I’m sorry, DougJ, but it looks like Matt Taibbi may despise David Brooks even more than you do. The man who delivered the ultimate smackdown on Thomas Friedman reports a new nadir for our modern op-ed courtiers:
David Brooks: … Unlike 90 percent of America, I was rooting for Duke last night. This was widely cast as a class conflict — the upper crust Dukies against the humble Midwestern farm boys. If this had been a movie, Butler’s last second heave would have gone in instead of clanging off the rim, and the country would still be weeping with joy.
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But this is why life is not a movie. The rich are not always spoiled. Their success does not always derive from privilege. The Duke players — to the extent that they are paragons of privilege, which I dispute — won through hard work on defense.
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Gail Collins: I’m sorry, when the difference is one weensy basket, I’d say Duke won neither by privilege nor hard work but by sheer luck. But don’t let me interrupt your thought here. I detect the subtle and skillful transition to a larger non-sport point.
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David Brooks: Yes. I was going to say that for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious?
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I had to read this thing twice before it registered that Brooks was actually saying that he was rooting for the rich against the poor. If he keeps this up, he’s going to make his way into the Guinness Book for having extended his tongue at least a foot and a half farther up the ass of the Times’s Upper East Side readership than any previous pundit in journalistic history…
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Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.
__
Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives in which society throws gobs of money at us for pushing ideas around on paper (frequently, not even good ideas) and taking mutual-admiration-society business lunches in London and Paris and Las Vegas with our overpaid peers.
__
Brooks is right that most of the people in that 5% bracket log heavy hours, but where he’s wrong is in failing to recognize that most of us have enough shame to know that what we do for a living isn’t really working. I pull absolutely insane hours in my current profession, to the point of having almost no social life at all, but I know better than to call what I do for a living work. I was on a demolition crew when I was much younger, the kind of job where you have to wear a dust mask all day long, carry buckets full of concrete, and then spend all night picking fiberglass shards out of your forearms from ripping insulation out of the wall.
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If I had to do even five hours of that work today I’d bawl my fucking eyes out for a month straight. I’m not complaining about my current good luck at all, but I would wet myself with shame if I ever heard it said that I work even half as hard as the average diner waitress.
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Then again, maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong perspective. Would I rather clean army latrines with my tongue, or would I rather do what Brooks does for a living, working as a professional groveler and flatterer who three times a week has to come up with new ways to elucidate for his rich readers how cosmically just their lifestyles are? If sucking up to upper-crust yabos was my actual job and I had to do it to keep the electricity on in my house, then yes, I might look at that as work.
__
But it strikes me that David Brooks actually enjoys his chosen profession…
Read (as Peggy Noonan would say, savor) the whole thing. I actually feel sorry for Gail Collins, who seems to have been stuck with the difficult task of distracting Bobo from sharing his Pundit Thots with some innocent bystander who might be driven to beat him senseless bloody for being an obnoxious tool.
Ash Wing League
Now I’m waiting for Taibbi to take down Douthat!
MikeJ
Speaking for bystanders everywhere, this is a job I would work really hard at.
Alex
Industrious?! Ruining the country with dumbass banking games and getting rewarded for it is industry?
Brooks, Ayn Rand’s grave is up in Westchester county, a short drive for you. Dig ‘er up and fuck her solid, so the rest of us don’t have to hear this.
Punchy
What’s the origin of the “Bobo” moniker?
KevinD
I can’t wait to see Driftglass’ response to this one.
GregB
The rich, they suffer so that we peasants can be free.
c u n d gulag
David Brooks, the “pundit” as “twit.”
David Brooks = pundtwit.
Why the NY TImes keeps “I Never Aspired to be an Elitist, I Was Just Born That Way” BoBo and “‘My Head is Flat,’ and ‘ In Six-months We’ll Know’ Friedman” on is a mystery.
They must have pictures of the management with tubes of motion-lotion, small boys, and sex-swings.
There’s no other explanation possible. Either that, or the rich bastards agree with them.
Oh, yeah. How stupid of me, THAT’S IT!!!
MattF
And just consider the lifetime of training and effort required for a day of shopping in downtown Bethesda. It’s unthinkable, really.
Mike E
I guess this cinches it–there really is no God, or this wanker would be a smoking greasy spot.
FWIW Duke deserved the title, they (and Butler) played their asses off.
Loneoak
@ Punchy: “What’s the origin of the “Bobo” moniker?”
His book “Bobos in Paradise.”
“Bobo” is short for bourgeois and bohemian.
SiubhanDuinne
@Ash Wing League:
Oh, my dear. WAAAY too easy.
arguingwithsignposts
What an asshat! I’d put 8 hours in a coal mine or collecting garbage or even teaching 1st graders up against anything “the rich” does any day of the fucking week.
Anne Laurie
@Punchy: Per the Lexicon: “Derogatory nickname for David Brooks of the NY Times, who coined the portmaneau Bourgeois Bohemian when he decided “yuppie” was offensive to its targets.” The man actually wrote a book called BoBos in Paradise.
HE Pennypacker, Wealthy Industrialist
The origin of teabaggers revealed.
Mark S.
A young David Brooks probably cried when Texas Western beat Kentucky.
Brien Jackson
So what does Brooks think his point is; that Butler, the team who only let one opponent in the entire tournament score more than 60 points (61) on them didn’t work hard on defense or something?
mai naem
Bobo doesn’t care. Granted he’s not in Tom Friedman’s league but I bet Bobo’s put together several million if not tens of millions from the books sales and the NYT and PBS gigs so that he doesn’t need to worry about him or his kids’ or grandkids’ financial futures. His kids are probably Ivy Leaguers who have a passport to the high life even without daddy’s money.
Taylor
For anyone needing insight into the Brooks of this world, catch The Fountainhead on DVD.
You will lose 90 minutes of your life that you will never get back, but that’s less than the time it would take to read the book, and at least there are great performances from Patricia McNeal, Gary Cooper and Raymond Massey.
I dare you however to listen to lines like “There’s an epidemic of selflessness” and not burst out laughing.
Kobie
1. It is patently obvious that David Brooks doesn’t know the first fucking thing about basketball.
2. Seriously, what an asshole.
Cacti
I’d like to see Bobo or Mitt Romney, or some other “more industrious” scion of privilege spend an afternoon roofing or laying pipe.
Logs more hours =/= works harder
eric
When I left the bar after watching the game, I got in the cab and my cabbie — a former Goldman Sachs Senior VP — shared his lament to me that his 14 hours per day in the cab is not hard enough work to satisfactorily tire his broad shoulders. As he said that, I peered at his strikingly strong postured body, and I saw the mark of the Skull and Bones tatooed on his sinewy forearm…I had met a fellow traveller. He also told me how he found it “ever so tedious” to hear people denigrate the Dookies for their sin of being white. As a a white man who used to break bread with the truly privileged in America, he told me that he rooted that those young scallywags teach the effeminate liberal elite a thing or two about hard work. I thanked him and told him to keep the 5o cents. I had a deadline to meet.
Thomas Brooks.
Taylor
BTW there is something deeply ironic about mediocrities like Brooks being such evident fans of The Fountainhead.
Martin
Hmm. I’ve been working 70-80 hour weeks (while taking an 8% paycut and furlough) since January. Now, I don’t dislike my job, but toss in the pay cut and now I can’t afford some of those niceties that an 80 hour work week usually delivers, so I’m still mowing my lawn, changing the oil in my car, doing my own plumbing, replacing my own fences. And I know I’m not alone among the middle classers.
So yeah, if you need another torch and pitchfork outside of Bobo’s house, I’ll find a way to squeeze it into my schedule.
Linda Featheringill
I read the piece by Matt Taibbi. It is a nice, class-conscious rant, although I get the idea that the writer is better off financially than he used to be.
The last time I worked downtown and rode to work on public transportation, which was a few years ago, I was struck by how many urban black people had two jobs, or at least a job and a half. Long hours, long days, crappy jobs. Just trying to make it. This surprised me a bit because it is never, never talked about by the society as a whole.
There is no way to know how much was “off the books,” somewhere up or down the line in the service industry. Still, honorable work is honorable work. And it should be respected as such.
I suggest that the tirade about how hard the rich folks work should be taken with a grain of salt. Or at least we could include the input of people who actually know what they are talking about.
Brick Oven Bill
I am convinced that all of the writers at the New York Times are on some form of mind-altering drugs.
Quackosaur
Speaking of the Village…
The AP wants us to know that Obama hurt the press pool’s feelings and broke protocol by leaving without telling them so that he could go to his daughter’s soccer game. He apparently broke years of tradition.
They must have made up, though, because the press was with him when he went golfing later in the day.
Link
MikeJ
Billing for eight quarter hours in one hour does not mean you worked 80 hours.
Cacti
Since the top 1% are obviously so vital to everything, I’m sure Bobo could answer this one.
Which would cause a greater disruption to world commerce?
1. Every CEO in the world disappeared for a day
2. Every Airport Baggage Handler in the world disappeared for a day
Incertus (Brian)
No one, in my experience, works harder than migrant workers picking the produce David Brooks ogles at the Applebee’s salad bar he claims to cherish so much. Fuck that condescending motherfucker.
