Why We Love to Hate Steve Jobs

The better you are, the more everyone hates you. Sorry, that's just how it is.  If two people were drowning--say, Lindsay Lohan or any other beautiful and talented young actress, and a fat, unemployed homeless bum, 99 out of 100 people would save the bum. And since most people suffer from feelings of inferiority, objects of hatred are always in demand. A good person to hate is someone you will never meet, like movie stars, members of the royal family, any of the current crop of politicians or Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The latter, newly deceased, is fresh meat--much fresher than the likes of Palin or Pelosi--so the masses, including editors of all the increasingly emaciated magazines and newspapers, are busy feasting on his carcass.

Despite the fact that everyone and his mother has an iPad and an iMac and an iPhone and an iPad, and despite the fact that you can barely squeeze inside one of the nation's 357 insanely crowded Apple stores, Steve Jobs has become America's whipping boy since his death a couple of weeks ago. At first hailed by all as a hero, the natural backlash soon followed and everyone started hating him because he "made his products in Chinese sweat shops and paid the poor little little children only pennies! He was a very bad man! Sure, he was a genius who made your life better, but he was very nasty at staff meetings! He had a mean side!"

Oh shut up. If Jobs had paid more to have the damn things made, you wouldn't be reading this now on your Mac or your whatever, and I wouldn't be writing it on mine because we couldn't afford them. Besides, those who took those jobs did so willingly and were most likely grateful to have them. The plain truth is that in today's envy-based culture, successful, beautiful, intelligent and thin people are despised by the stupid or fat or ugly failures among us; it's called jealousy. This is not new: I can still remember high school, back in the last century, when the prettiest girls in our class, many of them very nice people, were always being whispered about by the rest of us: They were bitches! They were really dumb! They were sleeping with our math teacher! Oops, that's another blog--but you get my point. The next time you hate someone, ask yourself why.