Advocate Editor James
by Advocate Staff
James “Jimmy” Hoff(a) in the Advocate Office. Behind him, his feared Lieutenant Michael “Matewan” Busch
Mark Schiebe awoke one morning from unsettling dreams to find himself transformed into a music critic who makes only fifty dollars a month. It was no dream. Across the GC Advocate community, writers are now so broke they can’t even afford to starve. Yet, the more startling fact is that their leftist boss at the paper, James “Jimmy” Hoff(a), like an apparatchik of yesteryear, refuses to raise wages to the levels enjoyed by the untouchable under-classes of the global south’s teeming mega-slums.
Although the GC Advocate has made noticeable strides in the last few years — including its new sexy tabloid style cover, its contributions from noted left-wing celebrities like Cynthia McKinney and Joseph Stalin, and its “Back Page” investigative reporting into the most salacious and explosive truths at CUNY — the wages of its most essential workers, its writers, give them less than a dollar a day to live on.
“If you think about it,” said music writer Anton Borst, “the magazine only comes out seven times a year. That’s only $350 a year! We’d make more money pan-handling while reading our articles aloud on the street.” Film writer Tim Krause put it like this, “There are more words in most of my topic sentences then there are dollar bills in my bank account thanks to ‘editor-in-chief’ James Hoff.”
“The next time I’m asked to write a book review about the struggles of my people, it will be about us writers, not the descendents of slaves,” said book reviewer Lavelle Porter, who, incidentally, could totally take Hoff(a) in a fight.
The discovery that Hoff and the other senior paper nomenklatura have received substantial raises in recent years is what finally drove the writers to unionize. “We wanted to show our bosses that they can’t go on writing passionate editorials about the Nader campaign and refined analyses of the vicissitudes of Venezuelan democracy under Chavez while we can’t even afford to buy more than five beers a month at the gentrified, new O’Reilly’s,” said a writer who spoke anonymously out of fear of reprisals from Hoffa and his thugs.
Unfortunately for the writers, Hoff(a) has plenty of moles amongst their hapless ranks. “As if it isn’t easy to flip these pathetic writers!” quipped Hoff(a). “They’ll do anything I say for a Chipotle burrito or a review copy a Revolutionary Autoerotic Meditation: A Brief History of the Queer Buddhist Resistor Movement!”
Before writers could even come to Hoff(a) for recognition as a union demanding that their wages be increased by at least 200 percent, Hoff(a) sent word that they had all been fired and were going to be replaced by unemployed graduates of CUNY’s School of Journalism. Hoff(a) was also able to use another set of unemployed CUNY Journalism alumni as a kind of latter-day private army of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.
“Honestly, now that I’m a Writing Fellow, I’ve kind of fallen out of the CUNY labor loop,” said staff writer Carl Lindskoog. “I didn’t even know about the strike. I was just going by James’ office to throw some darts and check my email when these ‘Democracy Now!’ rejects put me in a chokehold with their dreadlocks. I think I have scabies.”
“No, I’m not like Andrew Carnegie, championing democracy while I ruthlessly crush my own workers,” said Hoff as he left O’Reilly’s at 4am on a Tuesday after another night of debauchery. “But I do have a review copy of David Nasaw’s new Carnegie biography. I’ll give fourteen cents to review it. If I outsourced it to China I’d only pay ten.”
