Monday, January 12, 2009

Just when I think I can't have a bigger crush on Mike Rowe


I'm a big fan of the Discovery show Dirty Jobs, and the show wouldn't be the same without Mike's charms. However, this FORA.TV video he made in December just completely takes it to a new level. The video is about 20 minutes.

2 comments:

PJ said...

I chuckled through the whole thing but got a little choked up towards the end. My husband is in construction, difficult work, and I prefer manual labor to office work. I've lost friends over this issue. From where I'm sitting, it seems to me sometimes that a lot of people in this country think they're landed gentry and don't want to do, or send their children to school to learn to do, the "dirty" work that needs to be done. Then some of these same people complain about immigrant workers (I'm not talking illegal immigrants). Without them I don't know if our community would never have ever really recovered from Hurricane Ivan. Some of the work they did - well, you don't want to know. Not too long after Ivan I was talking to a woman who has a PhD in sociology and teaches at college level and she said that she was completely fascinated to watch the recovery workers while she was staying in her condo on the beach. You would have thought she was talking about a rare and endangered species but then I realized she never "sees" the people who do "dirty" work. She was completely disconnected from that reality and only seemed to understand sociology in it's most theoretical sense. I meet people like this everyday and it's astonishing TO ME that educated, well-to-do people are so unable to identify with the process that keeps them "afloat". Maybe this downturn in the economy will awaken people to the possibility of dignity for whatever work one does as long as it's honest. I've already written tomorrow's post for my daily photo blog and it's about the Enron people who taught Wall Street how to speculate in the energy market. That is why our gas prices went up and now have fallen. They had the story on 60 Minutes. I'm sure a lot of people think working on Wall Street is saying you're rich and powerful and above it all, but I think they're disgraceful.

Mike Rowe should have a Cabinet post.

ilex said...

Here here, PJ.

I am also amazed at the Boomer richie rich folks who are so disconnected from the things that make civilization work, probably the very work that their own parents did; I am equally amazed/ disgusted at all the young kids and Gen-Ys who don't know how to do ANYTHING except text on their cellphones. We do need a wake up call. Maybe it'll come in the shape of a big ol' 21st century Great Depression.

Yeah. I got choked up at the end of the video, too.