Whew. Had to open a window when I got home as the stink waves were still radiating from that last post like from an outhouse in Chernobyl. I’ve reread that post a dozen times now and I have to say that I still think I undersold it.
It’s not really possible to capture the essence of the bullying boss with a general audience screed. Real bullying isn’t about name calling, it’s about ugly truths and brain twisting lies, ulcer-driven bottom lines and all the invasively intimate ways in which abusers verbally grope their victims. I don’t know Katherine Kersten well enough to properly abuse her. For that you need to know a person, their vanities and vulnerabilities. Are they failed parents or serial losers in the game of love? Any mannerisms or tics that can be mocked?
Top down corporations are bullyocracies by nature, attracting ass kissers who are invariably abusive to subordinates even as they tongue their superiors. They may even have good intentions but after a while the entrenched system adjusts their management style to meet its needs. You cannot inspire underlings when you have no carrots, so stick it to them.
After you’re invested into a bad top-down organization/political party/establishment, the rationalizations and elaborate belief systems take over. The people who have run this country into the ground, stealing all the profits and abusing the process, also, by their very nature, despise you. Why? Because you let them do it to you. They detest your whimpers, your little water cooler rebellions. How dare you assume the position daily but then object to some new mickey mouse rules at the weekly meeting?!
These are not people who voted for Obama. These are not people who want change but rather just more of the same.
Abuse is your lot in life. Whips and chains have been replaced by mortgages and condo fees. Who needs the Klan when bankruptcy’s illegal and you have mountains of credit card debt to deal with?
No, it’s not about the bullying. It’s about the contempt. You might think it’s about the haute cuisine, Cuban cigars and hundred-year-old brandies, but it’s not. What we mistake for lifestyle is little more than the arrogant few lighting up their Montecristos with the deed to your children’s future. It’s not the food so much as it is self-aggrandizing theater. The things they consume are things that are then theirs forever, kidney-strained gold-flecked martinis and excreted truffle-laden $100 hamburgers kept in the canopic jars of epicurean memory. The bowel movement is as prized as the gustatory acquisition. If you don’t know what caviar shit smells like, obviously you ain’t shit.
For every Bill Gatesian charity there are a dozen Yahweh-class yachts moored at the club, each a pyramid-sized tribute to an A-type personality who will goddamnit be buried with the most toys. Sadly, they do not bury the Brodkorbian servants with their masters and their brobdingnagian-sized egos.
Name one thing the corporate rich have done for (not to) America? Take your time. Any new museums or libraries where you live? Maybe some new community swimming pools or inner city recreational facilities? Surely you have some half-way houses with little brass plaques honoring Enron for their generous donation? Have they ever given away toys or food not later connected to a hazmat-themed recall?
Charity? Charity is for closers. When you add it all up our top producers aren’t really on commission, they’re just living on tips. The rest of us? I think our lot can best be described by the scene in Rob Roy in which one of the characters picks up a chamberpot, looks inside and exclaims that he could feed a Scottish family for a week with the contents.
But don’t get to feeling too righteous. If you live in the First World no matter how down and out you are — you’re still a house nigger.
And yes, I enjoyed my Thanksgiving break immensely. You?
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Mick on the latest in cognitive dissonance.
Me? I'm for the bailout when I'm not against it. Like Paul Schrader's Blue Collar, you alternate between cheering and disgust, and by the end of the movie you're not sure who the heroes are.
Thanksgiving Day
starving child your corpse
will be worth its feather weight
the swine devour their favor
constant
collapsing
inferior
mommy why does it taste like ink?
clean your plate young man, this funeral's gonna be a fucking feast
constant
collapsing
inferior
— by Agoraphobic Nosebleed
Mick's co-blogger eRobin has a video that speaks to the previous bailouts. (I sprayed coffee on my keyboard when they mentioned the dog groomer job.) eRobin also has a timely appreciation of Mick's inherently justified cynicism regarding our rigged economy. See also Mick's pre-Thanksgiving post, GAO says Chao's Labor Dept crooked as a dog's hind leg. If you don't click the link, you should at least know that the dog's hind leg had been broken in a freak industrial accident and then re-set by an oxycontin-addicted defrocked veterinarian/realtor on Nasser Kazeminy's payroll.
