Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Steven Slater: A hero for our times?

The former JetBlue flight attendant’s dramatic leave-taking—down the chute with beer in hand—resonated with thousands of Americans.

“Steven Slater is the folk hero we’ve been wanting—nay, needing,” said Jessi Klein in TheDailyBeast.com. The 38-year-old flight attendant quit his job last week in “epic fashion,” using the cabin intercom to curse out a rude passenger before grabbing a beer from the beverage cart and exiting via the plane’s inflatable emergency chute. He was later arrested and charged with reckless endangerment. Slater’s dramatic rendition of “take this job and shove it” obviously sent a “vicarious thrill” through our stressed-out nation, because within a couple of days, he had 200,000 fans on his Facebook page, a legal defense fund, and an agent fielding offers from TV executives. The immediate cause of Slater’s meltdown may have been, as Slater claims, a passenger cracking him on the head with an overhead bin door, said Daniel Gross in Slate.com. But the reason his “cathartic meltdown” resonated so deeply with the American public was that Slater, like so many of us, was contending with a teetering economy that’s pushing workers far too hard “without adequate reward.”

What a pathetic excuse for inexcusable behavior, said Shmuley Boteach inWashingtonPost.com. When did we elevate whiny brats to hero status? While the nation fawns over this ill-tempered quitter, hundreds of thousands of young Americans are putting their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan, enduring “pressures that a spoiled child like Steven Slater can scarcely comprehend.” Where are their fans? “What does it really say about American culture” that we worship those who crack under pressure more than those who handle it with courage and stoicism? The notion that anyact of rebellion must be admirable, said Stanley Crouch in the New YorkDaily News, is downright juvenile. Those lionizing Slater need to grow out of their childish resentment of all authority and “find an actual hero to bet on. Life still makes them.”

Slater seems less heroic with each passing day, said the New York Daily News in an editorial, and “less amusing.” Police have not found a single passenger who corroborates Slater’s version of events. Some say he was in a state of “near hysteria” long before his now-legendary deplaning, flinging an oxygen mask to the cabin floor after giving the safety demonstration and bumping into passengers without apologizing. Even if we accept Slater’s account, said The Austin American-Statesman, it would only have taken one unsuspecting baggage handler standing under the chute when Slater deployed it for this story to have ended tragically. Safety must be the top priority for workers in the airline industry, and while many of us may identify with Slater’s frustrations, “it doesn’t excuse what he did.”

Still, said Joanna Weiss in The Boston Globe, don’t you find it just a bit inspiring? Whether or not Slater was bopped on the head by a rude passenger, it’s clear that he was having “a really bad day,” as we all do from time to time. But unlike most of us, Slater found the moxie, and the props, to express his frustration in truly dramatic fashion. Reckless though it may have been, said Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.com, Slater’s swashbuckling exit struck a chord with millions of Americans stuck in “terrible, soul-sucking jobs” that they aren’t in a position to leave. For this reason alone, he will go down in American folklore as the man who scored “a ‘We’re not gonna take it’ win for working stiffs everywhere.”

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach hosts ‘The Shmuley Show’ on 77 WABC in NYC. He is the founder of This World: The Values Network, and is the author, most recently, of ‘Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life.’ Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.