The Ballroom
Community Service for Millionaires
RECEIVED Fri., Oct. 3, 2008
Dear Editor,
Offering up the financial fate of this country to Henry Paulson is like asking Jeffrey Dahmer to babysit your kid and to give him a Ranch dressing bath. He was the chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs before he was invited to put one in our pink, two in our stink.
Politicians need to lay off the rhetorical nitwittery that curses "greed on Wall Street" as though they weren't instrumental in ushering in this age of welfare for millionaires. Back when Britney Spears shocked a dumb world and shaved her head, Bush was proposing a budget that gave more than $30 billion in tax breaks to the Wal-Mart family alone. The same budget cut $28 billion in Medicaid that year. If we can't get it together enough to throw the scum out on their fat anachronistic asses, then they can at least acknowledge their own complicity.
But hey, let the millionaires keep their blood money. Fine, let's bail them out. But every executive from upper management on up the ladder at AIG, Lehman Bros., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac must perform community service that involves nothing but cleaning public toilets in economically depressed neighborhoods 40 hours a week for one year. During this period of servitude, they must listen to Fran Drescher, Ray Romano, and Rachael Ray read Sweet Valley High Books on Tape. They will learn to subsist on the shitty food of the American poor: Cheetos, Vienna sausages, and Tang. They will be the Mahars and Dhobis of the new American caste system, disposing of homeless crackhead corpses from Jamaica, Queens Porta Pottis, and scrubbing the armpit and pubic stubble of street whores from blood-stained sinks in the blown-out tenements of Camden, N.J.
We'll be able to make an individual choice at the moment we walk by, seeing them decorated in the turds of those they attempted to destroy. The enlightened few will imagine their souls healing, their perspective opening petal by petal in a dramatic stop-motion rhythm. Others of us will just think, "With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever."
Offering up the financial fate of this country to Henry Paulson is like asking Jeffrey Dahmer to babysit your kid and to give him a Ranch dressing bath. He was the chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs before he was invited to put one in our pink, two in our stink.
Politicians need to lay off the rhetorical nitwittery that curses "greed on Wall Street" as though they weren't instrumental in ushering in this age of welfare for millionaires. Back when Britney Spears shocked a dumb world and shaved her head, Bush was proposing a budget that gave more than $30 billion in tax breaks to the Wal-Mart family alone. The same budget cut $28 billion in Medicaid that year. If we can't get it together enough to throw the scum out on their fat anachronistic asses, then they can at least acknowledge their own complicity.
But hey, let the millionaires keep their blood money. Fine, let's bail them out. But every executive from upper management on up the ladder at AIG, Lehman Bros., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac must perform community service that involves nothing but cleaning public toilets in economically depressed neighborhoods 40 hours a week for one year. During this period of servitude, they must listen to Fran Drescher, Ray Romano, and Rachael Ray read Sweet Valley High Books on Tape. They will learn to subsist on the shitty food of the American poor: Cheetos, Vienna sausages, and Tang. They will be the Mahars and Dhobis of the new American caste system, disposing of homeless crackhead corpses from Jamaica, Queens Porta Pottis, and scrubbing the armpit and pubic stubble of street whores from blood-stained sinks in the blown-out tenements of Camden, N.J.
We'll be able to make an individual choice at the moment we walk by, seeing them decorated in the turds of those they attempted to destroy. The enlightened few will imagine their souls healing, their perspective opening petal by petal in a dramatic stop-motion rhythm. Others of us will just think, "With a bit of luck, his life was ruined forever."
Teighlor Darr
