Breakfast in Taiwan

It's weird that I am so nostalgic over Taiwanese breakfasts. I just realized that maybe this is because it's pretty much the only meal I consistently had with my family. Now that I'm in Taiwan to finish the film, I find myself on the hunt for the perfect traditional Taiwanese breakfast, although since I'm alone, it won't be the lavish meals I remember with congee, fermented tofu, pickles and Taiwanese sausages from the man who sells them in the street.

Today I just might have found the go-to amazing Taiwanese breakfast hole-in-the-wall. Attracted by a little mark on the map that I received from the hostel, I made my way down Tingzhou Road (汀州路) past a bunch of motorcycle chop shops. I walked right past the place the first time, but when I doubled back, I sighted a tray of crullers and some sesame cakes outside a cluttered place with a U-shaped counter. 

Great hole-in-the-wall traditional Taiwanese breakfast.

I ordered cold soy milk and a rice roll (fan tuan, 飯卷). It might not look like much but wow, it was incredible. Soy milk in Asia is so different than those boxes of Eden Soy in America, thinner in texture, more subtle in taste. At this place, the soy milk tasted like the soy milk I remember making with my grandmother. And the fan tuan was fantastic - the cruller on the inside perfectly crisped, pieces of salted pickled vegetables providing just the right amount of briny crunch, the rice just the right stickiness to hold together without being too moist.  A bunch of high school students came in right after I did and ordered taro bread and egg in sesame bread (dan bing, 蛋餅), which I will try next time. 

Home-made and delicious.

Then I crossed the road to Shi Da, thinking I would get myself a cup of coffee. The market was in full swing - glad it's still there, since I've been hearing about official efforts to clean the area up. 

Guavas, plums and other fruit.

Shi Kia and Japanese pears.

Fruit is the other thing I am always nostalgic over since I seem to be allergic to nearly every fruit in America. I love those green guavas from Taiwan and I nearly bought a shi kia, in the Bahamas it's called a sugar apple, but the fruit vendor said that they needed a day to get ripe, so I demurred, thinking it would be disaster if I had to carry one around all day. 

After walking through the market, the straps for my camera bag were digging into my back and soaked with sweat. No coffee shops seemed to be in the area except for Starbucks, which I will avoid even if I am about to die of heatstroke. I decided to try Grandma Nitti's Kitchen,  a place I've been to before and liked. Unfortunately, their coffee is pre-sweetened and I can barely drink it. Ugh. Must. Find. Coffee. If I am to be semi-articulate for my second interview with Peng Ming Min. 

More about my trip to Taiwan is on the website for ALMOST HOME: TAIWAN - this is a personal little sidebar that didn't seem fitting to add to the film website.

No More Nice Nightingale

The Nightingale is about a nondescript little grey bird who wows the Chinese court with its song but is replaced by a bejeweled mechanical wonder that can only sing waltzes. It's actually pretty fitting that the controversy at La Jolla Playhouse should be over the casting of a musical based on this fairytale.

In case you've somehow missed hearing about it, out of twelve actors, only two are Asian. The Emperor of China is being played by a white guy; there are no Asian men. It's supposed to be 'multicultural' and set in a mythical not-necessarily Asian land. It's also supposed to be a workshop production. But let's face it, for a play set somewhere vaguely Oriental, all the people in power are white guys. Instead of taking on the real deal - Asian actors for a musical set in China - La Jolla Playhouse has opted for the artificial bird. And it sings the old familiar tune. I mean, can we say The Good Earth?

I'm a little late on the bandwagon for this because it's really depressing to me. As if being in the arts isn't hard enough, if you're Asian-American apparently you can't even get cast in a musical set in China.

What's worse is that this play is in San Diego - home to over 400,000 Asians. I think it's the 10th largest population of Asians in the country. UC San Diego, which is in La Jolla, has a student body that is 44% Asian and only 24% Caucasian. Has La Jolla Playhouse never had a discussion as to how it might appeal to this demographic? Do they just assume that Asians aren't interested in theater? Or maybe they think Asians would be too meek to complain?

And the play is directed by Moises Kaufman, a director I really like. I remember him way back in like 1988. He directed one of his first plays in New York at Theater for the New City, back when I lived in cage in the basement. You would think a Jewish, Romanian-Ukrainian maricón from Venezuela would be a little more sensitive and inclusive.

