I’m loving this Taibbi piece, in which he rips some little talk-radio turd for saying union workers are replaceable, while performers like Simon Cowell and Rush Limbaugh are not (yeah, tell it to the ghost of Morton Downey Jr.):
Yes, Colin, you spoiled little fuckhead, we can replace all of these people. After all, you’re right, none of them are truly valuable, at least not like Simon Cowell or Rush Limbaugh, anyway.
But we don’t always replace them, because some people in our past spent generations fighting to push us up above the level of savages. Unions aren’t perfect, and they don’t always pick the right causes to fight for, but they have to exist precisely because the vast majority of workers are replaceable, which is to say not special, which is to say vulnerable. Not that Cowherd would have any reason to know this, but that’s what a “job” is, as opposed to what he and I both have, careers — a job always involves shelving your own personal creativity and ambition to at least some degree, in order to push someone else’s idea along for a while.
Measuring people by how much numerical wealth they produce is a kind of psychopathy — it’s that kind of thinking that led to Larry Summers famously saying that African countries are “underpolluted,” because poisoning people in low-GDP African states makes less sense than poisoning the relatively more economically productive citizens of Western countries in Europe and America.
That kind of thinking is spreading, because our pop culture priests have succeeded in filling the population with shame and nervous self-loathing to the point where they think of anyone who isn’t an employer as a parasite, and anyone who isn’t rich and famous, or trying to be, as a loser. People even think of themselves this way, which is why there are so many down-and-out people voting to give tax breaks to the same bankers who’ve been robbing them for years, and booing when the mere concept of unions shows up for a few seconds in a football game. It’s sad, and a lot of it’s the fault of mean little assholes like Cowherd. Shame on him.
