Hothouse Fleurs de Lis

Heres' to those brave French students putting it all on the line once again in the service of cradle to grave coddleage (triple word score). How dare the French state put two years of their young lives at risk to termination by an arbitrary merits system ! They are brave, oui? Non! Le Duck drops turds in their general direction!

Will noone come to the defense of these brave poetic souls in their hour of need? Amazingly, oui! Serial looner Barbara Ehrenreich rushes to the barricades with words of encouragement:

Was it only three years ago that some of our puffed up patriots were denouncing the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” too fattened on Camembert to stub out their Gaulois and get down with the war on Iraq? Well, take another look at the folks who invented the word liberté. Throughout the month of March and beyond, they were demonstrating, rioting, and burning up cars to preserve a right Americans can only dream of: the right not to be fired at an employer’s whim.

The French government’s rationale for its new labor law was impeccable from an economist’s standpoint: Make it easier for employers to fire people and they will be more willing to hire people. So why was Paris burning?

What corporations call “flexibility”—the right to dispose of workers at will—is what workers experience as disposability, not to mention insecurity and poverty. The French students who were tossing Molotov cocktails didn’t want to become what they call “a Kleenex generation”—used and tossed away when the employer decides he needs a fresh one.

You may recognize in the French government’s reasoning the same arguments Americans hear whenever we raise a timid plea for a higher minimum wage or a halt to the steady erosion of pensions and health benefits: “What?” scream the economists who flack for the employing class. “If you do anything, anything at all, to offend or discomfit the employers, they will respond by churlishly failing to employ you! Unemployment will rise, and you—lacking, of course, the health care and other benefits provided by the French welfare state—will quickly spiral down into starvation.”

I would post more of her article, but I fear that too large a dose of such stirring words will stir your stomachs to revolt all over your keyboards, and the Duck does not want to face the liability. It is part of the DD's insurance policy. I'm sorry, you will have to follow the link and read the rest for yourselves, after you e-mail me an electronically signed waiver of liability form absolving the DD of any damages done to your computer equipment, clothing and tastebuds.

I would pick this apart according to the usual anal-ytical DD method, but it is too easy, like overdone BBQ that just drips from the bone. I must raise the degree of difficulty, or it's just like shooting beached whales with a Tow missile. So, I challenge the Daily Duck denizens to once again take to verse, to honor this Ehenreichian effluence with a fitting paean.

Update: OK, so I'm rescinding the poetry requirement, please have at it. Dreck like this is too good(bad) to let go unfisked.