You are, perhaps, a loan officer or you are director of human resources, perhaps even executive director of corporate communications or you are one of the boys in accounting.

And, if you are male and you do these things, or something like them for a living, there are certain elemental professions to which your fantasies aspire.

Cowboy. Cop. Steelworker. Over-the-road trucker. Longshoreman.

Lunchbucket jobs. Bandanna-in-the-back-pocket jobs. Jobs you break your back at, but by God, you know you're a man when you're done.

Maybe your dad had one of those jobs, driving a combine or climbing phone poles. And he sent you to college so you could wear small tassels on the front of your shoes.

Coal miner.

Down in Mother Earth's guts, a lump of muscle rising up in the darkness, a brawny hard-hatted silhouette running a coal-cutting machine, the grinding noise high in your ears.

Oh, how we metal-desk-bound monthly report-writers envy those boys still working like men!

We envy them at least when we are not making fun of their Bike Week T-shirts and their family trips to Wal-Mart, their Hamburger Helper dinners and their wives' bold color choices in the area of sweatpants.

And down in Montcoal, W.V., the earth slammed 30 of them to death and, who knows, some of them may have been so un-chic as to die with The Lord's Prayer on their tongues.

You like elemental? Read The Associated Press stories of the dead and the search for the living. The stories brim with simple words like "air," "refuge," "dust," "blast," "bodies" and, of course, "dead."

You could write a prayer with just those words, the words the newsies use before they get to the more oleaginous words of Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy Co., the owner of the mine. Dispersing his views via Twitter, no less, Blankenship, a man whose eyes roll up to Washington rather than down to the crushing grave of his workers, speaks about the "indignity of much of the media."

Indignity, one is tempted to say, is lying shattered under thousands of tons of dirt, lungs collapsed, face torn open, skull flattened, cracked and broken and drained.

But that is not indignity. That is only death, and in West Virginia, where the blue shadow of the coal-bearing hills breeds small Bible churches, plenty of people know that "only death" is not a strange phrase, not at all.

When you read seven or eight or nine paragraphs into the stories about the mine tragedy, you found Massey Energy has been cited for safety violations 1,342 times since 2005. Twelve times last month the company was cited for failing to properly vet the mine of methane gas, the same gas that blew 30 men to Heaven this week.

Blankenship and the boys in the tasseled loafers knew safety violations are just overhead. You fight 'em all and pay the ones you have to pay and, as long as the boys in the work boots keep going down the mine, you're gonna be fine.

The foreclosed houses on your block belong to the boys in the tasseled loafers now. The companies that lobby for the election of friendly judges and business-friendly senators are the ones that ate your 401k and cut your wife's hours at the bank. The Blankenships speak in memos and take your pension.

And so, if in fantasy, you dream of going down the mine, dream no more.

You're down there now.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com.