Plus this comes right on the heels of the Knicks giving up Jeremy Lin. I mean, jeez, this kid plays on a level that electrifies the entire world, makes the cover of Sports Illustrated twice, instigates a rush on tickets at Madison Square, gets the most unlikely people to watch sports (including me, yes I confess), and even with that much game, he doesn't rate more than one offer.

So yeah, I've been pretty discouraged, with these events corroborating what I've been feeling about the deck being stacked. I mean it's hard enough being poor and a woman, but being Asian-American too, I'm a triple nightingale. An overlooked bird, an outsider to the palace. It doesn't matter how well we sing. Or play ball.

So with all that, I drank a glass of wine tonight and watched the entire hour-long panel discussion at La Jolla Playhouse that took place yesterday. I swear, in my curmudgeonly old age, I'm turning into a wino. And a cat lady. But the panel was actually a lot more hopeful than I expected.

After a brief upset when it seemed the creative team might not even attend, Moises Kaufman and writer Steven Sater were indeed present, as were casting director Tara Rubin, and Christopher Ashley, the Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse. On the other side of the room were the angry Asian-Americans: Cindy Cheung and Christine Toy Johnson, both of them representing AAPAC, and Andy Lowe, founder and producer of Chinese Pirate Productions.

The moderator started things off by asking the Asians what they thought about the play. Christine struggled with emotions as she said, "To see this production....which clearly to me looks like it was set China...with so few Asian-American faces... reminds me how invisible we still are and how we are so often not invited to sit at the table. And to not be invited to sit at the table in a play that takes place in an Asian country, is like a knife to the heart."

Cindy added, "I'm still getting over the shock of seeing it and having so many people being okay with this. It was disturbing."

This made me think of a strange experience I had two years ago when I went to Governor's Island on a balmy night with one of my closest friends. There was something Dutch going on that day and we stayed late and danced to a band from Holland. Then the singer announced that it was the last song of the night and launched into something that went (I kid you not), "There was an old man from Hong Kong and he once said something very wise... ching chong ching chong chong ching chong." Not only was everyone expected to dance to this, but they were encouraged to sing along to ching chong ching chong, which the entire crowd of over a hundred people did. Gleefully. Even my friend, who is one of the smartest guys I know, obliviously enjoyed himself while I tried not to be horrified. I am still flabbergasted by this experience.

But I digress. There was a previous panel that was instigated by AAPAC, which I didn't manage to attend, partly because I had a bit of an issue with how it seemed they were knocking at the gate of the elites, can we come in pretty please? But I guess that was my curmudgeon talking, because after watching the entire panel, it did seem that something crystallized.

First, the Artistic Director, Christopher Ashley, conducted the discussion with grace, unlike Guthrie Theater's Artistic Director Joe Dowling, whose televised response to a question about the lack of women and minorities in the theater's 50th season was, "This is a self-serving argument that doesn't hold water." In contrast, Ashley apologized, "We did not intend to offend fellow artists or the Asian-American community. We did so and we are sorry."

But change doesn't just come from the ones in power - it has to come from the ground too. And there did seem to be a rumble of something shifting during the (mostly unfortunate) audience comments, which began inauspiciously with an old lady who wondered if there were enough talented Asians out there and also what did it matter. Sigh.

After she spoke, the audience seemed to be sharply divided between angry Asian people who shouted and had to be shut up, and non-Asians who rambled in circular platitudes that only illuminated their confusion at why everyone was so upset. Why can't we all get along? I really liked what one angry (Asian, male) audience member said before he was shouted down for going on too long, "When the Asian play comes along, it's suddenly 'mythical' and 'multicultural'... It's incredibly irritating to hear terms like 'multicultural' and 'color-blind' used to reduce the number of minority roles."

But Cindy had already laid it all out on the table and it was a royal flush, "There was a point in history when it was acceptable to have a white person play Othello... and at some point, the community stepped up and said this is no longer acceptable.... The Asian-American community is saying it now. That we find it unacceptable as well."

She was even bad-ass enough to throw down an extra ace in her sleeve, "We know [the play is] not a finished product and it's why we are here, to influence. We don't want to see this anymore. If it were a finished product, we would be outside with pickets. And we will be if it keeps going." 

So maybe a sea change really is occurring. As both Cindy and Christine said, it's no longer the way it used to be back in the prehistoric age like twenty years ago, when the Asian-American theater community really was like a small high school. Now it's like a dozen high schools who have play-offs and debates and dances together. After which they get on the Staten Island Ferry and make out. While I go home to my cat and a glass of wine.

