"I live a life by hour": Rupert Murdoch

“I live a life by hour”
January 28, 2003

In his 1967 book, “Where do we go from here?”, the late black civil right leader, Martin Luther King lamented: “when the constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person.”

In addition, blacks were generally categorized in four groups by the density of darkness in their skin: Negro, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon (mustee).
Negro: a dark-skinned black.
Mulatto: an offspring between a black and a white.
Quadroon: a person 1/4 black ancestry, that is, the offspring of a mulatto and a white.
Octoroon (mustee): a person 1/8 black ancestry, the offspring of a quadroon and a white.

In another word, the Black American was not a full person and the density of swarthiness played a significant role in their social status that determined the comfort of life.

There were another sub-group human species in the US, called the Native Indians, whose properties were decimated and lives were corralled in “reservations” by the Founding Fathers of the US.

The US President Ted Roosevelt said publicly: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe 9 out of 10 are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely in the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indians.”
History shows clearly that the US Governments have failed make good on the treaties that they promised to the Native American Indians whose population shrank from 12 million to 2 million, and they are invisible anywhere in the US except in the pigsty called “the Indian Reserve”.

In the meantime, there were very rich people in the US at the expense of those above people, and now this “Equestrian Club”, one percent of the US population, hold over 40 percent of total US wealth.
Their greed knows no bound, they demand more showers of subsidies, tax cuts, and freebies from the public coffer and they almost and always got what they want.
When people complain about the inequality and mistreatment in comparison with the affluent one percent Americans, their President scolds them: “it is a class warfare.”

In this environment, who wants to die prematurely or says goodbye happily to the loved ones, if you belong to the “Equestrian Club”?
You would love to count your life by hours and hate to see the hours tick by

One of them is the Chairman of News Corp. (Fox TV and other media outlet in US, Australia and HongKong): a Jewish media baron Rupert Murdoch recently was married to a young (more younger than half of his 70-years age) Chinese girl, Wendy Deng (an anchorwoman at Star TV in Hongkong) and fathered a baby from her, after dumping his wife of almost half-a-century marriage.

The following is an exchange between television personality Charlie Rose and Rupert Murdoch that was transcribed by Amy Wallace, a senior writer at Los Angeles Magazine.
Mr. Murdoch appeared to be extremely unhappy about his aging process that deprives his boundless opportunity to exploit other lesser mortals, dismissing the universal reality that every mortal perishes eventually.

Charlie Rose: March 11, you will be seventy.
Rupert Murdoch: Pretty soon.

Rose: How do you feel about that?
Murdoch: Pretty bad. I have lived for 613,000 hours. 201,000 of them were in childhood, youth, and thoroughly sort of inadequate education.

That leaves 412,000. You take a third of that for sleep and rest. So I’m down to 275,000 hours. I take out a month for holidays, at least half a weekend, family time, evenings, etc., and you are down to at the very maximum a couple hundred thousand hours I’ve been at work.

And then I go.
What have I done? How much time have I wasted in endless meetings with no decisions? Industry conference? Company conferences? Studying over long reports? Yeah, I guess I have wasted at least half my life.

So that gets me down to perhaps 100,000 useful hours.
Pretty bad figures.
So if I am pretty healthy and have a normal life expectancy—I am a bit optimistic—I’ve got another 175,000 hours to go, of which maybe I can spend 75,000 productively at work. All right? Or 70,000, say.

One of his media outlets, Fox TV, has been flooding their screen day and night with war-mongering rhetoric and power politics that fans flames of war against the so-called “axis of evil” nations, and the boss is lamenting in his jeremiad that his days are numbered in such a short hours that he wouldn’t be able to achieve his goal—a perpetual war that brings the profit.

He seemed to wish not only to live an endless life, but also to believe that he is somewhat entitled, like a child, to have a longer life because he is rich, powerful, and just married to a young chick.
What makes his mega-ego occupy his teeny brain full of extra-terrestrial fantasy?
Is his life more worth a grain of salt than the poor black’s, Native Indian’s, Joe Blow’s, or the Abudullah’s in Middle East?

The final comfort is that death makes us all equals no matter whether you count your life by years, hours, minutes, or seconds. The trouble is that Mr. Murdoch will never accept this basic formula of life until he takes his last breath and goes away, desperately holding all his money tight in his trembling hands, like a rapacious Jewish Wall Street banker.

By the way, have you ever thought, like Mr. Murdoch, that your life should be counted by hours not by years?