One question kept going through my mind when I heard of President Barack Obama’s decision to abruptly demand the resignation of General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner as part of government efforts to prop up the company.

It’s this: When was the last time a CEO was unceremoniously canned as if he were just another floor worker?

CEOs get pushed out of jobs all the time, of course, but rarely do you see a situation where the CEO’s job is terminated “with extreme prejudice,” as they put it in Apocalypse Now.

In most cases, CEOs (and just about any resigning senior manager, for that matter) get to walk away on their own terms, in their own way. There is usually a carefully crafted statement, with a little PR spin about “leaving to pursue new challenges” or some other nonsense, and perhaps there is some laudatory BS from the board. And, of course, there’s a big payday in the form of a giant golden parachute.

Wagoner got the golden parachute, but not much else. In fact, canning him was just another fait accompli if you believe The Wall Street Journal’s story about the White House team of economic advisors who met last Thursday night in their ongoing efforts to rebuild the American auto industry.

“The first order of business,” the story reported, was whether or not to oust GM’s Wagoner. “It ‘wasn’t the hardest decision,’ ” according to one unnamed government official who spoke to the Journal.

There has been lots of commentary this week about the propriety of Obama’s decision to can the GM chief and whether we want the government to be that involved in the operations of ANY private-sector American business, bailout or not.

Detroit News columnist Daniel Howes is even more pointed, asking: “What does it say that on the same day President Obama made nice at the White House with the nation’s leading bank CEOs—none of whom have lost their jobs despite sitting on vastly larger sums of taxpayer dough—the head of the president’s auto task force was urging Wagoner to ‘step aside?’”

These are all good questions, but I keep coming back to the abrupt way Wagoner was given his walking papers. It’s true that if you look at his track record, Wagoner should probably have been bounced long before now. He “has presided over the virtual wipeout of GM shareholders,” according to the Los Angeles Times, with the stock “down 95 percent since June 2000.”

Yes, there was clearly good reason for firing Wagoner, but did we need the very public walking of the plank?

 Many people are appalled by how the Obama administration treated the former GM chief, but really, is this any different from the way most rank-and-file workers get shown the door? Yes, Wagoner is leaving with millions, but besides that, there’s not much difference between how he got dumped and how any other working stiff is let go.

I’m not a fan of handling layoffs and firings this way, but I certainly know why the drill goes like this. And that’s the one little hopeful sign I take away from how big-time CEO Rick Wagoner got the ax: Maybe we finally will start to see some leveling of the playing field in how executives and CEOs get treated compared with the rest of the workforce.

In my book, a lot more big-time executives should get terminated publicly when they fail—unceremoniously and with extreme prejudice. And while we’re at it, we should deflate the golden parachute payouts as well.

If that happened a little more often—as perhaps it should have when Phillip Schoonover was running Circuit City into the ground—we not only would get smarter people running organizations, but we’d also have CEOS who would act with lot more sensitivity and compassion when cutbacks are being contemplated for the rest of the workforce.

Treating people with dignity and compassion is the very least we can do for those who are losing their jobs.

And although President Obama didn’t do it for Rick Wagoner, perhaps this public episode will make a CEO or two ponder how it might feel for them if the termination shoe were on the other foot.

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