Brick Oven Bill
David Brooks, an American Douchebag.
SRW1
@Ash Wing League:
Wouldn’t that violate the mercy rule?
gwangung
@Kobie:
This is different from any one of his other columns?
mattH
@MikeJ:
Like Taibbi said, some things are pleasure, not work.
rootless-e
@Linda Featheringill: Matt Taibbi is a poor working class fellow whose father labored in the
Coal Mines,I mean in the studios of NBC News as acommon laborerTV journalist. His mom endured back breaking work as awaitressmanager ofa dinersuper well connected charity.MikeJ
@Incertus (Brian): Yeah, but John McCain says they make $50/hr picking lettuce. So obviously they were included in the industrious rich.
Cacti
@Incertus (Brian):
As McCain alluded to once…
I’d like to see the industrious rich spend a single afternoon picking lettuce in the 120 degree heat of Yuma, AZ or El Centro, CA.
Scott
Taibbi seems to be a frequent twit himself, but could someone please, please, print off about ten million copies of Taibbi’s column and make sure it finds its way into the hands of every New Yorker, along with a photo of Bobo?
It would be a far better world if spent his next trip to NYC running for his life.
birthmarker
Click through and read the above mentioned Friedman piece. I laughed, I cried…
Also. if you haven’t, read “NickeI and Dimed.” You will never feel the same way about a low wage worker again. And yes, like most of us, I have done some pretty crummy jobs. By the grace of God I was able to move into better work, and trust me it was easier, though I still worked very hard. There’s something about not having to ask a boss for permission to use the restroom that’s very empowering.
Dollared
Taibbi is fast becoming my Greatest American Hero.
It would be a pity if he ever broke through. He has exactly the right level of profanity to deal with that asshat Brooks.
gbear
@Cacti:
Nah, you really don’t want to have incompetent wanker putting down your roof or installing utilities to your house. An afternoon at McDonalds (or stocking the salad bar at an Applebees) would be much better.
Mark S.
@Quackosaur:
That’s just fucking demented. We don’t need to know if the President went to see his daughter’s soccer game or if he decided to catch a matinee of Hot Tub Time Machine. Nobody cares.
gbear
@Ash Wing League:
Give it to Taibbi! He hates everything!
Cacti
@rootless-e:
It’s one of those John Edwards rags-to-riches stories.
As you may remember, John’s father worked in a Textile Mill (as the plant manager).
Or Bill O’Reilly, whose Dad made a scant $35,000 (in the 1960’s).
me
Taibbi’s post before this one.
Heh.
Linda Featheringill
@Cacti: If you really want to throw the world into chaos, kidnap all of the garbage collectors!
Kobie
@gwangung: No, not really. Brooks is basically wrong about everything.
Brick Oven Bill
Hey, #30 wasn’t me. But I kind of agree with it.
rootless-e
In Taibbi’s defense, not everyone has the gumption to play basketball in Mongolia.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cacti: If I recall correctly though, John Edwards’s dad worked his way up to manager over the course of many years and was a worker at during Edwards’s childhood.
Jager
As I worked my way through college, I had some really shitty jobs. Tied for the shittiest of the shitty: Working for a restaurant in the “back kitchen”, the other, spending 8-10 hours a day tying steel on an Interstate Highway construction project. Later in life when I was sitting at my desk in starched dress shirt, wearing a fucking tie that cost more than my kitchen co-workers made in a day and I’d catch my self bitching about working so damn hard, I’d remember those 90 degree summer days, bent over, tying steel while being chased across the countryside by a concrete paving machine. One day while chairing a meeting on company goals, my fellow managers were whining about how hard it was going to be hit the goals, i suggested that we get a couple of truckloads of sand dumped in our parking lot, we’d all grab a shovel and fill the trucks back up, then we’d have a grasp on the concept of hard work. Fucking titty-baby wimps!
eastriver
I find it most revealing that Taibbi worked in demolitions. Granted he wasn’t strategically placing charges to bring down bridges or skyscrapers. Like he said, more the hauling crap side of things. But the metaphor of demolitions in relation to his style of laying waste to charlatans and painters of diarrhea like Bobo is most interesting. And by “interesting” I spot-the-fuck on.
carlos the dwarf
I love Collins’ snide comment there. That had to be fun to say.
Martin
@MikeJ: How McCain got any votes at all after that statement is mind boggling. Yeah, no American would pick lettuce for $100K per year. Right.
timb
In fact he doesn’t the first thing about class either. Every Butler graduate I know, including the one who has been my friend for 25 years, is a rich asshole. It’s a school which prepares people for law, doctoring, and pharmacy and it is as expensive as Duke.
Brooks doesn’t know shit about anything.
Cacti
So, what was everyone’s worst job?
Mine was dishwasher at an all-you-can-eat family feedbag.
Pangloss
Another note about the David vs. Goliath aspect of the Butler/Duke matchup: As of 2009, Duke had the highest budget of any men’s basketball team in all of Division 1— $13 million per year. The second place team among the 337 Division 1 men’s basketball, Marquette, had a budget of $10 million. The median men’s basketball budget is somewhere around $1.9 million, and that includes about 70 schools that budget below $1 million.
Butler’s budget was $1.65 milllion– more than 8 times less than Duke, and almost twice less than Duke’s lead over the second highest budget team.
I guess we can assume that Brooks would have rooted for Goliath over David. Maybe the new Conservative Bible project will redress inconsistencies like that. We can only hope. It would be irresponsible not to speculate. We’ll have to leave it there.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cacti: A summer taking parts off the drying belt in the paint shop of a window factory. 140 degree heat and constant bending and lifting. I was rail thin and looked great when I went back to school that fall. Also, making things easier on me than most people working there was the fact that I was related to upper management and people knew it. That connection was a bit of a double edged sword though; no one messed with me, but I felt I had to work harder than everyone else in the department to prove I wasn’t a rich sissy.
Halteclere
Since mid February I have put in 90, 92, 78, 102, 72 and 88 hour work-weeks. This isn’t because I love my job (I hate it right now) or I’m an “industrious elete”. My company fired all the hourly personnel and are making the salary personnel pick up slack.
Bobo, get some real-world experience before you trot out any more crap.
Derek
After having worked for three and a half years in various UPS hubs in Arizona, a multi-billion dollar shipping conglomerate that literally accounts for nearly a percent of daily US GDP without whom the entire economy would grind to halt. I’d like this asshole to spend one hour in the Phoenix heat unloading a drop-frame trailer filled with tires and chainsaws, then tell the fifteen year lifer who makes 40,000, if he’s lucky, that the reason he makes a third of his boss’s salary is that he doesn’t work hard enough. Fucker would run crying if had to lift even one ream of office paper he would blow through on memos to his secretary.
Try going work for a fucking week with staples in your head because you can’t get workman’s comp over a non-disability injury, because your jackass supe made you clean up after someone else’s mess.
Better yet, tell that to a union steward. Tell him that his guys don’t work enough to be paid like the asshole in the tie.
gbear
Contract draftsperson at a shop where, on the first day of work, the regular crew told me not to take it personally when one of the owners started screaming at me. I was lucky enough to be able to walk off the job after the first week and go beg for my old job back.
I’ve washed dishes before too but that was in high school so it’s basically a rite of passage.
arguingwithsignposts
@Cacti:
Working the back door at a grocery store – unloading crates of milk and pallets of groceries, then stocking them, while being kept under 35 hours so I wouldn’t be full time.
Fuck David Brooks.
ETA: Reminded by TR’s comment below – fry cook at McDonalds would be second worse. Third worse would be cashier at a gas station on the late night shift in a bad neighborhood.
TR
Fry cook, Burger King. Ugh.
sven
Why do the rich work so much?
If someone offered me $300,000 a year to work 80/hrs a week or $150,000 a year to work 40/hrs a week it wouldn’t even be a contest.
Brick Oven Bill
I made money on my hands and knees, working my way through probably seven inches of duck crap at the bottom of a shallow lake, fetching golf-balls to sell to cheap golfers at $0.25/each. It really smells bad and you can lose fingers and toes to snapping turtles. At another job, I was waterboarded.
These are not nearly as bad as being compelled to sit through diversity and sexual harassment training videos in exchange for money though. Those are the worst.
If you fall asleep, they make you stand against the wall.
fucen tarmal
one bit taibbi missed; although his thoroughness is admirable, and his capacity to actively read, whilst most of us merely intuitively check out, while waiting for the disappointing payoff, brooks has a secondary audience for his “rich people work hard” mantra.
we know most of the teabaggers are out of work. we see all the time people voting and advocating tax cuts and property gains cuts. we know them, they speak for the rich authoritatively online and in bars, churches, etc. these people get the secondary brooks argument. it comes from people who filter and pass on the bobo sermons. they look at their semi-comfortable, relatively unchallenging, under employment, and they say…well the rich deserve to be rich, if i wanted to work hard i would be rich too.
they then believe they could be rich if they wanted to. which makes them feel noble in their choice to not pursue greater wealth. they aren’t fools, they are rebels.
Omnes Omnibus
@sven: As Scott Fitzgerald said, the rich are different.
