Canada/U.S.A might now be a McJob nation, but if you listened to politicians, it's still a nation built of concrete and steel. Last night, for instance, when Obama (who actually, for all his talk of medical-record digitization, more vividly put forth images of train tracks and concrete bridges) talked of the unemployed, he made it seem as if they were all former factory workers, and we note that this article defends the unemployed by directing our attention to laid off mill workers, the oil patch, and Ontario factories -- not laid-off retail clerks, laid-off parents of children living in MacKenzie, Grandfalls, or Windsor, laid-off singles living in urbane abodes like downtown Toronto. So it probably is true that if politicians suggest that the laid-off, traditional values, old-style, working class/proletariat--people in car manufacturing (or who think they should be), for instance--are intrinsically lazy, they'll get in trouble for it. But if they target those working at McJobs, who refuse to work for less than twenty bucks an hour, as dolphin paints them, as "shifty" youth, will-never-grow-uppers, or those who look like they lack the stuff to ever find a way "back," the voting public might be more than okay with it: they might already be prone to see these people as irresponsible and dispensible: people we should be happy to be rid of, for their loss makes the nation feel pure, virus-free.
Note: If the Tyee would like me to write a fictional piece on the midnight adventures of a mob of MacChine-Gunning McJobbers, lead by a baby-boom house burning, Vanessa Richmond, styled a la Thomas Pynchon, I might be up for it. Could do the pubic good to see in clerks the potential to be a bit more than prickly.
Link: The Tyee
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