I worked for one summer as a news announcer on WNRN (“New Rock Now”) in Charlottesville, VA. Every twenty minutes in the morning and once an hour in the afternoons I’d read a few headlines and engage in some quick banter with the host. (Aside: the morning shift was “Acoustic Sunrise” which I absolutely could not stand. The host was a very nice guy named, if I recall correctly John, but his music was capital-L lame. Sorry.) One of the stories involved someone who had been killed. I don’t remember what the story was about, but it was a Darwin Awards-esque thing. My uncle, who had been a professional DJ for years in Alaska, gave me a piece of advice: be careful about making fun of dead people.
So when I read Fake Steve Jobs’s piece this morning, I winced. He’s making fun of a guy who killed himself for losing a telephone. But it’s worked its way around the Web, and you may have already seen the following paragraph:
We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused—what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.
And despite I think much of the post being in poor taste, that paragraph is a stunning, sad (and, yes, condescending) piece of editorial. Being a guy from Virginia and not Michigan, labor issues aren’t something I’ve devoted a lot of thought to, but we all are going to have to, soon.