The Moar You Know
I’m willing to make David Brooks a deal; I’m willing to forgive him for this atrocity of a column if he’s willing to work the counter at my local Starbucks, 40 hours a week, for six months and live on nothing but the money he earns there.
He might not last a day, he certainly wouldn’t last a week.
arguingwithsignposts
@Brick Oven Bill:
BoB is almost making a valid point, then … no, he pulls it off into the ditch!
Napoleon
@Cacti:
This is easy/hard.
I had a job in a Mack truck shop that I got around 16 while in high school and managed to work until I was in law school (only being broken up while I was on one of my two layoffs with working in a dorm kitchen) and although it was an very dirty shitty job with 60 hour weeks in the summer, for a kid I made good money (I want to say I was at 4.50 or something like that at the end) especially with the overtime.
And it got me through school, so I have always thought it was a God send.
Halteclere
My worst job? Cleaning bathrooms at a concrete plant one semester in college so I could have some gas money and eat out Sunday nights when the dining hall was closed.
MikeJ
@sven:
It’s often work 80 hrs/wk for $250k until you make partner and start making the big money.
Incertus (Brian)
@Cacti: So, what was everyone’s worst job?
Physically hardest would be the 4 weeks one summer I spent as a roofer when I was 16, stirring the tar kettle on top of a flat roof in New Orleans.
Most soul-crushing would be close between the 6 months I tried to sell Medicare supplements door-to-door in all the small towns just north of Baton Rouge and the six weeks I sold used cars at a car lot in Hammond.
Kobie
Worst job? I was a bus boy at a rib joint for about nine months when I was 16 and I absolutely fucking hated that job. Worked for a couple of years at a bowling alley, cleaning tables and emptying ashtrays and dealing with the Friday night rowdies, which wasn’t much fun either. But thankfully, I’ve never had to take an endless-hours-doing-backbreaking-labor-for-shitty-pay job.
Jager
When I was a back kitchen worker, one of my gigs was cleaning the walk-in cooler every week…some nasty shit survives in there! The cooler cleaning was a far distant second to cleaning the grease traps, I can make myself gag when I think about it!
sven
Aluminum Fabrication – 70-80 hrs a week running a drill press was the low point. The work was physically demanding but the soul killing boredom was much worse. Imagine pulling the same damn lever 1000 times an hour day after day. It has been 13 years since I worked there but even last year I had a nightmare about that damn press.
eric
@Jager: ditto….i also collected urine samples for drug testing,….that was not so much fun, but not back breaking…i had a lot of crappy jobs that i had to do to get by until i finished my degrees…i am eternally grateful i was never a lifer in any of those jobs
tar roofer wins …worst job ever that smell
Ailuridae
So, what was everyone’s worst job?
It wasn’t actually all that bad of a job but when I tell people I used to do it they think its a lot worse than it is so here goes:
At a horse race track there is a job called a hot-walker. I was the assistant hot-walker which entailed walking behind the horse and picking up feces.
I’ve been really, really lucky work-wise. Not going to complain. I did the part time UPS work in Chicago but was grateful then to have had a job that paid that well (it was 8 or 9 an hour) and that didn’t interfere with work-study hours.
Martin
Running laundry service for a summer. Collecting everyone’s dirty laundry that had been baking in the 110 degree un-airconditioned buildings, getting it washed, folded and back to them.
There’s nasty shit (literally – you’d be shocked) in people’s sheets and wet towels – particularly when they’re away from home.
I did a few food service jobs. Yeah, cleaning grease traps is nasty, as is cleaning the cooler, but bodily fluids wins. I don’t mind construction jobs. Yeah, hot and incredibly tiring, but for some reason that kind of stuff doesn’t bother me that much.
arguingwithsignposts
BTW, not my worst job, but a guy I went to grad school with used to work cleaning chemical-laden barrels. The work was so dangerous several people he worked with were killed or maimed. For $10/hour.
Martin
@Ailuridae:
What’s awesome is that the job of picking up shit is so important that the position has an assistant.
fucen tarmal
my worst job was telemarketing “fundraising” for police fraternal organizations…essentially cold calling people and asking for money, implying that their support might excuse them from some infraction or tip the balance in their favor. of course explicitly saying this was prohibited, not implying it was fruitless.
the office/boiler room was decorated schizophrenia style with cartoons, pre-photoshop captions, cutouts that ranged from crude, to wtf. the main earner in the office was prohibited from entering the place, by restraining order, when the owner was present. apparently he held a knife to his throat “back when things were a lot more wild around here”.
arguingwithsignposts
@fucen tarmal:
Hey, do I know you? LOL. I did that crap for two weeks once. Not the worst, but definitely creepy.
Walker
So, what was everyone’s worst job?
I spent a summer dressing up in Tivek every day and wiping down/decontaminating radioactive tools.
eric
you want soul crushing: there are MANY young law school grads who now owe their lenders 100K+ in non-dischargeable law school loan debt and they are working for soulless monsters. The also know that if they quit to do a regular job, the income will not cover the debt payments. It may not be ditch digging, but I have seen these creatures, their souls are trapped it is not pretty. It would be a mistake to say they have it made given their income, which for many is not likely and for those that get it, it is not guaranteed to last more than four or five years until the great lawfirm beast shits them out. There is a trappedness to that predicament that they only hide temporarily. The number of jobs is overwhelmed by the number or robots graduating law school.
JenJen
Mmmmm…. Taibbi.
gbear
I’ve had a couple of jobs that required heavy lifting but they were both bearable. One was at a record warehouse where half the employees were either avid record collector or ex-musicians or both. The work was boring (unboxing, sorting, reboxing, put it on a shelf or in a truck) but the conversations were lively. The other was an evening second job at a birding supplies store where almost everything came in 50# sacks. It was a great place for the conversations also.
Jack Canuck
@Jager:
This. My gold standard is still doing construction work on condos in Vancouver during the winter, building decks and installing windows when it was a few degrees above freezing and pissing rain. And not getting paid much for it. Every job I’ve had since – and especially doing my PhD and doing sessional teaching – I can still look back and tell myself, “hey, at least I’m not doing that anymore”. Does tend to put things in perspective.
Loneoak
My worst job: Grading freshman composition papers.
Uloborus
Actually, forget Bobo OR Taibbi. Does anyone know where this explanation that the rich work longer hours than the poor comes from? How is it measured? When they mean ‘the rich’, do they include people like Bush Sr. and Jr., who will probably never work again and rack up 0 hours per week, or are they cut out of the formula because they’re not currently holding jobs? Are they including people who can only find part time work? Where do you start qualifying as ‘rich’? Since higher level jobs are a lot less timesheet oriented, how are you measuring their hours? Are you counting them as working 24 hours a day when they’re off on a business trip? Even if it’s to the Caribbean?
I don’t question at all that a lot of the very rich people are type A personalities who work and work and work compulsively. I’m just not sure how you can make a meaningful statistic out of this. Like Taibbi says, technically his hours are insane, but a lot of it isn’t work in any way we’d understand. How can you tell the guy who’s at his desk 16 hours a day bending numbers and making financial transactions from the guy who’s spending 12 of those hours on the plane to Hong Kong? Almost no lower level jobs have ‘not really working’ time like this.
Seriously, how do you measure this? Heck, since they’re NOT on a time sheet, do you ASK people like Gates how much they work?
Karatist Preacher
I’ve avoided any coverage of Butler losing but this seriously pisses me off.
Incertus (Brian)
@arguingwithsignposts: For $10/hour.
And that’s what makes me want to punch someone like Bobo in the mouth for saying what he did. One of the most successful false memes in this country is the notion that hard work is rewarded well in terms of money. Most of the time, the people doing the hardest work in physical terms are making the least money–they’re making minimum wage, or worse, getting paid by the piece, which ought to be against the law at the low end.
A couple of years ago, I used Nickled and Dimed in my freshman comp class, and had my students do the math on a 40 hour work week at $7.25 an hour, which is just above the local minimum wage. They shit themselves, because even though they weren’t, for the most part, paying their own way yet, they knew what rent runs in Boca Raton, and they knew they weren’t getting out of the dorms if they were making minimum wage at full-time, much less part-time and going to school.
Vlad
My worst job was probably washing dishes. Lousy work, lousy pay, and lousy hours, but it could have been much worse.
Also, as a Duke alum, let me formally state that I resent the he’ll out of David Brooks for trying to finagle his way onto our “side”. Go climb up someone else’s leg, you talentless hack.
The Moar You Know
@Cacti: I spent three years in a Tyvex spacesuit, breathing SCUBA air, working in an explosive, cancer-causing atmosphere. That wasn’t even close.
The worst job I ever had was as a receptionist for a slumlord property management agency. We managed over 1500 units and had a maintenance crew of three. Every time it would rain I’d drive into work with my stomach in knots, knowing there’d be at least forty, maybe fifty screaming angry people on the answering machine whose homes had flooded during the night. My job was essentially to get yelled at, by both tenants and owners, and schedule the maintenance.
My next job was the Tyvex spacesuit job. Vast improvement.
I have a profound fear to this day of answering phones, and a deep appreciation for the value of silence.
