A well-educated, intelligent high school classmate of mine, who now works in public higher education, recently posted a joke on her facebook page (I modified her use of a sexual insult to describe Tea Party activists):

“A unionized public employee, a Tea Partier, and a CEO are sitting around a plate of a dozen cookies. The CEO takes eleven cookies, looks at the Tea Partier, and says ‘Watch out for that union guy…I think he wants your cookie’.”

Gordon Gecko, the iconic insider and money-grubber, epitomized in the movie “Wall Street” what some apparently believe to be the only word in the world about greed. It is as if everything we know in our collective conscience to be true about greed and about capitalism we obtained from that movie.

Indeed, given recent trends in political discourse, given the “buffet of buffoonery” occuring in Wisconsin over reigning in union expense, and now Michael Moore’s recent hysterical comments that rich people’s money is not theirs, but “part of the national resourses”, I would not be surprised to find that the Wikipedia entry for “greed” simply played a clip of Gordon Gecko’s famous speech from “Wall Street,” while its entry for humility was simply a photo of Wisconsin union protestors.

I’m reminded of the old Looney Tune cartoon in which Bugs and Daffy get lost and find a genie’s hidden treasure (“Nyah, I should have taken a left turn at Albuquerque”).  Daffy sets out to stuff his pockets with all manner of goodies, until he finds the biggest pearl in the place. His conversation is then reduced to the proclamation “Mine, mine, all mine!”, which we would all agree to be a manifestation of pure greed.

But was Daffy greedy only after he got the pearl? Or did his greed compel him to fight all comers — including Bugs and the genie — and to give up all else in order to secure it? (He gave up his stature, too, when the genie ended up shrinking Daffy…yet his greed remained full-size).

We are, in our present political and cultural discourse, working from the assumption that only those who already have can be greedy. Those who want everything from them — or who simply want more, more, more — cannot, we suppose, be greedy.

It is a fact that those on the right too infrequently castigate the rampant capitalist for his greed, yet those on the left too often seem willing to cite only the capitalist for greed, when it is obvious that they hold no monopoly — pun intended — on that deadly vice.

My friend’s joke was meant to portray the greedy and his victim. It was funny, as jokes go. But perhaps the unionized public employee didn’t get too worked up because his greed was sated: he was getting his cookies straight from the State kitchen, for life.

Are CEOs all bad? No. Are unions all bad? No. My point is simply that accusing one group of sinful behavior, while considering it impossible that another is also guilty, is naive and not beneficial to public discourse and the resolution of civic problems.

Wisconsin has been known in the rest of the country for one particular foodstuff: cheese.

Now it is not so much one homogeneous block of curdled milk product (whether hole-y, or bleu, or moldy), so much as it is a veritable cornucopia of public dysfunction.

A buffet of buffoonery, if you will.

The dust-up caused by Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to reign in public spending has revealed in one place, at one time, the virtual inanity of thought in no less then four (4) separate spheres: State legislature, unions, public education, and the media.

Democrat legislators fled the State to avoid giving Republicans — who hold the majority after recent elections — the ability to vote on legislation that the Democrats don’t like. They have, in effect, blocked the democratic process, while at the same time they and their supporters in the streets claim to be promoting the democratic process.

Unions representing public employees are encouraging the defeat of Gov. Brown’s collective-bargaining restrictions, asserting that they are interested in “working people” — working people who, with salary and benefits, reportedly earn over $100,000 per year on the public dole.

Teachers claiming to do nothing but labor “for the children” are calling in “sick” — complete with faked doctor excuses — to join street protests and State capitol sit-ins, apparently unaware that the act of abandoning the classroom to argue for salary and union power is not quite consistent with an interest in kids’ learning.

The media, reporting on the kerfuffle, describes the event as “Cairo coming to Madison” (if your teacher was ‘sick’ that day in your Government class, Madison is the capitol of Wisconsin). Really?

This would be quite amusing, if it did not spell such trouble for public life. It seems that integrity and honesty are in short supply, while greed and self-interest are abundant.