Well, it looks like I wasn’t audacious enough in my prediction. I wrote the other day:
Last night there was the story about the Jet Kabluey flight attendant. This morning I caught something on one of the morning news shows about a woman attacking a McDonald’s drive-thru cashier over a McNuggets disagreement (“Well, they do always [expletive deleted] at the drive-thru” — Cosmo).It’s August. So, I predict one or two more freak-outs will cause some bored reporter or producer to concoct a “recession rage” narrative. The down economy has Americans mad as hell and they’re taking it out on each other.The only thing that has kept such stories from dominating the airwaves already is the fact that Barack Obama and the Dems control Washington. If this was going on in, say, the summer of ’07, we’d already have a Newsweek cover story written by Jonathan Alter along the lines of “Is The Bush Economy Making us Crazy?”
Well, now it’s already a cliche to say that the Jet Blue is a metaphor. From the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Hart said the 2010 contest is being pulled by the sentiment associated with the JetBlue flight attendant who fled his plane via the emergency chute after an altercation with a passenger. Calling it the “JetBlue election,” Mr. Hart said: “Everyone’s hurling invective and they’re all taking the emergency exit.”