You're Not Mad at United Airlines; You're Mad at America By&nbsp;Shane Ryan&nbsp;&nbsp;|&nbsp; April 10, 2017 &nbsp;|&nbsp; 12:56pm Photo via Twitter videoPOLITICS&nbsp;FEATURES&nbsp;UNITED AIRLINES Share&nbsp;Tweet&nbsp;Submit&nbsp;Pin There’s a saying that is sometimes attributed to Karl Marx or Slavoj Zizek—apocryphally, in both cases—that tidily sums up the existential angst some Americans feel at the start of a traditional work week: You don’t hate Mondays. You hate capitalism. The simple thesis here is that there’s nothing intrinsic to “Monday,” which is just a word we’ve invented to delineate every seventh day, that makes your average 9-5 worker miserable. The despair comes from the system, which invests “Monday” with meaning—this is the day you return to the cycle of repetitive, unsatisfying labor that fills you with loathing and anxiety. This&nbsp;system&nbsp;is the thing you should rage against; this is the thing you should change. “Monday” is a metonym, but a deceptively harmful one—a metonym in camouflage—because it has a way of diverting a person’s attention from the boot heel that is grinding her soul into dust. Instead, she takes the oppressive system as a given, and transfers her negative emotions to an inanimate, meaningless symbol—”Monday”—that is both immutable and impervious, since it is, very basically, nothing more than a day of the week. You may as well get mad at a rock. The dual effect of this transference is to deny the person any chance at changing his circumstances—since blaming Mondays instead of capitalism turns potential activism into fatalism—and to shield the system from criticism and reform. Okay. So you may have seen the situation on United Flight 3411 earlier today, when a passenger was&nbsp;forcefully dragged from his seat&nbsp;by cops after refusing to leave despite being randomly selected as a result of United over-booking the flight. It’s a disturbing scene, but no more so than any number of disturbing scenes you may have witnessed online: &nbsp;Follow Jayse D. Anspach&nbsp;@JayseDavid @United&nbsp;overbook&nbsp;#flight3411&nbsp;and decided to force random passengers off the plane. Here's how they did it: 8:01 PM - 9 Apr 2017 &nbsp; &nbsp;161,794161,794 Retweets &nbsp; &nbsp;137,927137,927 likes Paste’s&nbsp;Jacob Weindling summarized it thusly: So to recap, in a blind pursuit of profit, United overbooked the flight, didn’t offer enough to entice anyone to get off the plane, then in order to get their own employees on the flight, they removed ticketed passengers, and when one wouldn’t comply with their orders, they called the cops to pull a supposed doctor off the plane—bloodying his face in the process. Weindling also answered the reflexive question: “Well, what were they&nbsp;supposed&nbsp;to do?” I have an idea: don’t overbook the flight in the first place, and then make other people pay for your incompetence and greed…watching a multi-billion dollar business hire police to forcibly remove a paying customer not doing anything illegal is a jarring reminder of who really controls this country. Corporations clearly aren’t people, because citizens don’t have anywhere near this much power in the United Corporatist States of America. Already, United is being demonized online, which is both satisfying and warranted. But let’s tell the deeper truth here—United made a dumb decision, but essentially they just got unlucky that the problem landed on their laps, and it was their dirty laundry that got aired. They are a cruel agent, without a doubt, but they are not some lone wolf—they are a product of an indifferent system that increasingly devalues individual life, and that system is called America. We are the country where: <p styl