Oh, how I miss the days when Barack Obama wearing a tan suit could send the pundits into a multi-day tizzy. Those were simpler times. You didn't have to worry about empty-headed presidents launching failed coups based on the delusions of a man leaking shoe polish from his ears. You didn't have presidents so angry about having a tweet fact-checked that they ordered a posterboard-sized hurricane tracking map to be delivered from NOAA so that they could hand-annotate it to show a storm taking a different path from what the forecast actually predicted.
Nope, we had to worry about tan suits, coffee salutes, and whether the First Lady of the United States was allowed to show bare upper arms even if Sam Alito's Ouija contacts were all rolling in their European graves over it. None of this "Hey, I just found out bleach can kill viruses, so what if we all [redacted]" nonsense. Simpler times.
The press has been trying damn hard to get back to the tan suit days of national crisis ever since the seditionist former guy got scraped out of the White House, but it's never really stuck because the news cycle really does continue to be a tire fire in all other respects. People are still standing trial for sedition; far-right "news" channels continue to agitate for purge scenarios so that conservatives can be rid of all those that have wronged them; the news is just nasty.
Please, you can hear from the newspaper pages. Please, can't we have this one thing?
The latest in the genre is ... well, I'm going to be honest here, I love it. Bring it on!
The Bidens ordered the same dish at a restaurant. Who does that?
That's the story from The Washington Post about the brief online kerfuffle that resulted when the President and First Lady of the United States went to a Washington, D.C., area restaurant and both ordered the same thing. It was rigatoni, if you want to know. This move apparently set off the fine dining etiquette scolds, date-night menu subcommittee, because there is apparently a general rule that you're not supposed to order the same thing as your dinner partner because it, uh, shows weakness or something? It means that if the dish is poisoned and you're both pilots on a commercial flight three hours from now, it'll take you both out at once, and everyone will die?
I admit this is the first time I'm hearing about this, in all my decades of life, but apparently, there's a strategy to all of this, and thank God I am a misanthrope because people are bringing levels of social engineering to this whole put-food-in-your-mouth question that I just could not stomach in this already topsy-turvy world.
Okay, let's get a real explanation of what the President of the United States and his spouse got wrong.
[Name omitted because they don't need your grief], a 24-year-old Washington resident who does fundraising for a political nonprofit, is firmly in this camp. “Getting the same thing as the person you’re eating dinner with is silly,” she says. “The whole point of going out to eat is getting to try as many things as possible.” [...]
Couples' openness to sharing dishes exists on a spectrum. Some might treat their restaurant order like a battle plan, strategically gaming out their communal choices to maximize variety. Or they might be like me and my husband: Typically, we will get separate dishes, perhaps with a quick consultation - I'm more opposed to ordering the same things than he is - and then we'll trade a few bites.
There are those who aren't on the same page at all. Maybe one's a sharer and the other isn't. And we all know that competitive orderer who's eager to crow about getting the better dish than their partner.
Ooooh. Okay, I'm getting it now. This is an existing-but-vague social etiquette rule: If you and your five closest friends want to go out to eat, getting six different things will maximize your chances of somebody getting The Best Thing and then you'll know from then on to just order The Best Thing next time. Except next time around you still can't all order The Best Thing, because what if the person next to you wants to order The Best Thing but still have fork-and-spoon privileges on something besides The Best Thing?
And none of it is really meant to maximize the chances of finding The Best Thing, much of the time, because while it’s sometimes a chance for "strategically gaming out" the meal like you’re an Olympic curling team, other times people are strategizing against your order to make sure their meal is better than your meal, and … uh ...
All right, I admit I still don't understand any of it. Through all of my own life, I and those sitting around me in a restaurant have ordered whatever we most felt like eating at that exact moment in time, because it was always our belief that that was the point, and sometimes three people got the same thing and sometimes nobody did but nobody really cared or wrote columns to the newspaper the next day about how they were at dinner and two seats down somebody committed an unbelievable faux pas.
Anyway, The Washington Post got some online pushback over this one, and that's because it's an awkward look for international journalistic institutions with dramatic-sounding slogans like the Post's Democracy Dies In Darkness or The New York Times' Some Say The Darkness Will Allow Us To Evolve Into A New Species, One With Batlike Powers to instead devote their pages to a multi-source-quoting piece investigating what it means for two prominent Americans to both be eating rigatoni side by side. But, in fairness, the Post put their analysis in the Food section, as written up by a Food section reporter, rather than follow the New York Times' habit of stationing top political reporters like Maggie Haberman inside Mar-a-Lago desk drawers so that they can crank out almost the same stories with a Politics banner at the top of that page.
And that, I think, is where we've been getting all of this wrong these last thirty years. One of the central problems of our journalism is that stories like "President Launches Attempted Coup; Several Dead" or "Florida Governor Purges Ideological Enemies In State Colleges" share space on the same pages as "Do Hunter Biden's Paintings Use Too Much Magenta?" or "Rigatoni Rules: Who Decides?"
It's the same font, and the same headline sizes and those pages feel the same and have the same sort of advertisements. There's the problem. There's no differentiation. There are few social clues to suggest that "President Launches Coup Attempt, Several Dead" is measurably more important than "Tan Suits May Not Be Appropriate For All Astrological Signs."
This is especially true in, say, The New York Times, where you're likely to see both stories side-by-side on Page A-34, or both on A-1, depending on editorial mood.
