. Bill FUCKING Maher, America’s college newspaper opinion columnist. The people whose gas grills are bigger than their cars, because it cooks meat, okay, it isn’t a complicated process. Columnists at the New York Times. Especially David Brooks.
All these people make too much money. Teachers and steelworkers? Not so much. I spend 20 minutes around a few demon kids and their batshit parents, I want to rip somebody’s face off, and these people do it all day long AND THEY LIKE IT, the freaks. A four-hour shift at the animal shelter cleaning cages requires me to take a hot bath and lay down with a jug of wine to avoid my body locking up like a bank vault, and some 56-year-old dude is literally making the foundations of the city without complaint for 12 hours a day and all he wants is his pension, goddammit. These people do not make too much money.
Until these people are the ones out there cutting people off on the freeway in their Infiniti SUVs and buying $35,000 marble inlays for the floors of their “libraries” they’re not making too much money, and really, not even then. Fuck it, somebody needs to have a nice house and car around here and it might as well be people who make things and people who do things. I might be jealous, but that doesn’t mean they’re making “too much”
money. We have this system and this is how it works.
I mean, once you start the contest of who makes too much money, as I’ve just illustrated above, it just turns into a list of people you think suck, and if we’re distributing wealth based on who we think sucks, if you don’t mind me I’ll be out back burying my cash in the park because me and mine ain’t guaranteed lifelong popularity. So some bus driver’s making a mint (I would not drive a CTA bus if you paid me a million dollars, you have to be a driver and a cop and a marriage counselor and HELL NO), good for him. He’s owed at least as much as some banker schmoe whose worst day involves his secretary putting too much sugar in his coffee.
Schmucks.
A.