Via Wolcott, we find The Anchoress’s commenters making fun of bookstore employees and plotting murder:
The staff of book stores are almost always out on the left tail of the curve of political opinion. They either don’t realize that setting the temperature that high will drive away customers or they don’t care all that much since it is just a slightly above minimum wage job to them and if the store closes they will either write that great novel that they have been thinking about or go to work at Tas-T-Freez. The Democrat bigshot already lives in a gated community and with his family already secure in government jobs is not likely to experience any of the less pleasant consequences of massive immigration.
[snip]
Can you hear the “Let Them Eat Cake” attitude coming out of the mouths of those “gated community” inhabitants?
We all know what happened the last time someone said precisely that: head, guillotine, some assembly required. That’s something to ponder on.
Right out of college, I worked part-time in a little bookstore. We didn’t have sub-zero air conditioning, either, not because we were conserving energy but because thanks to the Dickens characters that were our landlords, the store barely broke even and there wasn’t enough money in the budget to double the electric bill every day in the summer. So yeah, it was warm, we kept the windows and door open, sold used books and hosted whoever wanted to make our place their hangout, recognizing that the more people who spent time there, the more stuff we sold. Like Wolcott, I hear the dulcet tones of utter bullshit in the unsolicited political commentary from the clerks and fellow customers; never once does anyone in a service job do that to customers, not and expect to keep her position. But what really stood out to me in these comments was the sense that the clerks … eh, fuck ’em, they’re just losers, really, who don’t need the job anyway. Because jobs are just toys, really, and another one can always be had.
Back then I badly needed that job to pay my own rent, since freelance writing then as well as now doesn’t exactly rake in the big bucks. It wasn’t something I was doing to pass the time before I wrote my novel (though I can’t speak for my fellow employees) and it certainly wasn’t something I was doing because the burger joint wasn’t hiring. I would have worked at that job quite happily the rest of my life had I not had to leave town, and to this day I consider the owner the best boss I ever had. I was working there because I loved books and literary people, because I needed a paycheck, because it was what I’d wanted to do since I first set foot in there years before.
Oh, and last I checked, writing a novel wouldn’t have gotten me out of part-time work, either. People who aren’t writers need to talk to a few before they mouth off about how we’re all living like Stephen King these days.
I’d say — without even touching the charming call for guillotining imaginary gated-community Democrats — that this is your typical rightwing contempt for the little people who need their jobs to survive, but that would be engaging in the kind of generalizations that, as the Anchoress herself so charmingly puts it, just alienate us from one another. God, I hate when that happens, too.
A.