(From the Head of the Q.U. Crypto-Political Sciences Department)
Look at this Ad for McDonalds. It features a young female of indeterminate ethnicity, and the taglines:
"Discover a career that fulfills your potential."
And
"It’s not just a job, it’s a career."
Okay, first of all, I have no wish to imply that those who work at McDonalds do not put in a hard day’s work. They certainly do, more than many in other more prestigious jobs.
But gods, how depressing if a job at McDonalds actually FULFILLS your POTENTIAL!
Seriously. If you feel this applies to you, I want you to go out right now to your local Community College (or Q.U. extension campus) and take some frickin’ continuing education classes if nothing else. Learn to draw, or paint, or dance, or sculpt, or take pictures, or write, or make nifty web pages, or even to cook culinary delights. Or go to a site like www.volunteermatch.org and flip burgers at a homeless shelter. Something! Please!
And the fact that it is not just a job but a career is, unfortunately, increasingly true for more and more Americans as our manufacturing and technology jobs are outsourced or shipped overseas where labor is cheaper, and/or better trained since they support actual working education and job training systems.
In fact, I just saw in the news today that
And egads, let’s not even get into the subtext of having a female minority face posted above such implications that a low-wage service job would fulfill your potential.
So how is this genre-related? Well, admittedly only loosely – in the sense that the Republicans are clearly living in a fantasy world when it comes to the economy, and the Democrats’ solutions to the problem sometimes sound like science fiction. And I fear that if McCain gets elected and pushes his backwards solutions on the country, this will turn into a true horror story.
