The writers strike has produced some entertaining ads. It’s an admitted hard sell, though, making millionaires like the Desperate Housewives cast into sympathetic working stiffs when actual laborers in meat factories and on farms across the country don’t enjoy the benefit of real health and safety standards much less decent pay. Anyway, point is workers everywhere don’t even have a shot at fairness unless they band together. If the writers strike manages to underline that point again, then it’s a hella good thing. I know we’re not supposed to even think, much less write, such things in post-Reagan America—that it has come to seem downright ungrateful and anti-patriotic not to be just totally blissed out about the fact that corporations exist to pay us minimum wage and all, but still, we all know the Enron guys in “jail” are still better off than a lot of the working people in this country. While the writers are striking, can we propose a reality show where corporate criminals are sentenced to long stretches of chain-gang style labor in a pesticide-soaked Green Giant bean field or McDonald’s slaughterhouse?