Take This Job and Love It

Like most people, I suppose I got an initial kick out of the story of Steven Slater, the put-upon flight attendant who finally said "fuck it". Good for him, say the wage-slaves and assorted peons.

So our so-called media, never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity, grab precisely the wrong end of the stick in this here shaggy-dog story. There are at least two enormously useful approaches they could easily have taken:

1. How airline travel has become oppressive and borderline abusive, with countless tales of passengers being herded, pushed around, left to swelter for hours on the tarmac while the airline thumbs its dick, treated like something between third-strike felons and factory-farmed chickens.


2. How work itself has become, for a great many people, borderline abusive. From pissing in a cup just to get the job, to being electronically monitored and force-fed corporate happy-talk right up to the moment the job gets outsourced to Shenzhen or Bangalore, work is less frequently an honorable pursuit that can in many cases provide a sense of discipline and even purpose, and more frequently an escalating series of unpleasant circumstances that occasionally culminates in violent provocation.
   
   Even in this festering "jobless recovery", an oxymoron right up there with "jumbo shrimp" or "Governor Palin", even people who have been unemployed for some time have a core of secret dread that they will get a new job, and it will almost be guaranteed to be one that serves only as a buffer between themselves and a cardboard box on the sidewalk. Where labor used to actually have some dignity to it every so often, even mid-range jobs frequently necessitate new and improved modes of cringing, of reading the latest Who Moved My Cheese? knock-off and pretending to swallow it whole, of forgetting how to find joy in even the simple accomplishment of useful tasks.

Instead, what do we see on the Today show this fine morning (and it is fine, friends 'n' neighbors; the weather out here in the NorCal has been spectacular the last couple weeks) but a woman Slater was briefly married to right out of high school. That's right, ladies -- pray right now to whatever temperamental phantom you grovel to that your dipshit ex-husband doesn't do something stupid and/or trendworthy, or lazy-ass reporters will be beating down your door, breathlessly asking What was he like?, even if you divorced twenty ferchrissakes years ago.

There are legitimate reasons why Slater could be perceived as a bit of a "folk hero", yet those reasons are seldom discussed. It is a consistent pattern of disengagement between media entities, and the audience they sell cars and tampons to. It is not a joke, it is a deliberate effort to ignore the serious aspects of an entertaining story, and focus disproportionately on the most inane factors of that story.

This is why every ten days or so, we are treated yet again to some fool antic involving Sarah Palin and her inbred cracker clan, whether we like it or not. It may not be as tightly scheduled as the next Two and a Half Men, but it is reliable and predictable and distracting all the same.

Fuckin' A, folks, it cannot be repeated too often -- if our professional corporate media spent half as much time talking about issues that actually affect peoples' lives as they do with this ricockulous ass-sniffing soap-opera nonsense, more people might actually get a clue.

Which is why, of course, they persist in this crap. I refuse to believe in accidents and coincidences anymore, not when they proliferate with such regularity.