Jay Elias | You can take it with you

"I have wasted Time, and now doth
Time waste me"
- Richard II

2002-10-14- 6:49 a.m.

Bloody Arms and Oil Fields

Well, we’re back at work. We have a new key production assistant this time, Otto. For those of you who don’t know, being the “key” anything (such as the key grip) means that you are the head of all the rest of that department; in Otto’s case, the production assistants. Part of what that means is that you are in charge of hiring additional people when the day’s work requires it.
We had a bunch of additional production assistants this week, seeing as we did a lot of location shooting. And beyond the usual people who Otto chose to bring in, he’s been saddled with a couple of must-hires from the executive producer. See, being a production assistant is pretty much an entry-level position, although the good ones have usually been around a while. They stick around because after about two and a half years of regular work, they qualify to join the DGA. But sometimes, when some acquaintance of a bigwig has a kid who wants to break in to the business, people like Otto are stuck hiring them.
Otto is a bit of a curiosity. He looks more like a fireman than a production assistant at six-four, two thirty. He’s from small-town Ohio and never went to college. One night this week, we’re having wrap beers and talking about the skills and lack thereof of the new must-hires, and he gets a funny look in his eyes. He starts talking about Gary, one of the other additionals. He speaks slowly, and with real pain. “Gary,” he says, “is one of the hardest-working guys I’ve ever had. He’s got over a year on set.” And here Otto’s eyes get distant. “He’s got a family. Two kids. And he can’t find work. And I can only give him seven days all month.”
Otto works a seventy-hour week for less than six hundred dollars after taxes. I don’t know how much I like this world if it is going to put such a burden of guilt on his shoulders.
Sometimes I wonder about President Bush. I think about all the companies that have gone under since he came into office, all the 401(k) plans laid barren, all the college savings wiped out in the market crash. I wonder if he thinks about that. I wonder if it keeps him up at night, or makes the sumptuous meals prepared by the White House kitchen stick in his throat. When he sits down for a nice chateaubriand, does it plague him to wonder about the families eating condensed soup and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner?
I’m not suggesting that the problems of the economy are his fault. I’m not saying they aren’t either; I’m simply not nearly knowledgeable enough about economics to know. What I do know is that he doesn’t know anything about what it is like to be hungry. He has never had to eat the condensed soup in his life, unless he wanted to. He didn’t have to save and invest to be sure he could pay for his daughter’s education, or worry about where the money would come from, or skip an evening out to scrimp for the mortgage. And I’m afraid of what that means for the rest of us.
The saddest thing about the last presidential election for me was that both parties fielded candidates from some of the oldest and wealthiest families in the nation. Both Bush and Gore went to the best schools, joined the best country clubs, got the best jobs handed to them on silver platters. Neither of them had experienced anything in common with the biggest struggles and concerns of ninety-five percent of the nation. How could a person take their concerns about health coverage seriously, when neither of them had ever wanted for it in their lives? How could a person expect them to understand how to help the public schools, when neither of them had ever been to one or sent their child to one? It stinks of exactly what we were taught in history class wasn’t supposed to happen in America: a landed aristocracy with an iron grip on political power. How can it not feel like taxation without representation when our leaders are almost to a man a million dollars out of our tax bracket?
I like to hope that all that doesn’t mean that President Bush isn’t losing sleep over the impact of the economy on people. I like to think that he gets kept up nights thinking about all the parents worried about how they will make the next tuition payment. I like to think he sometimes loses his appetite, thinking about the laid off employees of WorldCom and US Air, and how for a lot of them, their unemployment benefits are running out and their table will be comprised of even more meager fare. I like to think that as he plans to drop hundreds of bombs that cost American taxpayers over one million dollars each on Baghdad, that he is thinking about the nearly one million employees of Wal-Mart who make twenty-eight thousand dollars a year and end up paying nearly nine thousand of that in taxes. I hope that even if these are things he can’t truly understand, that he has people around him who remind him of them, who talk to him about the conditions that most Americans are living in right now, the worries and the stresses that are eating away at the stomach linings of two hundred and ten million of the people he represents every day. I’m pretty sure that President Bush didn’t know what Ken Lay was up to over at Enron. But I really hope that he understands that all those free flights he took on their company jet while he was campaigning is part of why there are sixty thousand people in this country who have nothing in their 401(k) or their pension plan.
Bill Clinton cheated on his wife with a twenty year-old intern, and that was a terrible thing to do. George W. Bush profited from a scam that cost over fifty thousand people their jobs and their entire savings. He didn’t know he was when he did it, but he knows now. I hope with all my heart that it pains him. Because if it doesn’t, if it doesn’t gnaw away at his conscience to think about all he has gained and all they have lost, I don’t think I could look him in the eye, much less respect him as my president.
But I worry that he hasn’t lost a wink of sleep over it at all. I worry that every time I hear about a factory closing down, or a massive layoff at AOL Time Warner, that the decisions are being made by people who have never seen, much less known, the line workers and repair technicians whose livelihoods are lost. I’m not so naïve that I adhere to the Michael Moore way of thinking; I know that sometimes, companies have to eliminate some jobs to ensure that the rest of their employees still have one. But what scares me is the idea that the people who make these decisions don’t understand what they mean in human consequences. We live in a world today where the divisions of class are larger and larger. People live in gated suburban communities. Children attend private academies starting in pre-school. I think about Marie Antoinette being told the citizens of France had no bread, saying, “Let them eat cake.” I don’t know if it would have made a difference if Ken Lay had worked his way up, and could understand what it meant to one of the thousand plus secretaries to lose not only their job but their savings. I don’t know if that would have given him pause. But I think it might have, and I think it should.
But sometimes, it seems like the only people who are noticing are poor folks like Otto. Otto lives in a basement apartment in north Jersey, and still can barely manage his rent and his gym membership and his car insurance, and has to feel the burden of trying to help out Gary at the same time.

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Doesn't Take Much and That's Messed Up - 2004-03-15
Like Water Under Bridges - 2003-09-08
Jesus On The Dashboard - 2003-08-13
An Administrative Announcement - 2003-08-11
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