A while ago I was in a hotel room at a conference with a person who is particularly bright. I flipped the channels past a news station that was discussing the opulence of Donald Trump's new home. How amazing the marble, granite, and gilding was. Ahhh. My friend said, "Isn't amazing what rich people can do?"
I got the joke. It is pathetic that our culture fixates on, believe it or not, just what can be purchased with money! Evidently, there is a correlation between how much money you have and how amazing your shit is. Research supports this.
The converse is also true. Americans love to fixate on those absurd things that poor people do. And the poorer people get in this country, the harder it is to peel yourself away from programs showing poor people sticking up banks and getting mauled by dogs. They never cease to entertain us! But, there is more and more of this trash, and it highlights a class issue. We laugh at poverty.
In today's issue of "Gosh, look at what those silly poor people do!" we find an ostensible poor person bathing in a Burger King wash basin. A full-on bubble bath. Watch poor person doing silly thing here!
Surprise #1 - This happens in Ohio, where manufacturing and wealth have gone screaming and running from the state, leaving in its "let's get to India and China" wake millions of people with families who have little means to support themselves. This makes laughing at the poor even funnier - I mean, if they'd simply negotiated their salaries southward to be competitive with the Chinese they'd still be working. RIght? Ohio has 4 of the top 10 declining cities in the US.
Surprise #2 - They are working fast food. Frankly, whenever I see someone bad-talking the staff at a fast food place I reckon that they deserve a snot in their food. These people are NOT paid enough to survive. They are sacrificing income to subsidize my life with inexpensive food.
The manager is in the room with him, which honestly doesn't surprise me. Sure, the Bush administration considers this manufacturing, but one really just needs an above-average pulse to move up to management. This isn't real manufacturing jobs, the kind that conjure the image of people with reasonable hours and benefits, tight knit communities of working and middle class folk, well-raised kiddos. Let's face it, people who live well and who are well educated are not going to commute into, let's say, Akron, to serve up Baconators.
When I see these stories, they make me sad. They make me think that the news is exploiting cheap and available tape of human oddities for the sake of hooking us for the next round of commercials. It also comes as no surprise to me that this tape was shown on Florida TV. Nor does it surprise me that it aired on CBS in that area, which I believe is owned by the Sinclair Group - the Nazis that ran the Swift Boats video.