Hat's Off to the "Average Guy"

Well.

My posts today regarding Amy Winehouse have set off a bit of a stir - the suggestion being that I'm, well, insensitive in commenting on her passing.

Maybe so. Maybe so.

And, as articulate that I pretend to be sometimes, I have been outdone today by another blogger, Reid, who, in turn, was relying upon the wisdom of Al Bundy of all people - and I think it perhaps captured better than I did my own feelings respecting Amy Winehouse's passing.

It's not so much Amy the person (obviously, as I never met her) it's the idea of how we lionize people who may not warrant such admiration, and ignore others who are much more deserving.

So.

In response to why I find the whole media response to Amy Winehouse's death so irritating, I quote Reid, who, in turn, quotes Al Bundy:

"So you think I'm a loser? Just because I have a stinking job that I hate, a family that doesn't respect me, a whole city that curses the day I was born? Well, that may mean loser to you, but let me tell you something. Every morning when I wake up, I know it's not going to get any better until I go back to sleep again. So I get up, have my watered-down Tang and still-frozen Pop Tart, get in my car with no upholstery, no gas, and six more payments to fight traffic just for the privilege of putting cheap shoes on the cloven hooves of people like you. I'll never play football like I thought I would. I'll never know the touch of a beautiful woman. And I'll never again know the joy of driving without a bag on my head. But I'm not a loser. 'Cause, despite it all, me and every other guy who'll never be what he wanted to be are still out there being what we don't want to be forty hours a week for life. And the fact that I haven't put a gun in my mouth, you pudding of a woman, makes me a winner."

It's not, perhaps, so much that we celebrate the life of Amy Winehouse - it's that we refuse to celebrate the life of the Al Bundy's of this world.

It's the failure, as my masthead says, to "consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from."

So.

Then.

Raise a toast to the dumb bastards who struggle too hard for too little for too long - and still at the end of every hard earned day, find some reason to believe.