The GOP and the Historical Obsession with Work in America

Rep. John Bohener (R-Isengard), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Mordor), and Se. Mitch McConnel (R-TN) promote squeezing the most out of workers at the lowest possible cost to employers.

Rep. John Boehner (R-Isengard), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Mordor), and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-TN) advocate squeezing the most out of workers at the lowest possible cost to employers.

Americans love to work. Just ask any politician or corporate stooge, particularly of the conservative variety, and they’ll reaffirm this eternal truth. In American culture, work is everything: it’s how we spend the majority of the time we are so graciously granted on earth; it’s how we afford the necessities of life, like feeding and clothing ourselves, procuring shelter from the elements, and affording the cable through which we experience high art like Duck Dynasty.

Americans simply must love to work. Heck, they work longer hours than anyone else in the industrialized world, even though they’re getting less and less out of work as wages continue to stagnate, unions have been decimated, and vacation times wither away along with retirement-savings. Americans also love to toil even as study after study continues to highlight the health dangers associated with excessive work. If that’s not evidence that Americans are the ultimate large-scale ant farm, than what is?! After all, the French don’t work nearly as much as Americans and often report being happier, and Americans love to mock the French. Continue Reading

Christmas is for Capitalists: The Bourgeois History of American Yuletide Ideology

A depiction of a 19th century middle class New York Christmas. The amount of bourgeoise fumes stuffed into the this image is enough to make you want to reach for a guillotine.

Christmas has always been excessively commercial. Sorry, Charlie Brown.

The middle class is a big deal in American society. Last year, America’s ever-observant punditocracy, including southern-fried campaign guru and Gollum look-alike James Carville, harped endlessly about how corporate Democrat Barack Obama and Montgomery Burns stand-in Mitt Romney waged their electoral battle royal in the name of the American middle class. President Obama dived head-first into this quadrennial tradition of bourgeois boot-licking, blowing past Romney in terms of the number of times he mentioned the phrase “middle class” in campaign speeches.

American politicians universally exist as servants/toadies for the country’s oligarchs, but they nonetheless pepper their campaign rhetoric with appeals to the middle class because bourgeois identity may as well be considered “American identity.” Want proof of this? Look no further than Christmas.

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