10.16.11
Getting hosed as a badge of honor
We are forced to eat old shoe leather. And now we like it. All real Americans eat old shoe leather. It’s good for your character.
In what has become a strange display of American feudalism, people are now contributing messages to Erickson’s 53 Percent site and boasting about being screwed by the economy. As Gawker notes, one 53 Percent post features a man who proudly says that he works hard yet lacks health insurance and can “barely afford??? his rent. Another, a “former marine,??? says he hasn’t had “4 consecutive days off in 4 years.??? Blogger Max Read thinks Erickson has exposed “where the best of American values meet their most masochistic applications.??? Reading through the contributions to the 53% site, Read concludes: “‘paid time off’ and ‘health insurance’ and ‘a living wage’ are apparently the demands of an unreasonably entitled parasitic class.???
Christoph Hechl said,
October 17, 2011 at 12:38 am
Well a few days ago i wrote in a comment, that i dare not ask “How stupid can one be?” and here is another fine example, why that is a good tactic.
On the other hand, the amount of news the reminds me of this seems to be increasing lately, especially with regards to the comments from all kinds of people about OWS.
When you hear overpayed bankers and executives obviously talking out of their backside, you wonder what qualifies them for their respective jobs if they cannot even analyse the situation at hand.
Idiots like myself learned in school, that this involves looking at both sides, but what do i know.
The BOFH once wrote about managers: “They couldn’t manage a good crap without written instructions.”
Probably THAT is what they mean when they talk about the dreadful state of education.
DD said,
October 17, 2011 at 9:40 am
There’s a lot of conditioning embedded in US society, quite a lot of people for whom the power of logical argument means nothing. When your mind is closed like it is here then you can come up with all kinds of weird rationalizations in support of dubious conditions and policy.
Like the delusion, “Since I might be rich myself one day, I won’t cast any aspersions on those who are lest they not grant my entrance to the club.”
Plus, calling people who detest the status quo “stinky hippies” goes way back. They sound like my dad in front of the tv set during the Vietnam war.
Anyone bold enough to protest the Iraq war got called into question, too. So for people so in love with the notion of of the individual and free speech, there has always been a kickdown process more visible when it gets down to brass tacks.
Christoph Hechl said,
October 19, 2011 at 1:02 am
That second paragraph in your comment actually surprised me a little. I have always thought it was just because i only saw everything from a distance, that i got this impression.
Your comment up there is the first time i see this mentioned by somebody else.
People argue (and act) in the name of a reality that doesn’t exist outside of their heads. To me that sounds pretty much like a serious mental disorder.
George Smith said,
October 19, 2011 at 10:39 am
A mental disorder it may be. But it’s been a common thing in America for the last couple of decades. Maybe longer.
The people who took Take This Job and Shove It seriously all turned over to the other side. Incidentally, it took someone who’d spent time in a US prison, David Allen Coe, to write that.