But okay, Asian-American theater community, now in addition to prying open the gentry's gates a little, how about some support for Asian-American producers so we can survive and come up with more work for everyone? I might even make out with you on the Staten Island Ferry then.

Rating the Dating Game

I don’t date. I find the whole concept ludicrous and rather unsavory. Yet two weeks ago, I suddenly decided to put up a profile on OK Cupid. 

What precipitated this strange impulse was my shocked realization that it’s been nearly twenty years since I was last alone. And everything I used to do twenty years ago no longer exists. The new East Village doesn’t have any more second-hand bookstores and vintage shops to hang out in. That scene is long gone and I’m gone too – transplanted to Brooklyn, where I don’t know any shopkeepers by name, where I never run into people I know on the street. 

So it’s been lonely. And I sort of fell for a guy who isn’t available or that interested in me. Maybe so I could stop being so angry with the guy whom I had been with for ten years and also finally get over another ridiculous infatuation. For nearly a year, I’ve been trying to stamp out every pesky smoldering flame in my badly charred heart. I suppose OK Cupid was my next line of attack. 

Not that I'm sure that I am cut out for another long-term relationships or god forbid, marriage. For so many women, success in life is contingent upon landing a guy like a giant floppy six-foot fish. “Don’t worry, you’ll be married one day,” my friend’s mother said to her once, as if she was to be pitied for being single. And that’s the attitude of many women who are otherwise so independent. Researchers were surprised that in a national study of 1,000 female college students, 91% agreed to the statement, “Being married is a very important goal for me.” [1]

Of course it's not just women. Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin theorizes in his book The Marriage-Go-Round that Americans idealize marriage because of their deep-seated religious heritage, but they also have a contradictory belief in individual freedom and the right to self-fulfillment, which results in Americans getting married and divorced at twice the rate of other countries. [2]

I can’t think of anything more horrifying than a big church wedding with six women wearing the same dress. It always makes me think of the phrase “a fate worse than death.” I suppose I’m more European in this regard. The World Values Survey, a study of sixty countries in 2000, reported that 26% of the British and 36% of the French think that marriage is an outdated institution, compared with just 10% of Americans. [3]

But love? I can’t seem to help it. Love strikes me like lightning. I remember once being in an acting class and a guy whom I had known for three years and hardly ever noticed turned in my direction and BAM. We both made some lame excuse to leave early and once out on the street, we got as far the corner before making out by the mailbox.

He was my second big love (my first love also happened instantaneously) but he was weirded out by my lack of rules or expectations. “It feels like I could just walk all over you,” he once said to me in disgust. I had a nervous breakdown getting over him. Mysterious red blotches erupted on my face and I couldn’t get out of bed for weeks, not that I would have wanted to even if I could have, since I looked pretty mortifying. Maybe love doesn’t strike me like lightning; it's more like a recurring case of bubonic plague. 

The only time I had ever been on a date was when I was fifteen. Every time I pass by the 8^th Street subway station, I see my teenage self leaning against the pizza shop in a way that I hoped would look nonchalant, wearing a slit satin skirt and slouchy grey sweater that I had borrowed from my best friend. But even that wasn’t really a date since we both knew perfectly well that we would find our way to some corner where we could make out. His message was clear – he had been flipping rubber bands at me in math class for weeks. 

I know I’m a pretty strange phenomenon, like a time traveler, or someone who came from an alien planet. I basically make up all my own rules, since I didn’t grow up with any. Or rather, shuttled in between New York City and Taiwan, I grew up with two sets of rules that sort of cancelled each other out. I learned social conduct not from my absentee immigrant workaholic parents or even from television and magazines, but from the classic novels that I devoured. Dating was consequently not part of my understanding of the world. Heathcliff and Cathy definitely did not go on dates. Daisy and Gatsby didn’t either. Not even the odiously plebian Elizabeth Bennet and stuffy Mr. Darcy went on dates. 

Dating is mostly a post-war American phenomenon. Teenagers in bobby socks sipping Coca Cola together at a soda fountain. Groping one another in a movie theater. Exchanging school rings. There is something very juvenile and Norman Rockwell about dating. 

For those who can't picture life otherwise, dating as we know it came about from the rise of both youth culture and the entertainment industry after the first World War. For the previous hundred or so years, courtship had taken place at home, with men coming over to have some tea and listen to women play piano. [4] That's what Tennessee Williams was writing about with the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie. But in the 1910s, courtship started to become a public event, relocated to movie theaters, dance halls, and restaurants. Dating became marked by competition and consumption, fueled by new magazines that advised sorority girls who didn’t have a date to turn off the lights in their rooms and pretend that they did.