Second worst job? Barista at Starbucks. The company is run by sociopathic assholes (and going down the tubes at a spectacular rate these days) and 90% of the customers are complete and total shitbags.
gbear
@fucen tarmal:
Ahh, that reminds me of the worst job that I’d completely forgotten about. While I was attending a tech school, I worked as a clerk at a gas station/convenience store (my neighborhood friends called it Stop-N’-Rob). About a month before graduation, I was held up at knifepoint. The job only sucked slightly less on non-robbery days. Man, it sucked.
It should be national service for everyone to work six months in a convenience store. I thought I knew my neighborhood before I started there. I didn’t know squat.
Incertus (Brian)
@Loneoak: I do that, though I get to teach sophs and creative writing a fair amount as well, and even when it sucks, I remember the many shitty jobs I held in the past. And the job sucks more or less depending on what level of faculty you’re in. I’m lucky–I have a full-time instructorship, with bennies and a living, if small, wage. I wouldn’t do this job if I had to adjunct. I’d find a forklift to drive again.
South of I-10
I waited tables all through college. The world would be a nicer place if everyone had to wait tables or work in customer service for a year. I worked for a year or two waiting tables at a private golf club. Talk about some non-tipping, sexist a-holes. By the end of my time working at a restaurant, I was working all the rehearsal dinners and receptions. Happy, buzzed people tip really well.
Brien Jackson
@me:
It would be funny if it wouldn’t take like 5 seconds of research to find out that there’s no way to remove the Pope. That’s why I don’t have much use for Taibbi, entertaining though he may be, he’s not one to let a few basic points get in the way of a little extra self-righteous preening.
different church-lady
Taibbi is a smarter guy than I: he says he had to read it twice to understand that Brooks was cheering for rich over poor. I’ve now read it five or six times and I’ll be damned if I can make a single scrap of sense out of any of it.
pamplemousse
This was a delicious read.
The worst job I ever had? Probably waitressing at an IHOP in a section of town where half the customers didn’t seem to believe in leaving tips. The manager made us wash walls if we weren’t busy for a split second, and the side work – including emptying all of those godforsaken syrup containers every shift into buckets, thoroughly washing them out, and then filling them again – all while attending to as many as 12 tables at a time – was sheer hell, it really was. This was in 2000 and I made an average of $40 in tips per shift and an hourly wage of $3.12. I had the coveted morning shift, too. Weekends were better.
My easiest job by far is the one I do now for $50/hour. Taibbi is right, working with one’s mind is just not ‘work’ in the same way that physical work is. It is moronic beyond belief to call a white-collar worker more industrious because they spend more hours at work. Besides, those of us who have worked in offices (and I used to temp as a secretary so I’ve seen a million office environments, all sorts of industries) know that besides *some* of the admins, the vast majority of office workers spend a fairly significant amount of their “work”day online doing non-job-related tasks, often with Starbucks latte in hand. Ask any waitress if she would do that for twice her weekly hours for twice the pay she gets, and I doubt if any waitress would say no. Whereas if you work 80 hours per week waitressing your body is fucking devastated. Notice the next time you go to a restaurant, if you see the waitstaff sitting down. If you do, they are surely on one of their paltry, in-practice-rescindable unpaid breaks.
At IHOP one of our benefits was a half price meal to be eaten on our unpaid break (taken when the manager lets you, IF he lets you, not when you want it) – oh yeah and you can’t leave the premises or even the building during this 1/2 hour break. But you can’t bring your own food either so you are forced to buy the restaurant food and then they have the gall to claim the fact that it’s discounted as a “benefit”.
Nickel and Dimed lays it all out there, y’all. There are so many people in this country who work like dogs and don’t complain because they don’t know it’s supposed to be any different, and the sad thing is they’d probably agree with Bobo that the rich work harder. They HAVE to believe that, otherwise the sheer injustice of it would keep them from getting out of bed in the morning.
boilerman10
Brooks, what a waste of good money.
Poor NYT for shelling out to this creep.
Linda Featheringill
Worst job:
Running a press in a nonunion shop that made parts for the auto industry – day labor [spot labor], 3.35/hour, no air conditioning, not enough breaks, lunch time unpredictable.
Totally exhausing. After work, I would shuffle home after I got off the bus. Sometimes people thought I was a wino because my gait was obviously impaired. During this exhausting period, I wrote no articles, made no public comments, wrote no letters to the editor, wrote no letters to my representatives, attending no seditious meetings, and did nothing to foment political activity. I was just the way The Man wanted me to be.
But I was not me. I was alienated from my true self.
It is amazing what a single mother will do to feed her child.
Chad N Freude
Mr. Brooks, who, as a member of the elite is neither bourgeois nor bohemian, apparently is not familiar with the concept of the hourly wage, and therefore fails to realize that if the middle class and poor had the same hourly wage as one of those hard-working rich people, perhaps they would no longer be middle class or poor, even if they work fewer hours than the rich.
I always thought that Brooks was just an elitist jerk, but obviously he is much worse than that. I wonder if he counts the hours he spends at dinner parties as work.
sven
@fucen tarmal:
Great point.
I also know a shocking number of people who things like “could have played pro ball if I’d taken it seriously” and or “Sure Clapton is great but he not y’know THAT much better than me.” My brother (who has never boxed) opened a statement with “I’m not saying I could take Tyson but…” which someone else prevented him from finishing.
gbear
@Chad N Freude:
Pundit’n is hard!
Linkmeister
Assembly line for a coffee roaster/manufacturer.
1. Squaring off bags so the opening would fit under the nozzle which dispensed the coffee.
2. Then placing that opened bag under the nozzle.
3. Then putting the full bag into a vacuum sealer.
4. Then putting fancy little aluminum clips onto each bag.
5. Then loading 15 bags into a shipping box.
6. Then taping the box shut with a hand-held tape dispenser.
7.. Then loading each full box onto a pallet.
8.. When the pallet was full, shrink-wrapping it.
All in the name of either “cross-training” or because we’d gotten a slew of orders (the coffee really is damned good) and the salaried staff had to go down to the production line to help out (I was the DP guy).
The full-time production people worked from 5:00am to 3:00pm five days a week and possibly Saturdays.
Josie
My worst job was teaching high school English to bottom of the barrel, overaged sophomores, who were only a couple of years younger than I and definitely not interested in reading Julius Caesar or Silas Marner. Since they couldn’t read the material and we had no supplementary stuff back in the dark ages, I became an excellent actress and storyteller to get us through the year. My revenge was to require them to memorize some memorable Shakespeare lines, such as, “Tis not in our stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves, that we are underlings” or something close to that. We had some lively discussions about that idea.
donnah
Worst job for me: counter help at a McDonald’s next to a Frigidaire plant. The assembly line workers showed up hungry and in a hurry and we had to turn around a ton of food and sodas in a flash. Most of them were nice, but they were hungry and short-tempered. I hated that job like fury and quit after four months.
Polyester uniforms and the greasy residue on your skin: ugh. Mopping greasy floors and cleaning up the milkshake machine: ugh.
No, it wasn’t coal mine/factory/crop-picking but it was still uniquely disgusting.
Linkmeister
@donnah: Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that after a day on that coffee line you smell like unbrewed coffee. For days.
R. Porrofatto
…for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious?
This is utter bullshit. Whenever Brooks comes up with something that appears to be a fact, it’s a safe bet to call him on it. Even when he cites a source, which he naturally doesn’t here, you must check him on it because he’s usually either distorting what it says or completely lying about it.
First off, other than some Heritage Foundation fantasy, there is no data whatsoever that prove “rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people.” Historically, i.e., NOT the first time in history, the top quintile of workers do put in more total hours (combined men and women) than other quintiles. But it is nowhere near 80 hours per week (a myth that Taibbi unfortunately perpetuates here — the only nit I’d pick with him). According to the Economic Policy Institute, the difference between the middle quintiles and the top is no more than about 4-5 more hours per week, and even that is scientific extrapolation. To my knowledge, hourly data for the working “rich” (whoever they are) doesn’t exist in any scientific form beyond survey responses (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here.)
Not to mention that breakfast in a well-appointed Wall Street company dining room, lunch at the Palm, dinner at Le Cirque and drinks with the boys till midnight is what actual working people might call a vacation.
NeenerNeener
One of my friends used to stuff catnip mice into little boxes for a company that had a Hartz Mountain contract.
Omnes Omnibus
I know someone who worked as a webcam girl.
fucen tarmal
@gbear:
as someone who considers proximity and accessibility of a convenience store in evaluating housing options, i can imagine there is much to be learned from a stint behind the register. i’m sure i have earned a place in the neighborhood’s mosaic on occasion, i hope that my policy of allowing a person to finish the paragraph they are reading before making conversation, or processing my transaction, buys me some latitude.
Loneoak
@Incertus (Brian):
Yeah, it’s not really my worst job, but it’s the worst part about my job. I taught some composition courses to get my way through grad school. I’m a recent philosophy PhD from one of the lesser UCs and I have a cushy NSF postdoc at the moment (I do science studies + ethics research on human genomics), so I’m not going to bitch about work at all. But the prospect of getting back into the humanities job market in the near future is terrifying, especially given the possibility of long-term adjunctery.
