The cool clique inevitably reveals itself as the loser league.
In Napoleon Dynamite, this phenomenon plays out during the school-auditorium-dance-routine scene, when cool kid Don delivers a patronizing “pfft,” as his classmates go crazy over the title character’s sweet moves. You see it in Revenge of the Nerds, when the dorks switch places with the jocks on the campus totem pole to the sound of “We Are the Champions.”
Life imitated art, this week, as detractors of The Donald dismissed his deal to keep Carrier, which announced a move to Mexico earlier this year, in Indiana.
“I think it’s all a PR move,” Chuck Jones, president of United Steelworkers Local 1999, maintained last week of negotiations, adding, “I’d be shocked if anything was done.”
But something got done. Not airy promises to usher in “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” but concrete action occurred to save actual jobs worked by actual people.
“Companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences,” Trump announced at the air-conditioner plant on Thursday. That’s another way of saying that you can no longer drink from the federal trough, as you piss on the people who fill it. United Technologies, Carrier’s parent company, derives about $6 billion in revenue from the federal government.
Citing deregulation and a push to decrease corporate taxes from 35 to 15 percent, the president-elect added a carrot to his stick, informing: “I just want to let all of the other companies know we’re going to do great things for business. There’s no reason to leave anymore.”
But saving 1,100 jobs before taking the oath of office failed to impress the pfft people.
“He is partially following through on a campaign promise, but this is not stemming the flow of offshoring in the United States,” Ryan Lizza said on CNN. “I don’t think Donald Trump is the first president to visit factories,” David Gergen felt compelled to point out, adding: “One thing this whole tableau does not address is the impact of automation.”
Translation? Pfft.
“It is not good enough to save some of these jobs,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) complained. “Trump made a promise that he would save all of these jobs, and we cannot rest until an ironclad contract is signed to ensure that all of these workers are able to continue working in Indiana without having their pay or benefits slashed.”
The senator took 704 words in the Washington Post to say one onomatopoeia: pfft.
Trump’s predecessor failed to drop the dime to save these jobs, during his last year in office. Trump, not yet on the federal payroll, did so before day one. That’s nothing to pfft at.
The pfft people demonstrate a sore-loser, rule-or-ruin attitude of the kind they accused Republicans of harboring after Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) in 2010 said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Some Democrats embody the trait they charged Republicans of displaying not so long ago. In booing when Americans cheer the president-elect winning back more than a thousand jobs, they cast themselves as losers. More so, they showed how petty political hatred clouds judgment.
Union members, many of them Democrats, received an early Christmas gift from the president-elect. Partisan Scrooges say, “Humbug!”
Classmates voting for Pedro surely displeased Summer Wheatley. When Gilbert won the presidency of the Greek Council, the Alpha Betas trashed the nerds’ house. The condescending cool kids feeling their clique entitled to the presidency reacted on script in response to Trump’s (and America’s) victory this week.
Pfft.