I'm Mark, and I'm a state worker.

Yes, I'm ashamed – ashamed I don't feel ashamed since I should, judging by the multitudes' insistence that other civil servants and I are overpaid, underworked and, evolutionarily, one notch above brainless creatures like one-celled paramecia.

But I'm working on it. On accepting my lot, that is, not working working 'cause, remember, I'm a state employee, obsessed with break time, goofing off (but only after break time) and alacrity only when it counts (at 5 p.m., precisely).

Speaking of counting, we've heard some curious computations lately. As everyone knows, our once-fair California, the state I bilk, um, serve, is destitute. In response, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposes cutting my pay 5 percent (atop a 9.2 percent chop in February!) and firing 5,000 of my co-workers.

Drastic, yes, but fairly piddling compared to what ex-eBay bigwig and 2010 GOP goobernatorial hopeful Meg Whitman promises if elected. She does score empathy points, however, by saying (per The Bee's Dan Walters) she feels "badly … about the 30,000 or 40,000 people that will lose their jobs."

Thanks, Meg. That helps.

But would either approach help California? Walters reports most state workers aren't paid from "the state's deficit-plagued general fund" but "work for special fund agencies," meaning even a Whitmanesque whacking "would save only a billion dollars, a tiny fraction of the state's deficit."

If I didn't know better (and I don't 'cause I'm only a state worker), I might postulate that such red-meat-for-the-masses layoffs, sure to devastate already critically stressed public services in exchange for miniscule savings, are but a ploy to cement corporate America's longtime double-themed dream: neo-feudalism, plus government privatization. I might further dimly theorize that once public employees' unions are busted and agencies divvied up, it's goodbye cost-effective, fairly recompensed public services, and hello money-sucking, drone-waged bottom line.

But, obviously, that's self-interest talking. Why not run government like business? We hear incessantly it'd provide more for less. Figuring experts should know, I've e-mailed some, and once I hear back from Enron, er, AIG, uh, Halliburton, I'll fill you in.

Ah, Enron. Strange they're rarely mentioned anymore considering our current fix is directly traceable to billions (per the Boston Globe's Kathleen Sharp) they looted from state coffers in 2000-2001 by gaming a deregulated energy market.

But, hey, that's all water over the hydroelectric dam. Why target a few genuine villains when there're thousands of shiftless (and unionized) state employees handy, who also, as is commonly known, are closet traitors?

Consequently, I'd never challenge corporate America's long, colorful tradition (mainly shaded blood red) of assaulting labor, let alone outrageously suggest that practically every U.S. worker has benefited from the sacrifices of subversives like Mother Jones, the Wobblies or striking miners massacred in Colorado. (Their organizing activities' un-American nature would especially glare if stacked against actions of real U.S. labor relations giants like, say, Wal-Mart's Sam Walton, whose inspiringly patriotic "Buy American" campaign, as dumb luck would have it, also made him billions. So what if cut-rate Asian labor produced much of his merchandise? Remember: Nitpicking's unseemly.)

Another public employee flaw: Whenever we whine about shouldering a disproportionate burden (even if we do), we expose our ignorance of how the "real world" works. I remember well my own incredulity the day a smartly attired stranger asserted at a café that corporations shouldn't pay taxes because they provided jobs. (This was back when they provided them.) Imagine his delight when U.S. PIRG reported that in 2001, "78 percent of corporations paid no more than the $800 minimum franchise tax." Or his salivation over California's property tax loophole big enough to shove a Disneyland through, one that's gifted longtime commercial property owners like, well, Disneyland, with negligible property tax increases since 1978 (thanks, Proposition 13) while subsequent home (re)sales have generated tax bills big enough to choke Rush Limbaugh. (OK, maybe not that big.) Nonetheless, in America, there's always a solution: Rent an apartment, or own an amusement park.

Wanna hear a secret: Atop being lazy, naïve and anti-American, I'm cheap, too. Like my detractors, I hate paying for public services. Don't misunderstand: I want services, I just don't wanna pay for 'em. Then again, maybe potable water, clean air and dams that don't collapse are overrated. Plus, who in his right mind could resist mindlessly cheering as a once world-class state careens down the potholed highway to Third World status? Beats wasting precious seconds learning Big Business' divide-and-conquer gambit is ages-old, spurring misdirected citizens to bring fellow laborers down rather than unite to build everyone, including themselves, up.

Perhaps, then, if I'm luckily fired and thus saved from myself, I'll stand side-by-side with my privatization-loving critics – at the unemployment office, where I'll repent by skewering the fat-cat civil servants dawdling behind the counter, though I do hope there're enough of 'em left at the department, whirring now like a "streamlined" corporation, to process my jobless benefits.

That is, if any of those remain.

Mark Drolette, when not otherwise frittering away his time as an analyst for the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, is a freelance writer from Sacramento