Monday, September 13, 2010

And why should we care, exactly?

Today the unnamed Courier editor takes a big chunk of the editorial page to write up a story about a coming labor action in pro football. Somehow I missed it, but apparently Prescott has a pro football team, so this is relevant to our area, and sports is way more important than I ever imagined, which is why this piece didn't go in the sports section.

I'll say it again: I was born without the sports gene, and I could not give a rat's ass about physical combat as entertainment. So I don't read that part of the paper. If you care, be my guest and write your own blog.

But what creeps in here is the editor's inability to pass an opportunity to bash unions. See, the editor loves democracy, and the editor is devoted to the idea of market mechanisms, but when individual workers come together to employ those principles for their own betterment, somehow that's a bad thing.

In this case he doesn't quite take a side in the labor dispute (which, I notice, won't come to a head for six months). Rather, he seems peeved that the players made a gesture that forced him to think about the issue for a second, delaying his enjoyment of the violence and threatening the editor with withdrawal from his violence habit next year.

Pity the poor editor, esconced in his Barcalounger, remote in hand and beer and chips at the ready, channel-surfing in vain for his favorite entertainment as one of the few remaining American unions with enough clout to meet its management in a fair fight tries to make its members a little richer through nonviolent negotiation. What a nightmare.

Psst, Tim: "Local, local, local," remember?

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