I’ve never had a truly awful job, but many of my jobs have had awful aspects. Like moving every mattress out of and then back into a dorm room that lacked elevators (my boss didn’t mind if we smoked weed all day though). Or working in a summer camp kitchen that was hosting cheerleaders–I refilled a lot of ranch dressing containers, most of which was promptly vomited by the girls in the loooonnnnggg lines that snaked out of the bathroom after every meal.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@Dollared:
“Believe it or not…I’m walking on air…”
btw, DVD is now available from amazon
http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-American-Hero-Complete-Notebook/dp/B000GRUR4G
Uloborus
@R. Porrofatto:
Thank you. That was exactly my question. This is a ‘numbers pulled out of his ass’ assertion, then?
I remember all too vividly my terrible years barely surviving as I worked at Papa Johns. It was during a period where the chain was being badly managed, and was starting to grind down the strategies that had made it successful in the first place with… a series of apparently random decisions. It could not have been more obvious that the top brass was trying to justify their existence and their multi million dollar office renovations (ah, how I remember that scandal). Every month or two the entire priority system of the company would reverse, and it made life Hell for lower management and seriously impeded delivering a good product and making money doing it. (I worked a long time behind the counter and a little time in lower management, but I digress.)
And then Schnatter and his VPs came to visit the store as they did regularly. He talked down to us in a vaguely friendly and uninterested way, and then they went back to what they were doing – having a social outing amongst themselves. Except for them, that was work.
Cerberus
Hmm, worst job, well, the traditional is the obvious. Janitor. Cleaning up shit by hand, constantly assaulted by smells that would end up covering the work clothes, and having to work in the middle of the night so that the normals would have a pristine shitter to defile and then getting reamed out by the bosses because someone made it a hellhole before you could get back in to fix it up while a high-mucky muck thing was going on in the vicinity.
But I’d say it pales in comparison to working for 2 weeks for a very shady non-profit who had us going door-to-door begging for money for 8 hours a day. Soul crushing work and sole-destroying and made me seriously question the value of activism (I got better).
Now, this job was sold to me as a job where I would be earning a certain amount of money for it. Apparently though, they were playing fast and loose with the employment laws and claimed that my work so far had been in a magical no-payment period and therefore I wasted two weeks of my life that I could have spent earning real money for Zero dollars.
Yeah, I got played into “volunteering” two weeks of my life for a supposed “job”. You don’t know how bad a bad job can feel into you also end up earning no money from it. I ended up weeping in the parking lot.
mellowjohn
worst job? a summer detasseling corn in dekalb, illinois.
btw, the duke-butler game was the first final game match-up between two private schools in a long, long time.
Wile E. Quixote
@Cacti:
In terms of long hours, low pay and being treated like shit by idiots I’d have to say “being in the Army”. But at least we got to run around on tanks and blow shit up. I’m lucky, I had a lot of manual labor jobs in college, landscaping, painting houses, moving, working in a dormitory kitchen but I’ve never had the unsafe, soul-deadening shit jobs that so many Americans have. Sure, I “worked” a couple of 13 hour days last week, but I was sitting in a chair programming and the worst thing I have to worry about is eye-strain and the fact that sitting down for long periods of time really makes me stiff. Compared to the stuff I did when I was younger, and to the jobs that a lot of Americans have I have it easy.
Phoebe
Taibbi is shooting the biggest clownfish in the barrel here, but he does it so well.
What’s new to me is this Gail Collins person. That was perfection, and she is now my idol. You all seem to know who she is. Should she not be my idol?
Worst job: It wasn’t backbreaking or anything. Just having to look busy during slow periods at Patagonia Sporting Goods, while soft rock was bleating around me. I was horrible at looking busy and constantly chewed out about it. Finally I resorted to hiding among the hanging sleeping bags, wishing they would do a better job of muffling “Teacher” by George Michael, and hoping nobody would spot my feet. “Bike messenger”, my next job, was dangerous, and occasionally very painful, but it never made me want to weep with self pity.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cerberus:
OhioPIRG? I gave them a month of my life one summer.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
My Worst job was as a public health inspector in southwestern Ohio and was assigned to exterminate rats and roaches from low income housing project. We would conduct community meetings and map out logistics with the residents on traps and poisons. I assigned the local ankle biters to gather vital intelligence on vermin whereabouts. It was a war dammit.
Sometimes, I would run into cops at the projects and they would giggle about here comes the “Rat Patrol”. They had no clue.
jdog
My worst job was clean-up crew in a seafood store. I’d come home stinking like fish for days.
Funny thing is, though, when I was working the worst jobs I was actually happy. Something about knowing you earned every dime of your paycheck is good for the soul.
QrazyQat
@rootless-e:
And Matt Taibbi made a point of saying how he’d be ashamed to claim what Bobo did.
Cerberus
It’s also worth noting (not that I believe Bobo uses any real numbers for his rich-man ass-licking) that I imagine poor people’s raw hours are artificially depressed because of the part-time trap. Many low-paying jobs like to work you just below the legal minimum of hours to become full-time so they can deny you hundreds of benefits and protections granted to full-time staff.
Many poor people end up having to compensate for this by getting several of these one half-hour under full-time jobs just to cover rent and basic survival.
Also, the minimum wage is way under the actual living wage. Working 40 hours a week on minimum wage will barely cover rent and maybe if you’re lucky transportation expenses. Want to eat? Better find additional employment.
I really would love to make every one of these fuckers survive for two months on and only on the money they make working a minimum wage job and that includes only going home to whatever you can afford on that salary in terms of rent. I doubt they’d survive a week and you’d probably see the minimum wage suddenly rocket up like no one else’s business.
Jager
While working at the restaurant, i showed up after class one afternoon at 3 and the owner pulled me aside and told me he had a little problem. The restaurant had a catering business and he needed me to handle a little catering gig that evening. Dinner for 80 people at a small service club.
Here is what he had me do: Load 25 banquet tables and 100 chairs, linen, dishes, silverware, glass ware, bar service and liqour into the catering truck drive it over to the club, I hauled it up to the 2nd floor and set it all up. Back to the restaurant loaded up all the food, chafing dishes, coffee maker and all the rest of the shit you need to feed 80 peole and took it to the club. He sent two tired old waitresses and a drug addicted asst cook with me. We proceeded to feed the guests, liqoured them up and then broke the whole thing down and hauled it all back to restaurant at 11pm. The cook and the waitresses were dismissed and I cleaned everything up, put it all away and I dragged my ass back to apartment at 2 am to study for a poly-sci exam. The owner never said thanks or good job. After my experience in the wonderful world of restaurants, I tip a minimum of 20% and that’s for half-assed service!
SRW1
@Cacti:
So, what was everyone’s worst job?
My dad had his own, most of the time one-man company installing heating systems in buildings. The worst job in that business was to isolate the hot water lines, especially under the roof and in the basement, against the loss of heat by padding them or wrapping them with layers of glass wool. For some years while I was going to high school my dad made me do that job during the summer vacations or on week ends. At the end of a day’s work you were a goddamn walking itch. And of course, didn’t get paid for it.
The Checkered Demon
@Cacti:
Polisher in a chrome shop in central Florida, walk outside to eat lunch at noon in the middle of the Summer and it felt like walking into air conditioning.. Ten thousand gallon tanks of various cyanide solutions heated to near boiling, twenty five horsepower polishing machines turning 3600 rpm that would snatch a part out of your hands and give it three quick laps around the polishing room before you could so much as blink. If you had a finger stuck through hole in the part when it was snatched the finger went with the part. Air full of grit, metal particles and polishing compound.
Cerberus
@Omnes Omnibus:
It was a CALPIRG offshoot devoted to the Environment, but I’m
horrifiedexcited to see the business model has found it’s way throughout the national branches.The worst aspect of it, really was that the (stated) reason (internally) that we were raising the money was to essentially bribe enough state senators to sit still long enough to listen to us. I pretty much got knocked out of activism for a year recovering from that soul drain. Very much a “why am I doing this” and “oh, I’m not even getting paid anymore” sort of deal.
Brien Jackson
Worst job ever was working for PIRG. I can barely imagine anything that would leave me as infuriated as that did. Went straight from that to volunteering for the SEIU.
jl
My worst job:
I worked for a couple of weeks for a waste processing company that picked up dead farm animals, and then disposed of them, or delivered them to a business that ground them up to do something or other with. I forget what. You had a dead milk cow, flock of sheep, shed of turkeys or chickens, or something, that keeled over, you called this company.
I did this in the middle of the summer in the Central Valley in CA. I decided to quit after a job picking up some sheep that ate something and died, and no one found them until a few days later.
I do not remember what possessed me to take that job. Needed to make a pile of money that summer for college, probably, and that one came up.
Paid pretty good. It was hard work and sometimes disgusting.
Scott de B.
@Brien Jackson:
You are quite correct that there is no way to remove the Pope. And yet the list of deposed Popes runs into the dozens.
Moral: There is no rule so absolute that a way can’t be found around it.
P.S. Just like there is “no divorce” in the Catholic church.
Brien Jackson
@Omnes Omnibus:
4 months here.
