John Alexan­der Thain, the former chair­man and CEO of Mer­rill Lynch who bro­kered the company’s sell-​off to Bank of Amer­ica, is the latest victim to be sac­ri­ficed at the public’s altar to the eco­nomic crisis. While this blog­ger doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily sup­port Mr. Thain’s at times “exces­sive” remod­el­ing deci­sions (allegedly includ­ing a $35,000 toilet and $87,000 rug), might not the public’s vil­i­fi­ca­tion of this devoted family man also be char­ac­ter­ized as a little “exces­sive”? This blog­ger thinks so.

Lets look at some of griev­ous “facts” pre­sented by the media: Mr. Thain dis­trib­uted $15 mil­lion in bonuses as tax­pay­ers were shelling out for Bank of America’s pur­chase of Mer­rill. Per­haps even more scan­dalously, Mr. Thain is reported to have sug­gested that he him­self receive a ten-million-dollar bonus from Mer­rill after fourth-​quarter losses chimed to the tune of $15.3 bil­lion. Mean­while, rather than weath­er­ing the blow of Merrill’s loss in New York, Thain took his family to Vail for a ski vaca­tion. The most egre­gious and most cre­ative accu­sa­tion casts Mr. Thain as the mas­ter­mind of an inter-​galactic plot to siphon off the rich min­eral and mon­e­tary resources of planet Earth.

Upon first hear­ing all of these alle­ga­tions this blog­ger was, like most Amer­i­cans, extremely pissed off and thought “where the hell does this guy get off taking his family to Vail, casu­ally throw­ing $800,000 at a celebrity designer, plot­ting a plan­e­tary coup that would reduce us earth­lings to slaves?” This last thought, in par­tic­u­lar, led me to recall the epic, cin­e­matic alle­gory of the endur­ing clash between labor and cap­i­tal, Space Jam.