On October 5, there were two tragedies. The first, under cover of twilight in New York City, unfolded after a thousands-strong Occupy Wall Street march against economic inequality. Some occupiers thought they might take their first amendment rights for a stroll down Wall Street, a public street, and got pepper sprayed, thrown on the concrete, and carted off by armed men in the bankshadows of the financial district. But the second tragedy wiped the first clean from the headlines: Steve Jobs was dead. The New York Times’s website that night was a digital shrine to the CEO — to his vision, to his crankiness, his influence, his craftsmanship, his turtlenecks. Because who but Steve Jobs would’ve had the cartoon-like ability to wear only black turtlenecks? Was he merely a hero, or was he a god?

More interesting than the Times’s homage was the reaction of an array of lefties: not just Occupiers, who mourned Jobs in Liberty Square, but many self-described progressives testifying to their grief on Facebook, Twitter, and at Apple stores. Mourners downloaded candle apps onto their iPads and held them mournfully aloft. The global display of grief for this particular CEO, even among those actively battling his fellow 1%ers, was at least a little surprising. His hero status is, by any left-wing criteria, undeserved. And his particularly hip brand, and its quasi-countercultural messaging, have been the disguise with which Jobs has gotten away with murder, sometimes quite literally, in his quest to turn his expensive little gadgets into the vehicles of our individual liberation.

For months now, the long divided American Left has pursued a different sort of liberation, unifying under the capacious banner of “99%.” A whole movement has taken shape, at last, to empower working people. Apple has always stood on the other side of this battle. As journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele noted, “after only one generation, all the Apple manufacturing jobs in America disappeared, as the work of building and assembling the machines was turned over to laborers in sweatshops in China and other countries.” In 2011, Apple admitted that some of its Chinese factory workers had developed cancer in these factories. Jobs’s company found the discovery an opportunity to celebrate the effectiveness of Apple’s auditing process, which had uncovered the abuses, even as, according to ABC News, the company “admitted that some of its workers in China have been poisoned and that many are regularly working in unsafe conditions.” The enormous public anxiety expended on Jobs’s own cancer travails could not stand in starker contrast to the flippancy with which he threw away the health of his most vulnerable employees.