The new online dating scene also taps into latent voyeurism. I confess that I rather like being able to secretly check out what people are interested in, how they write about themselves, what they think is hip and sexy and hot. But with the shoe on the other foot, I'm not so comfortable. I guess having been exposed to the public for half of my life, I'm pretty cagey about what I am ready to reveal to perfect strangers. I tried to write something about my age and the kid, but I finally just ended up saying, maybe I'll tell you if we meet in person. 

But privacy issue of online profiles aside, what really bothers me about dating itself is that it's intrinsically calculating.  Underneath dating culture, sociologist Martin Whyte sees a “marketplace learning scenario,” in which “people date a large number and variety of others to acquire experience that will enable them, it is hoped, to make prudent choices.”  Paul Hollander notes in his book Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Love in America, “American-style dating … incorporates two not entirely consonant goals: the pursuit of romance and intense emotional involvement on the one hand, and on the other a deliberate, self-conscious rational, trial-and-error procedure of sampling potentially available partners.”[5]

It’s very strange to me, this notion of being so prosaic about forming a partnership. One sociologist said in a July 1953 New York Times Magazine article that ideally, everyone should date 25 to 50 people before deciding who to marry. That kind of assembly-line dating sounds like another fate worse than death.

But I’ve given it a go and so far, I’ve been on four dates. The first was a jazz musician. We ate at a Thai restaurant, after which we went back to the jazz club where he was tuning a piano. The second was to a bicyclist and photographer recovering from his own ten-year relationship. We had dinner and walked around a little. I brought the third guy, a writer who teaches creative writing at NYU, to a party where he knew a few people. I met the fourth guy for tapas and we talked about his animal rescue work. 

They're all quite nice and maybe in other situations, if we had met at a party or on the subway, we would be friends. But with the OK Cupid set-up, this seems somewhat unlikely.  And I don't know if I like the position it puts me in. Maybe other people who are used to this sort of set-up know what to say or do, but it just feels like I'm inviting random guys to hit on me over drinks or dinner. This already happens to me plenty enough without me needing to go looking for it. Do other women like this? I find it rather uncomfortable and I never know how to react to it.  I would much rather be struck by lightning. Or wait around for the next bout of the plague. 

But maybe my attitude is rather childish. Maybe I would be more likely to aggressively pursue a relationship if I wasn’t so ambivalent about it all. But what is this need to have a mate? Why isn't it a group of friends enough? I mean besides the sex issue, which does get pretty difficult at times.  Maybe I am from some other planet after all.

The whole thing is making me feel that it's not fair of me to have a profile up on OK Cupid since everyone on it has a set of expectations that I don't know if I share. So I’ve been thinking I will shut down my profile after this brief sociological experiment. But, just to keep an open mind, I'll finish go on dates with the guys I've already been corresponding with: an actor, two artists, a random guy from Kentucky whose picture I like, and an Italian doctor who wrote me twice, the second time in Italian begging me to write him back, so I did. While we don't have much in common, he did mention that in the Italian language, there is no equivalent to the word “dating” – it’s not a concept they have there. 

Hilariously, the day after I set up my profile, OK Cupid sent me an exultant message about a great match. It turned out to be my ex-boyfriend of ten years, who unbeknownst to me had also put up a profile on OK Cupid a few months previously.  “We're a 96% match!" he messaged me, "Will you go out on a date with me?” I laughed until I cried. 

Maybe I should move to Europe.

---

[1] Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt. “Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right: College Women on Dating and Mating Today.” Institute for American Values, 2001.

[2] Andrew J. Cherlin. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (New York: Knopf, 2009).

[3] Ronald Inglehart, Human Beliefs and Values: A Cross Cultureal Sourcebook Based on the 1999-2002 Values Surveys (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2004), 158.

[4] Beth L. Bailey. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989).

[5] Paul Hollander. Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America (United Kingdom: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 25.

Pop Question - The New Theater?

I went to see Qui Nguyen’s The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G last night with a few friends and it made me think of Young Jean Lee, whose work, it seems to me, is also about a deeply felt inadequacy.

Nguyen does not speak Vietnamese and has never been to Vietnam. In the play, he grasps at straws, attempting to come to terms with his Vietnamese identity and his cousin’s horrific experience as a refugee. Growing up in Arkansas, it seems the only tools he had to understand Asia were kong fu films, 1940s noir and the anger/anguish of being “other” expressed in hip hop and ghetto rap.

