Yep, instead of joining the work force, grads are turning their Ipods up, and flip flops homeward, to sponge off mom and dad, because, according to the Times, “the work offered doesn’t match their self-assessed market value.”

Meaning, they’re special, so their jobs must be special. I mean, you can’t have a precious one-of-a-kind snowflake working in the mailroom! Snowflakes can’t open packages! Snowflakes can’t make coffee! Snowflakes are there to be appreciated, as snowflakes!

And so the job becomes another spoke in the wheel of self-fulfillment, something to accentuate the belly button ring and Asian lettered tattoo on your pelvis (which reads “stupid white person”).

You could say this is the ultimate consequence of self-love buoyed by a safety net. It’s not the kid who’s doing this, but the parents who indulge them. Kick ‘em out, they’ll find work.

But to me, by not accepting work, they’re missing out on a key part of life: having a job you hate. A rotten first job teaches you to love the better jobs that come later. Plus, they can be fun! A rotten job means you can invent new ways to pass time, i.e. drinking rum in the bathroom. And the best part: you won’t care, because the job doesn’t matter. You won’t have sleepless nights – just boring afternoons. In a real sense, taking the job you don’t want creates a freedom other people envy.

And also, it’ll get you out of the house. Which you owe your parents.

And if you disagree with me, you’re worse than Helen Thomas.

Tonight, we have John Gibson, the lovely Brooke Goldstein, the hilarious Joe Devito.

And Sharlto Copley (the star of “District 9,” and the new “A-Team”!)

Here’s the tape:

What does she have against technology? Perhaps when she was young she was bullied by a blender.

No matter – here’s the lesson.

Naomi Campbell is what happens when a supermodel is no longer super. See, all your life, you were waited on hand and foot: you never had to think about paying bills, arranging travel, walking your tiny stupid dog, or wiping your mysteriously runny nose. You become, in the purest sense, a machine of entitlement. You live to receive, never to give.

Then suddenly it stops. You’ve grown old, and what you have people no longer want. And the entitlements drift away. And what happens? You lash out in frustration, anger, denial.

What I’m saying is Naomi Campbell is Greece.

Tonight we’ve got….

Steven Crowder!

Jesse Joyce!

Courtney Friel!

Father Jonathan Morris!

I was at the Houston airport the other day and I couldn’t find my baggage carousel. I asked the employee there where it was:

“What does it say on the screen?” he asked grumpily.

“Well, it says Carousel 2 but…”

“Then that’s what it is. You should be old enough to know that,” he said as he went off mumbling about how they weren’t paying him enough. 

Anyway, it turned out that Carousel 2 wasn’t working and I had to pick up my luggage at Carousel 3, but I digress.  I had two more run-ins with airport employees, all of whom were putting out the same vibe that the crumminess of their jobs was somehow my fault.  In this country, people are of such an entitlement mentality that they want to blame everybody they comes across, requiring them to legitimately do their job and serve a purpose. I hate to say this but…

More often than not, people who are poor…. are right where they should be.

Nobody likes being broke. As somebody who’s had to live out of a 1982 Datsun, trust me, I know. I also understand that the first step to improve your situation is to fix the problem that landed you there in the first place.

The mistake that all “long-term poor people” make is putting others under a microscope in an attempt to set blame. That right there is a true loser’s mentality (or “poppycock” if you will).

When a great fighter loses a fight, he analyzes his loss extensively to look for possible fixes. He’ll watch tape, review the footwork and counter-punches, but most importantly, he’ll take a good, long look inside of himself. He’ll figure out which possible repairs are within his control and take charge of it. That’s what separates the champions from the “bums,” as Burgess Meredith so eloquently put it.

The same applies to life. If you’re unhappy with your circumstances, then change them. Don’t blame the government or your boss or the guy down the street who’s better looking than you (exceptions include Hugh Jackman and George Clooney).  Just take some Pepto-Bismol and be a man (or woman, for all of you bullish feminists).

Until then, how about shutting your mouth and doing the job you’re paid to do?  We don’t need any more Sean Penn’s running around.

Doing your job and doing it well may result in long-term success. What a concept!

In a nation where failure is rewarded with bailouts, the successful are public enemy number one and society’s nannies spread the lie that everyone is a winner, a simple TV singing contest provides the loudest voice of bedrock conservative values like hard work and personal achievement.  And that voice has an English accent.