Brien Jackson
@Scott de B.:
Yeah, but how many of those dozens is in the modern media age?
Cacti
@gbear:
Thankfully, it was a rite of passage job for me too.
I had middle aged co-workers for whom that wasn’t the case though. I don’t know how they managed to get out of bed and face the music every morning.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cerberus: Mid-90s, working on raising money for lobbying for the Clean Water Act. In addition to the business model you mentioned we would have group meetings before going out where a question of the day would be asked and everyone would have to share something about themselves. I simply made sure that everyone of my answers involved sheep. After this gig fell through, I work for Stanely Steemer as an assistant carpet cleaner. It sucked, but I got to meet one of the Tuskegee Airmen which was cool.
The worst thing about that summer is that I chose the “activism” position instead of a real law clerk position for my summer job after my first year of law school.
Cat Lady
I’m totally going to take that phrase out for a few spins around the block in the next couple of weeks. Thanks Matt!
Worst job: cleaning houses. One in particular. People are disgusting.
ExtremismInTheDefenseOfLiberty
My worst job?
Cleaning veterinary offices at night.
Also, years later, cleaning public restrooms.
Just mainly because of the gross conditions one encounters in these situations.
I’ve had really abusive employers and bosses, a drunk who carried a gun, another alcoholic who would unleash torrents of verbal abuse, a couple of other psychos.
Driving a cab under dispatchers who deliberately sent me into dangerous or dead end situations so that their buddies got the good fares was pretty frustrating.
Running a Winnebago-sized donut fryer in a commercial bakery where we made 20k dozen donuts a day was just hard, hot, dirty damn work, but I didn’t hate it, I got to be good at it and made it work for me.
I did a lot of weird and sometimes dirty jobs over the years, when I was younger, and I don’t regret any of it.
Gary J Moss
wow Bobo is approaching Larry Kudlow status. disgusting
Cat Lady
@Phoebe:
Gail Collins is alright. Every time she writes about Mitt Romney, she mentions his dog on the roof of the car. Every. Single. Time.
Cerberus
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, part of the bite was that I turned down a separate job which was shit to be fair, because being paid for activism work was “important work” that “would make a difference” and a “dream job”.
The janitor job was unpleasant, but I was generally pretty happy, because my expectations were pretty low and it exceeded those low expectations. The raw gulf between mental preparation and actual work has never been stronger than that “job” and that includes a stint torturing fruit flies (literally, we were breeding on accommodation to harsh environments by intentionally trying to cause them pain and killing them).
khead
Worst job?
Probably evening shift in a pilot plant doing production. I was fresh out of college, green as hell and I was supposed to be in charge.
Not as bad as some listed here to be sure, but the hours sucked and I consider it a minor miracle that I – or someone I was supposed to be reponsible for – didn’t blow up half of Columbia MD at the time.
Wile E. Quixote
I read the original article again and have to wonder: Am I a bad person because the thought of listening to David Brooks squeal, scream and plead while I tie him to a chair and beat him bloody with a two pound framing hammer makes me really happy? I know that a lot of people would read a statement like that and say “Gee Wile, that’s kind of sick, wrong and sadistic” but it’s not as if I have fantasies about kidnapping random strangers off the street, tying them to a chair and then getting out the framing hammer. I mean that would be sick, wrong and sadistic and I think that people who do things like that should be locked up. No, I just want to do it to David Brooks, well David Brooks, and David Broder, Ross “Pubic Chin” Douthat, McPeter McSuderman, everyone who works at Reason with the exception of Radley Balko, Thomas Friedman, Dana Milbank, Erick Erickson, everyone at CNN involved in hiring Erick Erickson, Mara Liaason, Juan Williams, George Will, Anne Applebaum, McMegan McArdle and Fred Hiatt.
Am I sick and fucked up? I mean I don’t think so. Again, I don’t go walking down the street thinking “boy, I’d like to tie that person to a chair and listen to them scream while beating them bloody with a framing hammer”, I’m actually a fairly polite person and try hard to be kind, patient and understanding with others because so many people have been kind, patient and understanding to me. But as soon as I read anything written by one of the people listed above I start thinking about framing hammers and beatings.
Linkmeister
I was a part-time janitor at my own high school for 2/3 of a school year. Surprisingly, I didn’t take any guff from my fellow students about it (or if I did, I’ve blocked it). I pushed cleaning compound around the gym and the hallways, then mopped, waxed and buffed the floors. Not a bad job at all, really. $1.65/hr in 1968.
Paris
My local Subway had a 2 for 1 special today. When I got there, and waited in a very long line for half an hour, the two kids working looked absolutely whipped and yet were still polite and pleasant. I wondered how they did it and thought ‘fuck those assholes in marketing who dreamed up this promotion’.
jl
@Wile E. Quixote:
You just need a long rest out in the countryside, away from outrageous and infuriating opinioneers who make gobs of money by serving up dangerous disinformation.
At least I hope that is all you need.
Uh… where in the country do you live, anyway, and you don’t you ever come out to the Pacific Coast do you?
I hope not, it is a very ugly nasty place, and you need beautiful peaceful surroundings for awhile.
carlos the dwarf
@Brien Jackson:
Yeah, I did that for a summer. I was street canvassing in New York City. The worst part of it for me wasn’t the business model, it’s the number of times I got groped and fondled by men more than twice my age.
Cat Lady
@Wile E. Quixote:
If you include David Gregory and Sally Quinn, I’ll bring the rope.
rusty59
The 50 -60 hours per week that I regularly work in my current well paying white collar office job with good benefits is a cake walk compared to the 40 hour per week (if I was lucky) jobs I had in the food service and retail industries years ago.
No matter how many hours I work or how stressful my job can sometimes be I never forget that I could be doing ‘real’ work for low pay and crappy or non-existent benefits.
Tom Q
My worst job was, I’m grateful, only the two summers I spent during college as a mover. It was heavy, exhausting work, you never knew when you were going to get home at night, and the regular employees razzed the hell out of us summer hires because they correctly believed we’d go onto to cushier jobs.
My adult life has been spent in offices, which is not what I want, and I dream every day of escaping it to be a full-time writer. But I’m also grateful every day for the comparative ease and respectable pay the job provides.
When I was younger, a standard line about a decent job was, Inside work, no heavy lifting — meaning it was preferable to what an awful lot of people endured. Bob Dole, for Christ’s sake, used to use the expression. Brooks (and I’ve heard others as well) is trying to not only deny the meaning of that phrase, but subvert it…claiming that hedge fund managers are actually more to be pitied for their long hours than, say, ditch-diggers. What a disgrace.
Brien Jackson
@carlos the dwarf:
I managed the Manhattan office. The canvassing was the fun part.
Bauhausler
8 years ago my ‘performance’ bonus as a Business Analyst was more than I’ll make this year as a janitor. Elementary schools. Imagine all of the barf, pee, germs, trash, food, litter and a dozen other filths that 400 kids can generate in 8 hours. Now imagine you and another guy have 8 hours at night to make it all clean for tomorrow. Over and over.
Wile E. Quixote
@Cat Lady:
Sounds good to me. Let’s shave all of David Gregory’s hair off while we’re at it and taunt him by saying it doesn’t matter how tall he is because Anderson Cooper is prettier than he’ll ever be.
Oh, and jl, I live just outside of Seattle in the very peaceful and beautiful Shorewood neighborhood with a lovely view of Puget Sound and Mount Rainier.
sven
@Cerberus:
I think you are on the right track.
When I did labor econ we read several papers which concluded that higher wages were correlated with working more hours. Brooks has translated this work to mean rich=hard working / poor = lazy. One of my econometrics professors used to start every class by making us chant “correlation does not equal causation” several times; he would have strangled David Brooks. Even the papers which found this correlation intentionally cautioned against DB’s conclusion for a number of straightforward reasons.
High-income/part-time work is scarce. (For reasons I definitely don’t understand.) If part-time=low hourly wage then any regression on wage/hour data is going to show correlation. Labor economists have tried hard to look at the question without part-time workers but it is a nasty problem to solve. If you simply eliminate workers who do X you are intentionally eliminating the variation which might confirm/refute DB’s hypothesis.
Higher wage earners are more likely to be salaried while lower wage earners are more likely to be paid hourly. Employers have an incentive to send hourly workers home when work is light while asking salaried workers to stay if there is anything at all for them to do. Large employers have also become ruthless as regards over-time pay or providing benefits. Walmart often limits employees to only 32 hours per week and has drawn national attention for requiring employees to work off the clock. Often it is the employer who determines hours worked, not the employee.
Employers rarely track salaried workers’ hours so much of the data is self-reported (ruh-roh) and therefore might be exaggerated. Lower-wage hourly employees report working hours as defined by their employer which tends to be (achem) more restrictive.
David Brooks probably heard about a paper which showed the rich worked harder, asked his assistant to get him a copy, skimmed the abstract while enjoying three fingers of single-malt, stroked his chin knowingly and said “I always knew the rich had it tough in this country…”
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Toughest job I’ve ever had? Every single one of them. Every industry I have worked in has been hazardous.