Similarly, in Lear, Young Jean Lee uses the Sesame Street scene in which Big Bird explains the death of Mr. Hooper as a reference point to understanding the death of a parental figure. I felt the scene was trite and eyeball rolling, but when I later talked about it to a much younger friend, his eyes misted over and he exclaimed, “Oh! I know that episode!” I realized then that for a million people, Big Bird must have been their first introduction to death.  And what does this say about the state of the world? Or this new generation of writers, who reference Shaw brother flicks and television shows instead of Greek myths or classical literature?

At a recent rehearsal, an actress whom I was working with declared, “I don’t know anything about history. Dates just don’t stick in my mind!” I was rather horrified. To me, the whole point of being an artist (and you are an artist as an actor) is your understanding of where you are in the continuum. I believe what makes an artist great is a deeper insight than others of where they stand in time – the gift is a comprehension of what came before and being able to translate it through current events, to create something that is both new and old, that has the weight of time, of the accumulation of understanding through the ages.

But what if what came before – what if the references that you are working from – are a jumble of over-the-top films, belligerent music and sentimental television programs? What if history and time has been truncated to the last twenty years? Like all extremely smart artists, Nguyen and Lee are interested in huge knotty human questions. But in assaying these difficult subjects, they seem to have stumbled onto another one, which is the dumbing down of our culture.

I am called elitist or a snob by a lot of my friends. Well, it’s partly a joke since they all know that I didn’t graduate high school – I get a perverse pleasure in those job forms you fill out where you have to mark the last year you graduated and I write “10” in big bold numbers.  Take that, Establishment! I can pretty much safely say that I am self-educated and thus my references are not going to be the usual ones. I’ve hardly read any books that were written after the 1960s, for instance. I know myths and legends and fairytales, 19th century literature, the Romantic poets, American writing of the early 20th century. For a while, I used to haunt Tompkins Square Books, basically reading anything that said “classic” on it.  Which took me to some obscure corners – Huysmans, Andreyev, Alain-Fournier, anyone? Anyone?

And yes, those are all dead white guys. And I am not really sure how I feel about the dead white guy canon. On one hand, yeah, they are all dead, white and male. And I am not male or white or dead (yet). On the other hand, wow, they can really write! Prose that takes your breath away, that you want to recite aloud, that causes you to spontaneously weep. Mnemonic characters and scenes that stick in your subconscious and become part of your own life experience and how you forever view the world.

Which is what I suppose Sesame Street was to Young Jean Lee. And my friend the young director. So am I being snobby or elitist to think there is something wrong with this? Just because it’s a kid’s television program?

Which brings up a whole other question of what makes something memorable and affecting. What strikes a chord? And if it strikes that true, deep, collective chord, then does it matter how it’s written? Or whether the scene is of a man in a giant yellow bird suit or an Asian actor being under-dubbed in English?

I guess that’s one of the points in The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G and Lear. I can’t say I actually loved those plays, but they do feel like some kind of crystallization of a new generation whose prime influences are not dead white guys.  Instead, they mine pop culture for answers to the perennial questions of who you are and why you are here, coming up with a lot of colorful bluster and noise, but in the end, they lament it’s painfully inadequate and very empty. The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G? It’s really The Existential Crisis of Agent G.  Nausea for the New Age. But see, that’s a reference to another dead white guy.  

Maximum Wage - Bridge the Divide

Like many people, Occupy Wall Street has been occupying my mind and I’ve been thinking a lot about maximum wage. It’s an idea that went off like a light bulb in my head a few years ago, when I was discussing the issue of income disparity with a friend. “We have a minimum wage, why not a maximum wage?” I suddenly exclaimed.

I was obsessed with the concept for several weeks, wrote an article (which for some reason I can’t find now) and brought the idea up to a dozen people, all of whom basically reacted with horror. Friends whom I considered progressive accused me of being un-American. I was unable to come up with a rejoinder until another friend said that the idea isn’t un-American, it’s un-capitalistic. Which was so true, I wondered how it happened that America became synonymous with Capitalism. What ever happened to freedom and individualism and the catalytic ideals of the founding fathers that ignited revolution in France and Haiti? Nope, now America equals institutionalized greed.

When I began researching the idea of maximum wage, it amazed me to discover that there is a historical precedence for the idea. In fact, there was, in effect, such a thing as maximum wage in America from 1942 until 1964.

