Pool Boy

No, not Vandehei. Better.

"If every American had to pool-boy for these people for a day, you'd have a revolution on your hands," is how he sees things.

The 23-year-old from rural Maine says he cleans several pools in the area, not just the Bushes', for a large pool-cleaning company. He works about 45 hours a week, and calls it the easiest job he ever had. He's paid $9 an hour -- "pennies thrown at my feet," relative to the wealth all around him, he says.

Yeah, but to be fair, most of those folks accumulated their wealth the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it. Why so resentful of the lucky, Chief? Surely they're no different from you 'n' me.

Razsa recalls one day when former first lady Barbara Bush was on her way over, and it looked like there wouldn't be time to bring the pool's temperature up to her desired 82 degrees in time. The family's caretaker was in a panic, he says.

"He kept shouting, 'Barbara will go crazy! Barbara will go crazy!'" Razsa recalls. "This is the same woman who after Hurricane Katrina said (of the Houston Astrodome refugees), 'You know, they're underprivileged anyway, so this -- this is working very well for them.'"

You know, the more you hear about this woman, the more she just sounds like a ray of fuckin' sunshine. Again, more corroborating evidence that she regards people of lower socioeconomic strata as an entirely different species. You'd think all the royalties she gets from being on the $1 bill would lighten her mood a bit.

But I think Rasza's most trenchant comment is one that has little to do with the Bushes directly.

That way of life is a common thread in my conversations with Razsa. It's something that's perhaps less abstract for him than for the pool owner.

"My brother was on hard times, pumping gas for Exxon from midnight till 8 a.m. to support his daughter," he mentions at one point. "Exxon is one of the richest companies in the world and he was making $7 an hour. My brother had to go on welfare to support his daughter, even though he was working 40-50 hours a week. Instead of making Exxon pay a living wage, they make the lower and middle classes pay for him."

I think there are certain groups or clubs of people who become so insulated from the people they're supposed to serve that they do pretty much regard those other lives as something in the abstract. They repeat the tropes of "poor people just aren't working hard enough", while they themselves get incredible opportunities and fuck them all into a knothole until they're forty years old, and still manage to get away with it. It's why people develop value system revolving around the principle of karma, even though it's demonstrably untrue. Some people can fail upward through life because they just don't give a damn.