I hadn't heard about the actor Geoffrey Owens being job-shamed for doing what almost all actors do, taking a day job considered to be menial until right before I wrote this.
There's everything more dignified about bagging groceries than there is in having appeared with Donald Trump on "The Apprentice" or "Celebrity Apprentice". I can imagine that there were lots of "celebrities" who were degraded and humiliated and who sank lower than actors so often have to working with Donald Trump than Geoffrey Owens did doing honorable work. There's often a really big price to be paid in working in any of the arts, definitely, for almost everyone in them, a financial price, the kind that makes you have to work a job like Owens did. The thing I like about this story the most is Owens saying that he felt his work in a grocery store was honorable and nothing to feel shame over.
FOX, mentioned in the post immediately blow this, and the Daily Mail were the media sources trying to hold up Mr. Owens to ridicule, two of the biggest cesspools in the media. Bagging groceries is far more honorable work than getting paid millions to work for those bottom sucking corporations.
"Economic anxiety" takes such curious forms, doesn't it?
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of that is part of this, since "economic anxiety" would seem to mean racism. FOX and The Daily Mirror are major sources of using "ecnomic anxiety" to mock black people. I wouldn't be surprised of lots of the FOX audience wouldn't like to have a job bagging groceries. I spoke with a friend who's knocking on doors, campaigning for a seat in the Maine Legislature, he said that he can always tell when someone watches FOX. One he told me about was a really pathetic guy living in a totally dilapidated trailer, the backside covered with obviously scrounged, cheap fake wood paneling with spray-on foam to fill in the cracks. He said he was on SS disability insurance but all he wanted to do was rail at "welfare cheats" "illegal aliens" and when he pressed him on what he'd like to see the legislature do all he could come up with is he wants online horse race gambling made legal because he can't afford the gas to drive to Sanford to place bets.
DeleteFOX is the Volkisher Beobachter of Americannazism.
Remember the people who told Obama to keep the government out of their Medicare?
Delete"Economic anxiety" was always a euphemism for racist attitudes. Or a way of ignoring the racism, because the only thing ad bad ad a racist is an elitist. And who doesn't want to pretend they don't look down on the "lower classes"? Which is not what is admitted is how they think of them, but actions speak louder, and all that.
The stereotypes people live by.
DeleteA while back I started wondering about the seemingly irresistible allure of hate, angry hate and its relationship with snobbery. I came to the conclusion that it's a lot bigger than, though still related to, how the American left went wrong when it went from the SCLC and MLKjr. to the campus-based, anti-religious, lefty magazine style left in the late 1960s. The snobbery and self-righteousness of the campus crowd didn't do a thing to stem the reaction against the Civil Rights movement. That might have been almost inevitable given the public face that the media put on racism during the height of the movement, it was a lot safer to focus on the poor-white "trash" than the wealthy establishment behind it for the media. And to put a purely regional spin on it (again, probably inevitable considering where the apartheid laws were most entrenched) none of which helped. I believe MLK jr. himself realized that some of the worst of it came when they tried to extend the movement North. The reaction in Boston was about as ugly as it got in a lot of places, the North West became a haven for white supremacists.
Some of the most racist people I heard in the 1970s were college-educated gay men in New York City and college graduates from Northern Maine. There are lots of them in Southern Maine, too, though. I'm thinking of specific people.