Cookie toss

Roy Lichtenstein, Head with Monocle, 1980.

You'll recall Mr Charles Cyril Wimpleton-Cooke, late of Knightsbridge, now helping out at National Review Online, where he helps to furnish the word cheese, with dainty morsels like this:

one really shouldn’t be surprised by the ever-mind-numbing output of Gawker, a website that is run by professional trolls and read primarily by people with eyes that are so close together that they could host a monocle.

Hmm (Thx to @mattyglesias for noticing the strangeness of the expression).  I first heard of him, anyway, on the Twitter machine, in the context of Governor Snyder's campaign to take Michigan back to the 1880s, where he wanted to know if President Obama intended to deny him "the right to work for less money." Naturally I thought he meant to complain about the way union contracts discriminate against the very wealthy, who might be embarrassed by high wages and benefits and prefer a smaller and less visible paycheck.

But no! It turns out that Charles Clarence Wilfrid isn't wealthy at all, unless you count his job, which is surely not unionized, and presumably doesn't pay the way it did when old Lord Buckley was alive (to say nothing of the lunches in those days, which were spectacular). To the contrary, he has no particular wish to be paid less money at the moment; rather, it's a matter of principle:

Trust fund, @yastreblyansky? I wish! My "trust fund" is as full of money as your argument is of merit. This is a matter of principle.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 11, 2012

So that's another story. And I wonder what story it is? Where I come from, the right to be paid less is when you want to take a job away from somebody who has to feed a family and can't afford to work for less; in Magic Market terms, it's selling your labor at loss leader prices to get that foot in the door. To the true conservative market theorist, I guess, the other person there deserves to lose the job: What do they want to be going around having all those children for anyway? To me, the principle has a name, and it's scabbing.

This monocled Barbie is modeled from Otto Dix's famous 1926 portrait of the journalist Sylvia von Harden (see inset); flotsam, found in a Google search (monocle + cubism), from somebody's shipwrecked Tumblr account.

Cookie and the Works

The smear of right-to-work to one side, actually Mr. President I do have the "right to work for less money." Why should I be denied that?
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) December 10, 2012

Sir Charles Constant Wimbley Cooke, Bart., M.A. Oxon., F.R.A.S. (Fellow, Royal Arsehole Society), etc., etc., and a contributing writer at the National Review Online, has always disliked the idea of wages, which make one's work seem somehow so vulgar, and self-interested. If one must take money for doing something one ought to be doing purely out of a sense of moral responsibility, must one also "negotiate" the amount? They don't call your superior at work "superior" for nothing, you know, surely he knows better than you how much your work is worth, and as Scripture tells us the laborer is worthy of his hire.

As to the concept of a trade union, an organization entirely devoted to haggling like fishwives with its superiors over the worth of work, and not the work of real people but of a sort of arbitrarily "typical" employee whose demands are supposed to set a kind of standard for everybody else, he regards it with horror. Why not simply engage a pimp, if that's the way you feel, for heaven's sake?

I like to think Sir Charles once had a sort of "job" at, let's say, an especially chic art gallery back in the dear "old country", along with an old school chum, Beefy Waxe-Weatherford, who happened to fall in love with an American girl, and longed to propose to her.

"You'll do no such thing," said his governor, "or I'll cut you off without a penny."

"Of course I wouldn't need a penny if we joined the Euro," remarked Beefy, "but as things are, I think I shall have to ask for a raise." For his Tiffany was rather a high-maintenance operation, excessively fond of winter sports and summer hill stations.

"Don't do that!" Cooke urged him. "In the first place, you don't in point of fact do any work."

"That's true," said Beefy. "But think of the tone I lend to the place!"

"But think of how slimy you'll feel afterwards!" insisted Cooke.

"I know," said Beefy, "I'll call in a trade union to ask for me. You don't suppose they're very dear, do you?"

From Ebid (UK).

To be continued...?