Electroplating? Cyanide plating bath, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids, chromic acid, copper & nickel acid plating baths, nitric acid, sodium hydroxide stripping/cleaning baths, heavy parts & machinery that remove body parts really fast, massive DC rectifiers that will fry your ass if you aren’t paying attention and much more to enjoy.
Boat building? Inhaling (and wearing) minute fiberglass particles, resin/catalyst fumes and fires (one guy left on a stretcher with his face burnt off and skin that looked like pork rinds), adhesives that gas out and fill low-lying areas with toxic fumes (like the boat hull you are working in that one of our guys died in while rigging a motor), cleaning solvents that ignite from static electricity, electrical harnesses that get nailed by the canvas department which ends up electrifying the whole ground system, heavy components that you have to lug up and into the boats while navigating on slippery fiberglass particles, various power tools ready to maim and injure you with things like bandsaw/finger accidents, a “haircut by Milwaukee” where the gear-reduction drill catches your hair while you are drilling in a confined space and rips it all out plus many other fun things like that.
I could go on and on about other jobs I have had in the past but after seeing what has happened to others I used to work with I do consider myself to be very lucky in that I have all of my digits, both eyes, my limbs and that I am still alive.
I would love to see some rich guy try to stay alive, uninjured and make a living at the stuff I have done in the past. There is no fucking way that they would tolerate it for any length of time, not at the pay that is offered. I would say that it ain’t worth it but there is this issue about putting a roof over your head and feeding yourself that people in the real world have to deal with.
BoBo can go fuck himself.
FDRLincoln
Worst Job: working at a taco restaurant in the summers of ’88, ’89, and ’90 so I had some money to live on during college.
It was hot and sticky, there were rude customers, and I hate Mexican food.
CatStaff
As far as I’m concerned, Mark Twain said it best:
There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and
complacently about “the working classes,” and satisfy themselves
that a day’s hard intellectual work is very much harder than
a day’s hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much
bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they
know all about the one, but haven’t tried the other. But I know
all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn’t money
enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days,
but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as
near nothing as you can cipher it down–and I will be satisfied, too.
Annamal
Worst job was actually pretty mild 7 hours of blueberry picking a day followed by 3-4 on a conveyer picking out imperfect berries.
It made cleaning buildings seem a lot milder, but honestly f*ck bobo, any of jobs would have been rendered soul and body crushing if they were the rest of my life.
eightnine2718281828mu5
Question regarding Brooks numbers– is he counting commute times?
Most upper management types work within reasonable commuting distance of their job since they can afford expensive housing; the rest of the labor force can spend 2-3 hours a day just getting to and from work.
Assigning a value of ‘0’ to these hours would seem inappropriate.
r€nato
If there were any sense of justice over at The New York Times, Brooks would have been demoted to janitor and Barbara Ehrenreich would be hired as the new columnist.
carlos the dwarf
@Brien Jackson:
When was that?
frosty
@Cacti:
The summer loading the folding machine in a bookbindery wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The set-up guys bought me beer for lunch even though I was underage.
Worst would be the busboy job. Head waitresses could give lessons to Satan. And watching the waitresses divvy up the tips and give 10% to the busboys and keep the other 90% really sucked.
jake the snake
@Brick Oven Bill:
Maybe if you paid more attention in those classes America’s fine working women would not feel compelled to run over you with a lift-truck.
r€nato
Having worked in close proximity with upper management assholes, I can say with full confidence that 90% of them got their cushy jobs with great benefits because they were the most unscrupulous, amoral Machiavellian assholes around and elbowed their way into that position precisely because they wanted to get paid the big bucks and be as far from actual hard work as possible. Actual competence at their jobs was typically a byproduct of luck, leaning on the accomplishments and talents of underlings (while simultaneously making sure to grind them down and knock their self-esteem back a peg or three, just so they didn’t get the uppity idea that they might be at least as qualified as the boss) and taking/stealing credit for others’ hard work.
The bleatings of various Republicans and other right-wing free enterprise types who allegedly support our ‘meritocractic’ society, are merely defensive posturing to cover this truth. When you see, for instance, those supperating flesh wounds in suits at financial firms who complain about Big Bad Socialist Gummint taking away their incentive to keep the US economy going… it’s called ‘chaff’ by military pilots. Throw up a bunch of bullshit so nobody sees what’s really going on.
(it’s no coincidence that beneficiaries of American neo-aristocratic entitlement like Jonah Goldberg are often the foremost purveyors of the idea that hard work always equals success in our society)
If I were dictator, one of the first things I’d do would be to mandate that every place of employment would have to hang a large, prominent sign reading Arbeit Macht Frei at the employee’s entrance.
And this reminds me of that shameful episode where George W. Fuckup thought it was both amusing and a testament to American spirit, that one of the people attending his pre-screened pep rallies had to work three jobs. In any other civilized nation, that would have been the end of that politician’s career right then and there.
JB
for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people
But there have always been rich people. What that says to me about the current crop of rich people (or at least the choir to which he’s singing) is that rich people are dumber than they’ve ever been before.
r€nato
MS. MORNIN: That’s good, because I work three jobs and I feel like I contribute.
THE PRESIDENT: You work three jobs?
MS. MORNIN: Three jobs, yes.
THE PRESIDENT: Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that. (Applause.) Get any sleep? (Laughter.)
Ha ha ha, you fucking asshole. Now STFU, break time is over. That elephant diarrhea isn’t going to shovel itself, you know.
(in my dreams)
mai naem
@Wile E. Quixote: I feel the same way although my preferred tool is a baseball bat. Lots of times. I would never actually do anything like that. I also wish we could challenge some of these pricks to actually walk in somebody else’s feet for a week – work in construction or as a janitor or some kind of caregiver with difficult clients. I guarantee you Bobo, Gregory, Friedman and Lou Dobbs would not last 3 days in any of those jobs.
Porlock Junior
@Alex:
Well, as Andrew Marvell said,
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
OTOH, as Pooh-Bah said,
A man might try!
Go for it, Mr. Brooks sir. And once you’re there, why not just stay and really challenge that uppity Cavalier with some major long-term embracing?
frosty
@Phoebe:
…looking busy…
I forgot my real worst job, which was a professional one at a state agency. I had about 2 days of work to do each week and my boss sat across the bullpen from me so I couldn’t just read the paper. This was in the days before computers and the internet, and let me tell you, faking it and looking busy for 8 hours is an enormous strain. I punched numbers in a calculator and wrote the answers down … baseball statistics. My co-worker read and took notes … office phone book.
Church Lady
I’m trying to figure out exactly when it was that Taibbi was doing construction work. Was it while he was a student at Concord Academy (current day student tuition: almost 36K per year)? Perhaps it was while he was earning his degree at Bard College (current tuition, room and board: right at 55K per year)? For someone that was raised with all the benefits that wealth can bring, Taibbi certainly seems to hate people just like himself.
r€nato
@Church Lady:
Maybe he’s seen first-hand what assholes they are. I’m glad he’s on our side, rather than being another sociopathic asshole like David Brooks who spends his life condescendingly explaining to others how God Himself has ordained the social order, therefore it is just and perfect in every way.
Osceola
Mercury handler in a chemical plant.
Lurker
@Jager:
I started tipping 20% minimum after friends told me about their waiter and waitressing experiences. They all tip 20% minimum, too.
Church Lady
Worst job? Working my way through my second year of college waiting tables at a college bar. I think I made around $2 an hour, plus tips and college kids don’t tip worth a shit.
Kerry Reid
@Taylor:
Oh god, that movie is deliciously awful in my view. Neal (whom I adore — just screened “A Face in the Crowd” for a class last week) and Cooper were having a hot affair during the filming, but none of the passion translated to screen. Wooden dialogue, wooden acting.
Though I do love the moment when, eyes flashing, she looks at him and says “YOU! I wish I’d never SEEN your…building.”
Truly, the best proof that Ayn Rand was a disgusting whore who lacked the courage of her much-vaunted convictions is that she let this POS get released, instead of pulling a Howard Roark and bombing Warner Bros.
tisalaska
Brilliant writing..just friggin brilliant…down as one of my favorite posts on this site.
bago
Uhm, when I was under 18 I did a weeklong stint in a circuit board factory. But then after I turned 18 I started at microsoft. But for the purposes of street cred I was raised in a trailer park. I believe the word is atypical.
bago
@DougL: he’ll yeah. Being able to tell the difference between sulphuric acid and hydrochloric acid by touch alone rules!
Angrey Rich Person
David Brooks is correct. The working class is a bunch of lazy slobs, who have no motivation to better themselves. This includes the middle class too, pretty much. They got a forty hour work week, benefits, etc., what the hell do they want? The lives of desperation they lead are their own fault. The rich are rich because they have had the nerve, the willpower, and the willingness to do the simple hard work that it takes to succeed in America, and make the sacrifices, too, like maybe go out and buy a share of stock instead of a six pack of beer every night. This is what the building of America was, and is, all about.
Now the rich of the past, they had it easy. Don’t you realize how difficult it is to get rich in America today, without things like slavery, and genocide of the Indians, and eight year old children in factories working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and not being able to indiscriminately rape the land, and the waterways, and any number of other things that are just simply verboten now?
