Remember the ending of Back To the Future when Biff the bully is waxing the Mcflys’ car? This is actually the funniest unintended time capsule moment in movie, because it shows Biff as a self employed auto detailer, and this is supposed to be the bad timeline for him.
And yet for the standards of the 80s it makes sense. Even though he wasn’t his own boss, Biff’s boomer corporate career in the original timeline was better. He had a high five maybe even six figure salary at a white collar job where he barely had to do anything, and probably also a generous retirement pension to look forward to, because those still existed back then.
Such an existence is completely unknown to the white American man today. All those niches have been hijacked and filled by various ethnic mafias, or just don’t exist anymore.
Now being Biff the auto detailer, a private contractor who actually networked well enough to earn a living, is a ludicrous, unattainable fantasy for most people. Yet 40ish years ago that was the absolute minimum any moron could achieve with barely any effort.
Imagine trying to explain to a Gen Z why Mcfly would hire his wife’s attempted rapist. Because in boomer land, a dude making another dude do manual labor is humiliating. But the economic context of that joke has been gone for many years.
However, such jokes also reveal how the boomer Faustian system eventually, inevitably collapsed. Jobs that are pure grift are high status and enviable, while jobs that produce actual value, like auto detailer, are ridiculed as something only a loser would do.
Ian Kummer
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