Show Business for Ugly People: Whining About the Rewards

People in show business whine--constantly--about the less glamorous realities of their business.

People in the Show Business for Ugly People that is politics likewise whine--constantly--about the less glamorous realities of their business. And as it happens, Politico recently passed on to its readers, without comment, the whines of 25 Senators and Representatives from Capitol Hill.

Just as any reasonable person would expect they did themselves no credit whatsoever as they complained that "It's not like The West Wing!" (Did they really have to be in Congress to understand that?) and "It's not like House of Cards!" (Did they seriously want it to be? Were they even watching the same repugnant spectacle the whole rest of the world was?) in a way that can be insulting to the listener's intelligence.

They seemed to me to be at their worst when they talked about what seemed to them the lack of what they see as adequate remuneration for their so-called "public service." "I get paid only $174,000 a year!" they whined--oblivious to the fact that this is equivalent to twelve times a full year's earnings at minimum wage that they have collectively refused to raise from its level of $7.25 an hour since 2009, almost five times that wage in a Washington D.C. admittedly very expensive to live in (not least because of what Congress allowed to be done to the government), and three times the median wage for a full-time worker in America (even when calculated in the rather generous fashion of assuming fifty-two weeks of the median weekly wages or salary). It also overlooks the fact that they get a good many benefits that make that salary go a longer way, to which the rest of the public has no access--such as, to cite only the most basic and important, cost-of-living reimbursements, and very favorable health and pension plans, widening the gap between their lot and that of the country at large yet again.

Moreover, as a practical matter those in Congress are unlikely to have just their salary and fringe benefits to live on the way others would. As of 2020 a member of Congress on average had assets in the range of $4.5 million (some $5.6 million in today's terms). Of course, extreme inequality prevailing on Capitol Hill as it does everywhere else in America means that the median in that body is closer to $1 million (or $1.25 million now). Still, regardless of which of those metrics we go by they were about five times as wealthy as the rest of the country at large--all as, of course, the survey overlooks the extent to which many of those who are not so affluent may, for example through marriage, be connected with a still wealthier person--with all that means for their household income and wealth as against their personal income and wealth. (Consider, for instance, the cases of those Senators John Kerry and Kamala Harris, and the financial situations of their spouses relative to their own far from unenviable situation.)

Meanwhile, as they and those who pay for their campaigns love to ceaselessly remind the public in their unending display of hostility to young people trying to make their way in the world, an unremunerative, or even costly, position, like finishing an expensive college education or taking an unpaid internship, is often a trial suffered to get to something better. ("Yes, the life of that law student is pretty shabby--but think of what they'll be making when they graduate and get that job with that blue-chip firm!") So does it go with those on Capitol Hill, who so commonly go on to very lucrative careers after political office--not least, sitting on the boards of corporations and taking jobs with lobbying firms grateful for their having so consistently sided with them against the public interest when in office, as they collect other rewards still in the form of speaking fees and paydays for the books ghostwritten for them and put on bestseller lists by mass purchases by their "supporters" and sympathetic or hired claqueurs (or aspire to graduate from the legislature to become Cabinet members, Vice-Presidents, Presidents, and get all the boodle that awaits those who depart from those offices).

One must take that, too, into account when appraising the situation of an overwhelmingly narcissistic group of people who are in this job not to do good but to do well (some might say, do well by doing evil).

The result is that, no, these people are simply not dealing with the same hardships as the rest of the public. Indeed, their personal financial situation, even in the absence of great personal or household wealth, must be considered a very privileged one relative to that public--with the fact of their whining about it bespeaking the fact that it is on the whole a very privileged group indeed that gets itself elected to Congress (as seen, again and again, in the proportion of lawyers, by and large lawyers who have done fairly well for themselves, who hold seats in this body, relative even to other Western democracies). And if politicians' votes, especially on the more material questions facing them, have little to do with what their constituents' think about the matter, it bespeaks, too, how little they know, or care, for them, as against how much they know and care for those who get them into office and whom they hope will lavish them with rewards. The result is that just about any complaint from their quarter about their financial situation is, with possible rare exception, to be treated as a display of--the word is warranted here--the self-pity of which the privileged (which they most certainly are) so love to accuse the exploited, cheated and oppressed whenever they dare to speak up for themselves, and which they (didn't I already say they are narcissistic?) are quick to display; and a pack of elitists sure that even as they get much, much more than the people they supposedly represent because they are so much better than those people (This. Means. You.) they deserve to have that much more still, with their entitlement the more blatant because, in contrast with how they would have, for example, schoolteachers, treated, it is clear they think the idea that pay should be linked to performance ought not to apply to them. By allowing the reader to imagine otherwise Politico, like the Congresspersons it interviewed, did itself no credit--but then when has it ever done so?