So let’s stop criticizing the rich. They rich have gotten what they deserve, and the working class has gotten what it deserves. And if they don’t shut up, maybe we’ll start repealing some of these entitlements they’ve gotten throughout the years that the rich are forced to pay for, and they can get a little taste of what it was like to be a working person in America when working people were real working people, and treated like the animals they are.
Kerry Reid
My worst job was doing telemarketing for Time/Life publications during one summer off from college. But if I bitched about it, my mom reminded me that she used to de-tassel corn, so I would STFU.
Wile E. Quixote
@Church Lady:
Oh joy, Church Lady is back. I guess that her husband isn’t slapping her around enough for being stupid so she has to come to BJ and post stupid nonsense so that we’ll slap her around too. I find it interesting that morons like Church Lady and clueless-e lose sphincter control obsessing about Taibbi’s background or when he was doing construction while finding no fault with the nonsense that Bobo, a man who has never held anything even remotely resembling a real job in his life, writes.
Of course it wouldn’t matter if Taibbi’s parents had been poor, working class folks living in a tar paper shack and working in a coal mine. Church Lady and clueless-e would then condemn him for not properly respecting his betters when he wrote mean things about Bobo and Friedman.
MNPundit
You know, there’s absolutely nothing enobling or somehow more respectable about working a menial job or exhausting physical labor. In fact, it’s an American failing that work is construed to determine anything but monetary compensation in society.
The character of a person is not reflected by the money they make, though it may be reflected by their actions during their job.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Church Lady:
Talk about missing the point, that one took effort.
You did actually understand that Taibbi’s entire point was how grateful he was that he didn’t have to do labor like that for the rest of his life, and that what he and almost every other fairly highly educated person did for a living being equated with “hard work” like that by Bobo Brooks was arrogant and insipid nonsense?
Nathan R
This Brooks article seriously pisses me off. In practically the same breath, he simultaneously heaps praise upon the rich for “working harder” (in his mind, this equals working more hours in a week) and for spending more time with their children. Both of these things can’t possibly be true at the same time, unless the poor in this country spend a disproportionate amount of time on leisure activities without children, which given their dearth of disposable income seems extremely unlikely.
Hugely
hardest job (not worst per se):
landscaping – didnt mind the labor – I fucking hated the wasps I got stung twice on my hands within 10 mins and got real fucking spooked out.
had all the food service jobs as well
anyway FYDB you canadian prick. Mind u all the canadians I have ever met are awesome – brooks is just carrying water for people who dont need the help…
pjs1965
My rite of passage was detasseling corn for minimum wage. Going through cornfields and plucking the tassels off designated rows of corn. Sometimes walking the fields, other times riding in a bucket on a machine, which was worse than walking because you could not pace yourself and still had to pick every fucking tassel. The tassels themselves were often filled with aphids which made the tassels slimy and hard to grip. Mornings would be cold and wet and wearing a garbage bag was a good way to stay dry. Afternoons were hot and steamy.
It was amusing to see newbie girls wearing shorts and t-shirts. BAD idea! If they survived to the end of the day their legs and arms would be all cut up from the corn leaves. Better to wear a long-sleeved heavy shirt and old jeans no matter how hot it was. Every day there were fewer and fewer people on the crew. Many quit because they weren’t allowed to smoke on the job. It was a mixture of high school kids and losers.
Funny thing is, looking back at it, as much as it sucked, I rather enjoyed it.
asiangrrlMN
Damn. I hate Brooks even more now. I didn’t think it was possible. I echo the sentiments that I would love to have Congress people (and now NYT columnists, I guess), live for a month as a ‘real American’–meaning manual labor, ten hours a day, no bennies, a mortgage, no car, no health insurance, etc. Let’s see how they would fare. If I was making eleven-billionty dollars a year, I would actually work eighty hours a week (and not just bill it that way).
urbanmeemaw
I’d like to see Bo-Bo’s blather juxtaposed with a picture of the famlies who lost loved ones in the West Virginia mining disaster. For a country that spouts “work hard and pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, there are so many like Brooks who hate working Americans who actually produce something other than Wingnut Welfare food.
tofubo
thank you for the two links, they made my morning
when does taibbi take over teh editorial page on kaplan test prep daily or gets the ability to hire and fire @ the NYT
perchance to dream
tofubo
@urbanmeemaw:
siphoning off money that could go to better wages and conditions for the workers to buy off judges that will hopefully rule in your favor in future cases IS hard work, jeesh
Baseballgirl
That was genius…BoBo rises to new levels of “tooldom.”
Brian J
@sven:
That was very cool to read.
One of the reasons I like academics (at least the ones who aren’t douchebags) is that they know how to cut through the bullshit. The fact that your professor started the class with making you chant that is…I don’t know, very nice.
Mnemosyne
@MNPundit:
It’s not about what’s ennobling — it’s about Brooks claiming that his job is so much harder than a coal miner’s. It’s the way rich people who suspect they got their money through luck and connections try to soothe their consciences — “Sure, I make more money in a year than that guy who died in a mine explosion saw in his whole life, but I deserve it more than he did!”
It’s too scary to admit that they could have been born not-rich or without the great connections that found them their cushy and lucrative jobs, so they prefer to believe that it was hard work for them to inherit their grandfather’s fortune or get into Harvard as a legacy.
Jay
What’s really offensive about Brooks here is that he is making the blanket statement that ANY school in the Midwest is automatically a “blue collar” school. The Butler/Duke game was the “haves” vs “the have mores.”
Butler is a very selective private school that costs more than $40,000 a year. That’s not blue collar people.
4jkb4ia
And Brooks is well advised to read his own newspaper, namely William C. Rhoden on Friday on Duke faculty worrying about whether basketball is now a university value to the detriment of other things.
It is clear that today all right-thinking people must cheer for Lee Westwood.
tc125231
@gbear:
OhNo
@Loneoak -10
Where I come from Bobo is a piece of Caca that’s become stuck to the bottom of one’s shoe.
johng
I’m sure it doesn’t occur to David Brooks that Butler’s team didn’t finish up their farm chores early so they could practice on a barrel hoop nailed to the side of the outhouse, just as Duke’s players don’t have to stop play to take calls from daddy’s accountant.
All college basketball players are drawn from the same pool, and the players, themselves, don’t actually come from the surrounding communities, in most cases.
This goes without saying, however, and it’s probably just beyond Bobo’s higher understanding. Brooks is so busy understanding how hard the rich have it, poor guy has to rely on really stupid stereotypes that are so surreal, they’re almost not even stereotypes, anymore.
It costs alot of money to go to Duke, just as it costs alot of money to go to Butler. Perhaps if College of DuPage, or MalcomX College somehow found the money to field a basketball program, and the lower middle class who take 2 years of classes to live at home and save money somehow found the time to practice and play games, Bobo could nurse a solid 3 inch woody watching Duke smash their feeble hopes and dreams.
Alot of us hope to someday have the fucking time to give a shit about college basketball, and its societal ramifications. Thank god someone’s there to do it for us.
sparky
@Porlock Junior: nicely done, thanks.
the NYT has never been about afflicting the comfortable, and so, in these parlous times, where there is talk in the land about the evils of Manahatta, it is well that skilled sycophants mount the Park Avenue medians in defense.
southpaw
@Ash Wing League: If he gets Douthat, will they have to give him a column at the Times on general principle?
Church Lady
@Wile E. Quixote: Joking/Snarking about domestic violence is not cool. Ever. You are a complete and utter moron/asshole.
Germane Jackson
This whole post could have been summarized by Brooks rooting for Dook. Of course he does, he’s an asshole. Fuck Dook and fuck Brooks.
Beej
Apparently, Bobo has never considered the idea that, with the country and many businesses hurting financially, they have cut the hours, and hence the pay, of many hourly workers. Then, of course, there are all those people who are unemployed. This man really is an idiot.
Dave in NYC
If someone offered me $300,000 a year to work 80/hrs a week or $150,000 a year to work 40/hrs a week it wouldn’t even be a contest.
I don’t think there are too many $150,000 a year, 40-hr a week jobs…and if they are, they require a lot of intense weeks at lower pay in order to get to there.
There’s a small kernel of truth in what Brooks says — most of the rich people I’ve worked for generally deserved what they had. They were good, honest people who worked their asses off and made large sacrifices for their careers. But none of them would be stupid enough to claim that the rich, as a class, were more industrious than the poor.
Wile E. Quixote
@Church Lady:
Church Lady, you’re an ignorant, dishonest, contemptible piece of dumb, white trash. Most of the people who post here have taken shits that were morally and intellectually superior to you and we flushed them right down the toilet. So why don’t you take your bullshit fake outrage, fold it until it’s all sharp edges and pointy corners and shove it up your ass.
Church Lady
@Wile E. Quixote: The anger and contempt you display towards those you disagree with (and not just me) is truly disturbing. I can only hope that you are getting the mental health care you so obviously need. HRC will definitely be a good thing if it provides treatment for sick, twisted, violent people like you. You need serious therapy.
Joel
Boy, I was under the impression that Taibbi was arguing from the perspective of a white collar person who acknowledges his position of privilege.
Maybe I need some reading lessons. Or new glasses or something.