The problem, then, may simply be one of font. Our papers of record could instead put news of attempts to overthrow the United States government in Times New Roman, but analysis of a president's tan suit might be presented in Papyrus or Comic Sans. There'd be differentiation there; you would know, at a glance, whether the Post or the Times or Forbes meant this to be a serious story, bearing the full weight of their journalistic brands and histories, or a goofy story meant to cleanse the palate between fascist coup attempts. The font would set the tone.
As for how to translate such a rule over to the various news networks, that would be a harder question. Perhaps pundits being asked to weigh in on the latest tan suit controversy could be made to lean over at an angle when speaking, to give the vague impression they were speaking in italics. Perhaps each stool or chair behind the big five-pundit desk could be of adjustable height, and the more serious the analysis being delivered is, on that day and hour, the higher the pundit's chairs would be adjusted.
If you turned to CNN and saw one of the network's stabled talking heads peeking out over the news desk with their chin uncomfortably close to its edge, you would know you were in for a story like "Sean Spicer Launches New Line Of Foot Creams." If you turned on the television and could see the color of Wolf Blitzer's socks, you'd know that something was happening that might require hoarding toilet paper.
There's nothing particularly wrong with using high-profile Americans to illustrate social foibles that Normal Damn People were not even aware of, so long as you make it clear that your story has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with, say, the proper etiquette for most daintily flushing protected government documents down the workplace loo. But you have to make it clear. The problem with much of political journalism is that they're too busy trying to steal Miss Manners' etiquette-and-propriety thunder even though Miss Manners has that s--t very much covered and then some, thank you very much.
So here's my second proposal, if the Post and the Times are facing tight budgets in our trying era and don't think they can spring the licensing fees for two different fonts. Forget the political pundits. Ditch the political pundits, for the love of God, and give everything to the Food columnists, or the Style columnists, or the Nuclear Safety Protocols columnists.
Because that is an even bigger problem; if you were to believe our papers of record and our television news channels that don't have a record any more consequential than what their last three advertisements were selling, every last sodding bit of news in America is "political" news.
A toxic train derailment is "political" news. Does it have other implications? Maybe, and maybe not, but none of those other stories are important as what Sen. Josh Hawley might have to say about it.
A war in Europe is "political" news. Does it have far-reaching economic consequences, or require we make difficult moral decisions that could impact world peace for the next century? Probably! But those things are analysis for the back pages, and some craven political hack whining that we shouldn't even be bothering with that stuff while our southern border walls remain perilously climbable—now that's the stuff that makes the sizzle reel.
The editorial fetish to assign every story to the political reporters is What Is Wrong With America Today, and fixing the country can likely only be done if we winnow down the ranks of attention-seeking political reporters and replace them with attention-seeking reporters covering everything else.
Why is there a food reporter available to publicize questions of dining etiquette, but no Toxic Train Derailment and/or Carcinogenic Slurry Spill section to handle the steady national flow of stories about that?
Can someone explain to me why there's a whole beat devoted to tracking even the most fleeting of fashion trends, but reporting on newly proposed Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules on preventing workplace dismemberment is more likely to consist near-entirely of footage of some loud-ass congressional attention-seeker whining about "our freedoms?"
I promise you, there's room in America for a newspaper section devoted entirely to the week's workplace acid spills and macerated limbs. Do a picture spread, whatever you want with it, but questions like "are poultry workers being forced to work despite projectile vomiting on the raw carcasses they're dismembering?" feels like a story that can be neatly, and appropriately, separated out from any quotes about what Ted F--king Cruz might think about it. Projectile vomiting is not a political question. If you’re on a plane and someone starts projectile vomiting, the flight attendants do not get on the intercom to tensely ask "is there a political lobbyist on board?"
If we can't have that, though, we can work with what we do have. And what we do have is an entire industry of trend and advice columnists that might be better equipped to handle the nuances of our politics than our political reporters have been. Let's give them a chance to weigh in on these things since the people on the front pages have demonstrated no particular skill at it.
Miss Manners: Are you allowed to rape someone in a department store dressing room if you're, like, at least moderately rich?
Perspective: There's an ideal number of classified documents that should be stored at your for-profit Florida club, and that number is zero.
Carolynn Hax: A creepy dude bought a beauty pageant and thinks that gives him the right to ogle half-nude teenagers in the changing room. Should we make him president?
This isn't stuff you can get from the front pages. Journalists on the front pages think it is their sworn duty to not weigh in on whether rape or sex trafficking or attempted coup is good or bad, because that would be breaking the wall of journalistic impartiality and we couldn’t have that. Miss Manners, though? Not a problem. Miss Manners would probably be able to break through that wall and knee someone in the groin.
If you're wondering whether the tale of Joe and Jill Biden ordering the same pasta dish at a restaurant ever got a satisfying conclusion, in our food column analysis, the answer is yes and no. It turns out the rigatoni at the Red Hen restaurant in Bloomingdale is the eatery's "signature dish," the meal so good it's been a staple for ten years running. So Joe and Jill Biden went to a restaurant and both ordered the thing that locals consider to be the best on the menu.
Well that kind of changes things, doesn't it? Yeah, I think the menu police have to take this one on the chin. Nobody's going to give you guff for going to a restaurant and ordering the thing they're famous for. If they do, send them over to Miss Manners or one of the other advice columns and have them fight over it. That'll get you off the hook and provide even more feed for the national news-maw.
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