For the three folks who don’t know because they have been living in a cavern next to Osama bin Laden since 2002, “American Idol” has wannabe crooners appear before a panel of four judges and warble some song for about sixty seconds.  The viewers vote (by paying a buck to the phone company) on who stays in the contest and who gets tossed off, but before the voting the singers get feedback.  This is when the fun begins.

Three of the judges are almost always positive.  Randy Jackson, a producer who calls people “Dawg,” usually says something along the lines of “You really worked that out” or “Every week, you get up there and bring it.”  Kara DioGuardi, a songwriter, mostly urges the singers “to show us who you are.”  Paula Abdul, who looks astonishingly like she did back when she was making records in the 80’s, absolutely loves everything about everyone.  Her critiques are rambling, often incoherent affirmations not only of the singers’ performance but their essential beings – “That was beautiful, moving, heartbreaking, and I can feel that your inner beauty shining through and look, there’s a squirrel and I have a hat.  I love you.”

None of this could be considered criticism.  It is mostly validation, criticism’s arch-nemesis and the bane of anyone actually trying to improve himself. 

It’s the fourth judge, English expat Simon Cowell, who makes “Idol” so conservative and so refreshing.  Because he just doesn’t care.  And it’s glorious.

“That was bloody awful,” he will casually observe.  Then the camera will pan to the 22-year old singer slash Hooters girl as her jaw drops in the face of an undeniable truth no one has ever dared tell her before. 

“But singing is my dream,” she’ll protest.

“Get a new dream,” Simon will reply without a hint of emotion, “because your singing is a nightmare.  Go home.”  And they usually do – the audience tends to vote off those not making the Cowell cut.

There are still a few places left in American society where hard truth and unrelenting standards still intersect – courtrooms, basic training, match.com.  But those are exceptions.

Schools ban competitive games, stop designating valedictorians and promote everyone with a pulse to protect the tender feelings of those who fail to achieve.  Teachers whine endlessly about the tyranny of standardized tests and the oppression that is accountability.  Auto companies mismanage themselves until their capitalized value is less than that of Arby’s while the wizards of Wall Street flush trillions on deals that would make P.T. Barnum blush, yet they all get checks from Uncle Sam.  People do stupid things – like buy houses they couldn’t afford on twice their income or have eight kids with no husband – and end up with cash subsidies and sympathetic profiles for the geriatrics who still watch the CBS Evening News. 

It’s clear many of these contestants have never been told the truth about their singing – that is, been criticized – in their life.  It stuns them – someone has pointed out that they are less than perfect!  They are flabbergasted.  It’s like Simon has just lectured them in Swahili.

“Well,” they will stammer, “I think I did really well and I had fun out there.” 

Only in a society where children’s’ self-esteem has been made the Holy Grail of the educational system could a 19-year old communications major from Maryland State with a love of show tunes presume to place her opinion about singing on the same scale with that of a 30-year record industry vet who could tile the floor of his mansion with the gold records he’s honchoed.  And who lied to this young woman and told her that the amusement she derived from her activity is somehow relevant to evaluating the skill she displayed in executing it? 

But you can see in the eyes of the smart ones that they are thinking about what Simon said.  That’s good – criticism is the key to improvement.  Validation is the key to staying lousy.

Simon, like all rebels, comes in for his share of grief.  He is mocked for his huge ego, but he has a right to a healthy ego – Simon is tremendously successful music impresario.  He earned it.  The problem is the huge egos of people who have not.

Mostly, Simon is accused of taking pleasure in slashing the contestants down to size, but a closer look proves that is just not so.  Simon is never happy when trashing a performance – there’s no smile, no hint of delight.  If anything, he is irritated, offended that he and the audience were presented with a poorly arranged, lazily performed, overindulgent mess of a performance.  The only time he is clearly happy, in fact, is when someone does well.

“That was brilliant,” he will say in exactly the same way he just told a lesser performer that she sounded like a broken woodchipper with a chest cold.  But you can see the comer of his thin lips turn upwards in delight.  Simon does not enjoy failure.  He enjoys earned success. 

Where society seeks to avoid at all costs “stigmatizing” people by telling the truth about them, Simon swims upstream against this feel-good nonsense like some kind of truth-telling salmon.  Like so much of society, many of the contestants show up believing they are somehow entitled to validation.  In the past, this misconception would have been dispelled by parents and teachers.  Now it’s up to Simon.

The American people are hungry for the kind of conservative values like hard work, discipline and healthy competition that “Idol” rewards.  The show is a huge hit and Simon is its (pardon the expression) heart.  At the risk of inflating his ego further, Simon Cowell is clearly the most important British contribution to Anglo-American civilization since the Magna Carta.