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Here's your Jeopardy answer:
• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion
TOTAL: $3.92 trillion
Your Jeopardy question?
Name nine things that cumulatively cost $686 billion less than the bailout of Wall Street?
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Senator Clinton has flown to Chicago to be with President-elect Obama. Tomorrow morning they will step out onto a balcony to greet the assembled masses, and Obama will wave a bloody balance sheet on which all of Big Dog's donors have been listed.
Madonna's already negotiating for the movie rights to the soon-to-be-written Andrew Lloyd Weber musical.
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It snowed this morning. Not worth mentioning but I just noticed the new tenant who drives a light truck with a UC Davis bumper sticker standing on the parking taking a picture of her snow-covered truck.
Everything is interesting to somebody. For instance, coming hard off the heels of eight years of law and order, newspapers are finally starting to take note of the significance of numbers. Numbers like 42. No, not Bill Clinton (#42 on the presidential roster), but 42 as in 42 dead Kansans.
During the past 12 years, 42 people have died on Kansas roads in police chases, state records show. Those fatal crashes also injured 37 people.
Eight -- or about 20 percent -- of those who died were in vehicles hit by fleeing cars. Five of the eight innocent victims died in Wichita.
High speed chases. One of those things we do that make no sense. Otoh, if we didn't permit high speed chases, who'd ever want to be a traffic cop? On the other other hand, having just passed my Norwegian-American home girl Belle Gunness, Kansas law enforcement now ranks #3 on the list of all-time most prolific American serial killers, right after Randy Steven Kraft and Gary Leon Ridgway.
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It began in 1955 in a restaurant in the Loop. Ernie Banks was lighting up the Wrigley Field score board and the Prudential Building dominated the Chicago skyline. Lew was in his late 20s, the son of Nathan Manilow, one of the country's top home builders. With a law degree from Harvard and a sky's-the-limit future in the real estate business alongside his father, Lew was having lunch with a close friend of his father's. Maybe they were discussing President Dwight Eisenhower's heart attack that September or the death in April of Albert Einstein. Perhaps it was Broadway's heartbreaking sensation that year, "The Diary of Anne Frank."
Whatever the topic, it flew right out of Lew's head as soon as his lunch companion, in reference to a mutual acquaintance, dropped a bomb on Lew's assumptions about his own privileged life.
You know, Lew, so-and-so was adopted. "Like you."
And so began a 40-year detective story that recently culminated in two 80-year-old brothers meeting for the first time.
It's a good story.
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Group blogs are at their best when the "other" posters riff on the group dynamic. The dynamics are most skewed when a blog goes "group" via the Johnny Carson route — guest bloggers kept on like Joey Bishop to warm up the crowd until Johnny gets back from vacation.
Kudos to Jay Ackroyd for perfectly summing up the nature of group blogging at Eschaton.
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We don’t get to unwrap them yet, but it’s nice to know there are already some presents under the tree.
Yes, it’s good to be back.
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Group blogs are at their best when the “other” posters riff on the group dynamic. The dynamics are most skewed when a blog goes “group” via the Johnny Carson route — guest bloggers kept on like Joey Bishop to warm up the crowd until Johnny gets back from vacation.
Ouch! What can I say, I’ve been in a slump lately.
Joey fuckin’ Bishop…
That said, it’s nice to see your attitude about CxO pay and other fuschia collar BS finally infecting some other bloggers out there. It’s just too bad that it took the near downfall of the economy to give people their “What’s the deal with…” moment of clarity. I wish I had more faith than Krugman, but I’m fairly settled into the “worse before it gets better” camp.
There oughtta be a law. Wait…