Yet, how I love them. Perkins does what most white travel hosts with Oxbridge education cannot: go to other countries and behave. She is warm, silly, kind, unwritten, funny and respectful. So I have all the time in the world to watch her, and just she fires shots and throws bullets at explosive targets in a traditional Colombian sport called Tagus. Hilarious! But the greatest danger of these “extremes and scandalously legal!” Travel documents are about how dangerously close it comes to otherness. What do we really do when we reduce other countries to their quirks and extremities? Especially considering the current monstrous state of our own state. In truth, I liked it better when a series of Sue Perkins trips was less about her pushing herself to go to a love motel in São Paulo and meet swingers, and more about holding the hand of a little old lady she had just met on the banks of the Mekong. The reason for all this risk-taking in Latin America, where she meets a local comedian everywhere, is Perkins` desire to escape middle age. She says she is afraid of becoming immobile.
Their biggest fear is being “stuck.” At a crossroads, where probably all the travel presenters meet at some point, she deals with her midlife crisis by doing a bunch of extreme, I can`t believe, legal things on camera. She joins a death cult in Mexico. Whitewater rafting with sex workers in the Colombian Rio Negro. Becomes “wonderful, terrible, beautiful, disgusting drunk” in Latin America`s largest gay club. Which isn`t extreme, but for those who fondly remember Perkins pounding on cups of beer as a Victorian lady in The Supersizers Go, it`s joyful. Sue Perkins gets drunk is a miniseries in itself. This scene perfectly captures the strange tone of Perfectly Legal. Her three episodes range from bizarre, disturbing, trash, silly, hilarious and entertaining to deeply moving – the latter at the very end, when she takes a mind-expanding drug in La Paz and, after five hours of vomiting, has profound revelations about her father`s death and the sadness of not having children.
Jeez. What a journey. Mine, I mean, not yours. The time has come. Perkins and Caballero take a deep breath. He lifts the gun to her belly (I wish she would stop making jokes about it, because she`s just a middle-aged middle belly belly). Replaces shooting. Perkins looks shocked.
Then she mulls the difference between shaking things up a bit — the premise of her maiden voyage to the high-octane seas of the Netflix miniseries — and getting a .38-caliber bullet in the stomach. “They say the closer you are to death, the more alive you feel,” she says. “I can now say that the closer you are to death, the closer you are to death.” As a subscriber, you have 10 gifts to give each month. Everyone can read what you share. The richest 10% of Americans had done very well since 1970, at least that`s what he seemed to be blushing at first glance. These 11.3 million households, or about the population of California, saw their share of national income increase by nearly half, from just under 33 percent in 1973 to just over 48 percent in 1998. On closer inspection, however, a strange trend emerged. The numbers showed that the higher the income group, the higher the income. Those in the top 1 per cent saw their median income, adjusted for inflation, in 1999 and, after paying income taxes, more than doubled, from $234,700 in 1977 to $515,600 in 1999. Meanwhile, the 55 million Americans in the poorest fifth of the population lived in households whose average income rose from $10,000 in 1977 to $8,800 in 1999. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal group that advocates for the poor, calculated these figures from sophisticated income data that the Congressional Budget Office began collecting in 1977. Studies conducted by other economic research and advocacy groups have come to similar conclusions using other official data.
Across the political spectrum, economists have seen the same fundamental trend: the rich really get richer and the poor get poorer. The money, it seems, was made to flow upstream. The vast majority of Americans, at least by the year 2000, had flattened or even emptied their pockets, the value created by their labor flowed into a niagara of greenbacks not to the rich or even the rich, but to the mega-rich. But just as liberals at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities underestimated the gap between rich and poor, so did Piketty and Saez.
