April 15, 2006
Lee R. Raymond is the most amazing executive in the history of the world. My only question is, why is he only receiving $400 million for his astounding labours, over an entire year.
Mr. Raymond is not like you or I. We look around and see things that need to be done and think of ways to do them. Mr. Raymond reaches into the heavens and touches the very source and fount of intelligence and channels the electrical vibrations of cosmic flatulence into the daily policy and managerial requirements of Exxon Corporation, with the result that Exxon, in a year of radically accelerating crude oil prices, recorded record profits. America, behold your god. George Bush-- bow your head!
So why only $400 million for a man who is surely smarter than the lawyers who sued the tobacco industry (more on lawyers)for $17 billion and then demanded, as payment for their diligence, $25 billion. Now those are lawyers!
Mr. Raymond is not only responsible for Exxon's record profits-- he is the creator of oil itself. It is only through his perplexing divinity that rotting deciduous trunks mutate into liquid energy, that we may then pour into our SUVs and incinerate. Compared to him, those trivial accountants and managers and derrick supervisors who toil into the night are mere gnats with the souls of pygmy gnats, and the minds of buffoon gnats. Turn away from Mr. Raymond, when he walks by, you worms. Prostrate yourselves and beg him, with all your soul, to accept $1 billion, for anything less than that is unworthy of such exquisite astuteness: this man sold oil at a time of rising prices.
Somewhere in Africa, perhaps, lives a humble old man who sits before his kerosene lamp tonight, and gazes up to the stars in the heavens above him, and is amazed that such a being could even exist that could burn up more energy in one second of urban traffic constriction, than he could burn in a hundred million life-times with his puny light.
May his face gaze upon us from the ether now that he has retired to ascend into the heavens.