Column:
Charles Austin: too hot for The Maneater
Published March 18, 2008
Apparently the column I wrote this week was a tad bit insensitive toward the female gender (apparently some people these days don’t think sexism is funny — I blame the feminists). Anyhow, this has put me in quite the pickle, as I have almost no time to write a column that lives up to the integrity and hard hitting reporting style of this illustrious paper. I have so little time, in fact, that I am hard pressed to even come up with a joke about Eliot Spitzer, which is something a 5-year-old could do at this point. So instead I am going to expose the shocking truths about this paper to the entire campus, or at least the 45 percent of students (that is a ballpark figure) who are literate.
Firstly, it has come to my attention that a picture is worth a thousand words. As a columnist, I am only allotted 600 words a week, which means that what I do is hardly worth more than half of a picture. To make matters worse, the powers that be have decided to publicly humiliate all of us hard-working columnists by placing a picture right in the middle of our writings each week.
Every time I read my own column (and I read it very often) I am enraged to see that column cartoonist Dan Magee is allowed a thousand words worth of space for every 600 I get. For each mindless column I hastily scribble, I make a fat $10 (if the money keeps rolling in for another semester or two I think I may be ready to retire). This leads me to assume that Dan Magee must be making $16.66 for every $10 I make.
This is not only an astonishing wage disparity; it’s also flagrant racism.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I have never met Dan Magee in my life and I know absolutely nothing about him, but I am going to go out on a limb here and hope the fact that his last name is “Magee” means he’s Irish.
One hundred years ago we were telling the Irish not to bother applying for jobs in this great nation, and now in 2008, we’re celebrating their heritage by taking to the streets every March in a Bacchanalian ritual rife with fictional Irish midgets and basketball tournaments.
The Irish have come a very long way this past century, and they have much to be thankful for. So why then, Dan Magee, do you insist on pushing for more?
It’s bad enough that I have to look at the color green on St. Patrick’s Day (Fun fact: in Maneater folklore, green is the color that symbolizes socialism and liberal media bias. This is why the Maneater’s title is written in green). But just to shove it in my face that his people are more successful, attractive and intelligent than mine, Dan Magee absolutely insists on making 167 percent as much money as I do.
I knew the gap between the rich and the poor was widening in this country, but this is just absurd.
So this is where you come in, loyal Maneater readers.
If you want to see fairness and equality in this country, I beg you email Dan Magee and demand that he make his pictures only 60 percent of their current size. This will give the editors no choice but to dock his pay to a much more reasonable $10 a week (his ancestors would have loved to make that much money in 1900!). Or if you would rather read about punching women, then send angry emails to the Forum section.