Overworked, Under-appreciated, and Unemployed in America - The Argument for Inefficiency

In the United States, we don’t have an unemployment problem. We have an underemployment problem and an overworking problem. The problem with our economy is it is built to run cleanly, solidly, and with as little overhead as possible.  We have an efficient capitalist society (don’t worry, this won’t be a full on socialist rant) that trims off the excess, and pulls us down to the lowest common denominator.  This is seen as a good thing.  It keeps businesses offering goods and services for the lowest prices around – they make money, we save money.  In theory, it works to perfection.  In actuality, when we talk about trimming off the excess, we aren’t talking about buying too many parts to make our widgets.  What we are talking about is trimming off the excess jobs.  What we are talking about is trimming off excess workers.  We are talking about trimming excess people.  This is what efficiency does to our society, and this lack of specificity sterilizes our society from what is happening to the “last in/first out” of us.  We need less efficiency, because it benefits all of us – the workers, corporations, and government included.

NBC's Hannibal strikes a comfortable tone. (With a warning to NBC on how NOT to screw it up.)

Serial Killers are en vogue right now, at least on TV.  A&E has “Bates Motel” which, if I were in charge of branding for A&E, I would’ve never let that get through.  It makes it seem as though the show is about the day-to-day operations of running a small, roadside motor hotel, in between the brutal murders of an embezzler, a police detective, and a third attempted murder.  Fox has “The Following,” with Kevin Bacon, which has ridden out many of the early hiccups and last-minute character alterations (I guess he’s… not an alcoholic anymore?) to have a fun, coherent, ever-changing show about a serial killer cult.  Showtime’s Dexter is wrapping up after this upcoming eighth and final season.  There are, of course, behavior science shows like SVU and Criminal Minds, but the other, more heralded and critically acclaimed hit is NBC’s Hannibal, a revival of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter character, including Jack Crawford as the director of the Behavioral Sciences unit at the FBI. There is a reason for why Hannibal has received its much deserved praise. The acting and plots have been fantastic, and the theme for the show, with a potentially insane criminal behavior forensic psychologist assisting the FBI, all add to the appeal. But, it is the tone in which the show is portrayed that truly sets it apart from the rest of the gory pack.

A Modest Proposal: We Need To More Quickly Jump To Prejudicial Conclusions

**Before you read, if you think what follows is to be taken at face value, then you, faceless internet reader, do not know me, a faceless internet poster. If you weren't aware, "A Modest Proposal" is a reference to Jonathan Swift, satirist. Carry on.**

I think it’s time we take a look in the mirror, America.  Let’s look at our big, beautiful, pudgy faces, probably smeared with a combination of chocolate and bacon grease, our hair a little askew, some type of bad mustache with a few stray hairs, and ask ourselves, when did we change?  When did we become something different than who we used to be? We never used to accept news coverage that was this shoddy, this rote, and this lacking in information.  As a country, we used to demand MORE.

As a country, do we really want to become the type of people who are afraid – and that’s what it is: FEAR – to jump to conclusions, and make wildly speculative, semi-to-fully racist accusations based on nothing other than our own internal prejudices and fears?

A quick post about commenting

Please.  Engage me.  Reviews and opinions suck if they are a one-way street.  I'm not some 24 hour news network person.  I'm seeing around 20 people, on average, reading my piddling reviews of The Americans (more shows to be added!)  There isn't any comment approval, so unless you're trying to sell me viagra or a way to make money from home for just hours a week, I welcome the flaming/trollery discourse.

A modest proposal for a better network TV programming setup that is totally implausible because Network TV is a stupid, antiquated medium that will die a slow and painful death.

Jack Shepherd’s Tattoos.

Landry and Tyra kill a drifter just to get an erection (or something.)

Kim Bauer and the mountain lion.

The Puerto Rican Day Parade.

Great TV shows have awful episodes.  Why?  Because, Great TV shows, if they hang around long enough, run out of ideas.  How many times can terrorists kidnap Kim Bauer?  How many people from the tail section can crop up in LOST with an interesting backstory that – surprise! – isn’t congruent with their persona on the forbidden island of mystery and electromagnetism?

Hoarding Nostalgia

I am someone who doesn’t really like to throw things away.  Case in point: I have this old, beaten up messenger bag that has been with me since 2005.  I started using it regularly in 2006, and it basically became the thing I carried with me everywhere I went. I stuffed things into it, forced its buckles to snap shut - tore at it, dragged it through the rain, threw it, dropped it, scraped it against all manner of things.  Surprisingly, though I imagined myself carrying this messenger bag, which I began to call my “murse” throughout the streets of lower manhattan (and I did - my senior year at NYU), I mostly toted it with me in Northern NY - to and from work at this crappy little water park called the Enchanted Forest/Water Safari. No one even bothered to make fun of me, because they knew I didn’t care.  When I moved on to Columbus to attend The Ohio State University, the bag came with me.  I carried it with me everywhere.  It became rather threadbare.  It came with me still to Stony Brook, NY, to my first professional job.  It’s with me now in Montclair, NJ.