Wednesday, May 2, 2001
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Wednesday, May 2, 2001 |
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While the rest of us work By BILLY MURPHY The highest paid segment of our society has too much time on their hands. While the rest of us really work, the pilots and athletes and entertainment-industry types have seemed to evolved into a stroke-and-strike mentality. They first stroke their egos, not only believing they are worth their considerable salaries, but worth even more. They next move into "strike" mode where they threaten to stop work holding the rest of us hostage until they bridge an even larger gap between their material worth and ours. Surely life as we know it would stop if our stadiums grew dark, our TVs and movies stood empty or if we had no one to fly our businessmen thousands of miles across the country to entertain clients at bars and strip clubs. In writing this column, I wanted to allude to a story by Shakespeare that illustrates the absurdity of our current cultural climate, but there are none. Sir William never wrote a sonnet about a fat king who refused to perform his duty of "kinging" to his slaves until they doubled his salary. There was never any Bard prose telling the tragedy of a man who was so poor he couldn't afford a summer home in Aspen. Can you imagine if you put your average pilot, actress or baseball player in a room with a typical blue collar worker? Blue Collar Man: "I have been with the plant now for 10 years, I now get two weeks of vacation a year! How about you guys?" Actress: "Well, I do two movies a year and they take about 45 days each, to film, so that leaves... well, I could do the math, but I quit high school to be a model. But wait, you have to count the week I spent in the hospital to have breast augmentation surgery." Pilot: "I just get six weeks." Baseball Player: "I just get five months off, but that doesn't count the time I spend doing my court-ordered community service. And does drug rehab count as work or as vacation?" Blue Collar Man: "But you guys must have tough jobs to make so much money, right? Long hours, right?" Pilot: "Oh, yeah, Sometimes I fly 16 hours straight." Blue Collar Man: Wow, I bet that does make for a long Monday through Friday!" Pilot: "Well, no, I just work two days during the week." Baseball Player: "I work five to six days a week, so I am with ya, Mr. Blue Collar man." Blue Collar Man: "And long days?" Baseball Player: "Oh yeah, I get to the clubhouse around 5, get in the Jacuzzi, then a massage, then a steam, then I suit up and play ball for two hours. Then after, I repeat the Jacuzzi, massage and steam. Sometimes I am not home 'til 12." Actress: "You should see my days. After my Jacuzzi, massage and steam, I have to sit an hour in a makeup chair, then wardrobe, then do two lines of dialogue before a break for lunch. My cell phone never stops ringing. My agent, press manager, personal manager and trainer just won't leave me alone... It is awful." Blue Collar Man: "Yes, that sounds awful. You guys sure do earn your money." I am a firm believer in capitalism and have no problem with someone getting paid as much as they can get, but it borders on insanity what these people expect. How big can an ego become? How important should a person feel? I hope my momma would slap me and my friends tell me I should be ashamed of myself if I ever became so self-important. But then again, if I had the kind of money our rich working class had, I would just go out and buy the right kind of friends, too. [Visit Billy Murphy on the Internet at http://www.ebilly.net.]
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