01.25.12
iSteve for God
From Mitch Daniels, another of the GOP”s querulous old men, so white and wispy you could almost see through him, last night: “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew.”
From the New York Times, re the special on iKit manufacturing in China:
“Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas …Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.”
A few months before Jobs died he, along with Mark Zuckerberg — another potential God appointee — were invited to dinner with the President. To talk about how to make jobs.
Fresh off the news, President Obama is bowing before consulting the two smartest men in the world today, Nobel laureate/Pulitzer prize winner Mark Zuckerberg and King of All Music, Steve Jobs.
The goal: How to create more jobs.
Jobs, whose name is most appropriate because he has made many many jobs in China, will probably tell the President the problem is the large number of no-skill sitting around people in the US.
“Stop counting them, Mr. President!??? he may advise. Future growth lies in more Harmonica or You’re Fired! apps and what not, particularly now that one of the rival cell phones brags it has 60,000 of them. Sixty thousand!
Nobel laureate/Pulitzer winner Mark Zuckerberg may tell the President that to create jobs … we must unleash the creative power of every American to make more social networking sites.
Neither of these guys are interested in making jobs for all these baggy and lumpy no-skill sitting around people.
I feel fine despising everything Apple. However, the urge to deify and mythologize those who don’t quite deserve it, anything that employs bad examples to further the culture of lickspittle, has always been strong in the American majority. Of which I’m distinctly not a part.
Mitch Daniels wasn’t alone last night.
The President invoked iGod iSteve, if in a slightly different context:
“It means we should support everyone who’s willing to work; and every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs.”
Hmmm, wanting to become the next person to take advantage of mass sweatshop-contracting for consumer electronics manufacturing in China, the next person to destroy an industry for the sake of purchasing a small piece of white plastic kit, the next person with an idea of progress that means writing millions of trivial software applications for instant gratification on hand-held networked computing devices …
And this slightly blasphemous cartoon is apt.
Related: Earlier in the series — iSteve for King