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The Kitchen is Closed

FTER SEPTEMBER 11TH, I never much liked the trend of everyone and his brother wearing the hats and jackets of the NYPD and FDNY. Only the people who do the job should get to wear the hat. Would you wear someone else's Medal of Honor?

Yes, it's a tribute, and sincere tribute is always appropriate for these brave people. But wearing their symbols is also rubbing off a piece of heroism that isn't ours. As long as we keep talking about what they did, we don't have to talk about what we're not doing.

And one thing we're definitely not doing is paying the people who do the very difficult jobs we don't want to do. According to the Department of Labor statistics, the national annual income for firefighters in 2000 was $34,000; for police officers, $37,000. The Department of Defense statistics on basic pay for an active duty officer in his first two years was about $25,000. Soldiers living on or near the base in America often need to use food stamps to get by. Teachers in their first year make an average salary of $28,000, and often buy classroom supplies out of their own pocket because there just wasn't any money in "the budget."

"No money in the budget" -- we hear that, shrug, and go on, as if it's a cosmically unalterable fact. Corporations do it with their budgets, too. I've seen it in show business. One day, no more coffee and doughnuts for the crew. "The Budget" didn't allow it anymore, like "The Budget" was handed down by God himself and brought directly from heaven on a golden chariot by those bastards who pulled their ads from my show, Federal Express.

And then one day it hit me: kitchens don't close. Just as at home, at a certain point in the night, I stop using the kitchen -- but at three in the morning, if I want to, I still have the ability to go downstairs and "re-open" the kitchen. By turning on the stove and opening the refrigerator! Restaurants are not banks; at the stroke of ten an enormous airlock doesn't seal off the kitchen and render the preparation of food an utter impossibility.

No, kitchens can open and budgets are what certain people say they are. The budget comes from somewhere. There's a line extending from it, like a trail of breadcrumbs, and it leads back to people voting, or not voting, or voting stupidly. Budgets are made by politicians. Or corporations, but that's kind of the same thing. One makes teachers pay for pencils, one takes away coffee and doughnuts.

Because it wasn't in "The Budget," some things have to get cut.

Yeah, some always do. But for years until the accounting scandals of 2002, it never seemed to be the year-end bonuses of already wealthy CEOs, often in the hundreds of millions of dollars. That would buy a lot of coffee and doughnuts.

This is a country that is the richest in the history of the world -- a country where middle-class people now commonly use maids and limousines, luxuries that when I was a child were the appurtenances of only the wealthy, never people I knew. It is also a country that is always reluctant to raise the minimum wage because, my God, the cost of the arugula salad at Le Crap might go up from eleven to thirteen dollars, as if anyone who'd pay eleven dollars for a salad would notice.

So what's the connection we need to make here? Again, it's one we really know, the one between how much taxes we shell out and how much pay goes to the people we say are our heroes.

Does government waste money? Of course, mostly because we let them, and frequently even encourage them. (Back home, one man's pork is another man's jobs program.) We all think the government should get by on far less of our money.

But until that miracle happens, the ones who get screwed by tax whining are the cop, the fireman, the teacher and the soldier. We should think about that the next time we put on their hats.

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