The Hidden Danger of "Real"

Daily Show last night has some really hilarious and biting segments on "real" america vs. "fake" America:http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=188637&title=quiz-are-you-a-real-american

Which reminded me of my first couple of years out of college when my friends and I constantly talked about getting "real" jobs. A "real" job was one in which you used white collar skills, were paid a certain amount, got benefits, etc. But we didn't really have a term for the jobs we were doing: waitressing, retail, bar tending, moving furniture, etc. This really bugged me at the time. We GenXers were "slackers" in the popular culture but in reality, most of us were holding down 2 or more of these ambiguous "unreal" jobs to make ends meet.

I felt at the time that if we continued to denigrate the work we were doing as somehow "unreal" we only continued to lower the stock of our entire generation. A job is a job. There is no such thing as a "real" job.

And so the GOP continues this trend with their strange, Marxist campaign now where "plumbers" and folks that work with their hands are real and hard working, while other kinds of work is somehow not real. Certain parts of the country are "real" others are not. Small towns are "real," cities are not.

It may seem silly and innocuous but if you think about the language being used, what we're doing is rendering things invisible. When you can't reduce something down to fear or racism or anger, you resort to just making it disappear. We don't say that the counter parts to "real" things are unreal or fake or imaginary. We don't call them anything at all. They're left undefined and null. Only "real" things count.