In 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed 100% taxation on income above $25,000 (equivalent to about $300,000 now). Congress did not approve of this, but they did pass an act later that year for an 88% tax to be levied at income above $200,000 ($2.78 million in today’s dollars). The next year, the highest tax bracket rose to 94% of all income over $200,000. The rich continued to be taxed over 90% of maximum wage until 1964. So basically, during this time, wealthy people paid $9 out of $10 on anything they made over the top income level, which rose from $200,000 to $400,000. It’s pretty remarkable that the years that teabaggers themselves cite as those of America’s greatest prosperity coincided with what they would perceive as oppressive taxation.

A salary cap of $500,000 to executives was floated around during the early years of Obama's administration, as was a tax hike for the super-wealthy to 40% (see below cartoon from 2009), but this was shouted down and disappeared.

But there’s another way of imagining a maximum wage that doesn’t have to do with taxation, one that I think is infinitely more practicable – and that’s to correlate maximum wage with minimum wage.

If you take a look at the CEO salaries disclosed at www.paywatch.org, a website created by the AFL-CIO, you’ll find that at McDonald’s, the CEO makes $9,732,618, which is 645 times the lowest salaried worker who makes a paltry $15,080. Or okay, if you want to pick a company where the lowest paid worker is making more than minimum wage, at Texas Instruments the CEO makes $12,213,420, which is 315 times his lowest paid worker at $38,730. Right there, it's apparent the source of the vastly skewed ratio between rich and poor.

And it wasn’t always like this. According to sociologist G. William Dumhoff in his highly annotated article Wealth, Income and Power, “The ratio of CEO pay to factory worker pay rose from 42:1 in 1960 to as high as 531:1 in 2000, at the height of the stock market bubble, when CEOs were cashing in big stock options…By way of comparison, the same ratio is about 25:1 in Europe.” CEOs now make approximately 325 times what the average workers make.

Linking maximum with minimum wage is in practice now at Whole Foods, where the highest salary is capped at 19 times the lowest salary. In other words, if John Mackey wants to raise his salary, he would also have to raise the salary of all his baggers and checkers. Last year, the Greater London Assembly, the government arm that supports the Mayor, voted “to commit themselves to reducing the difference in pay between the lowest and highest paid staff to no more than 20 times, with a long term goal of no more than 10 times.”

Doug Smith makes a compelling argument for a 25-to-1 ratio in his article The Maximum Wage, while labor journalist Sam Pizzigati argues for a 10-to-1 ratio, stating in his 2004 book Greed and Good, that “before inequality began exploding in the 1980s … [a] ten times ratio defined income distribution patterns in nearly every major American workplace.”

Tying minimum to maximum wage at each corporation would definitely mitigate the extreme gap between the haves and have-nots in America but CEOs would probably attempt to compensate themselves through other derivatives. Currently, there is a ghoulish scheme afoot where banks have their employees name them insurance beneficiaries and CEOs collect (millions sometimes) from employee deaths. An underlying change really has to occur in America, a change in the American Dream from profit as an end, to profit as a means to an end. We all have a share in society and a responsibility to it as well. It’s ridiculous that anyone should be making 400 times someone else. It’s ridiculous that some people make $58 a day while others make $20,000 a day and adamantly believe they should be able to hang onto every red cent.

See also:
J.K. Malone. "Maximum Wage Law Passes Congress" New York Times, July 4, 2009.
Especially those alarmist comments.

"History of Marginal Tax Rates: Will Higher Taxes End the Rat Race?" Greenewable.
Comes with link to site showing tax tables from 1913 to 2011. 

Paul Rosenberg. "Reagan's Mean-Spirited Legacy of Economic Disaster." Open Left, February 1, 2011.

Carola Frydman and Raven E. Saks. "Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-Term Perspective, 1936-2005." July 6, 2007. Intense study of executive pay, using data from the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). Page 9: Consistent with previous studies, we find that executive pay increased moderately during the mid-1970s and rose at a faster rate in the subsequent two decades, reaching an average growth rate of more than 10 percent per year from 1995 to 1999. This acceleration represents a marked departure from the trend in compensation in the past.” They further noted, “The remarkable stability in the level of executive compensation from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s is surprising in light of the robust economic activity and considerable growth of firms during most of this period.”

And an argument from the other side:
"Diving Into the Rich Pool." The Economist, September 24, 2011. 
Argues that taxing the rich will not help the economy, but does not mention taxation history pre-1980.