Tim Kreider is a Damned Idiot

How completely out of touch do you have to be to assume people are working 60 hours a week by choice!? That's what Tim Kreider of the Times had to say this week and the only explanation is he's so rich and pampered he's forgotten what desperate tastes like. If he ever did to begin with. Nepotism is the name of the game in American writing these days and without even Googling I feel safe to assume he got his job through family connections and sucking up in the right internships.

Matt Bors has a much better analysis of this piece of crap by piece of crap Kreider, but I need to sound off because this is something that just pisses me off. If you've ever been overworked, you know the only goddamn help offered in this country is shallow platitudes about how you need to "downshift" and take stock of what "really matters." Rent and groceries really fucking matter, and they're getting more expensive everyday. If you're like 99% of the country, work isn't something you do for fun. You do it for the goddamn paycheck!

But not Kreider, because he's either always been too well-off to worry about it or he's too stupid to make the connection. That latter does sound awfully likely - "Well sure, I worked a lot because I needed the money but all these other folks are just workaholics!"

You'd think someone so fucking stupid shouldn't get paid to be stupid publicly but you're not the New York Times.

But that word - workaholic - that's the most insidious case of victim blaming. In this country, if you're spending all damn day in the office it's just assumed you have a problem. It's not that you need to be there for any substantial reason, you're just "addicted" to the work. It's a brainwave that makes all the repugnant business practices of post-Reagen America - downsizing, unpaid overtime, slashed benefits - more palatable because hey, if you don't like it why don't you quit?

Tim Kreider is the same sort of Dixie dumbass who would say the slaves are working themselves to death while paying no mind to the whip-swinging overseer. And he gets paid for this bullshit because all you assholes still won't just admit you're getting screwed everyday.