Worthier Toil Than This
9/11, Guy Fieri, lists in the time of coronavirus, and more.
Next year will be the 20th anniversary of the terror attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. No matter who wins the upcoming presidential election, the coverage of the anniversary is likely to be the most insufferable media event of the 21st century, somehow managing to eclipse even world-historical snooze-fests like the release of Avatar and the Cubs winning the World Series. It may seem unfair to compare the brutal murder of thousands of innocent people to frivolous pop-culture celebrations, but that’s what America does: it shoves every human emotion and every historical event through a meat grinder and what comes out the other end is Product. We’re being sold our own memories of trauma and suffering back to ourselves in the form of mawkish self-congratulation, even as our institutional memory and how it connected together a complex political moment is being erased.
Paul Krugman, the once-respectable economist who traded his credibility for the dubious reward of being a featured columnist with the New York Times, helped set the tone for next year by posting a series of Tweets about how wonderful it was that America was united after the attacks, and that President George W. Bush—in the new liberal cosmology, lacking as a president but unquestionably a good man—may have made a few errors in judgment when a response to them was demanded, but he didn’t do anything outrageous like stir up anti-Islamic violence. This is the sort of thing that pundits love to do. If Bush didn’t personally curb-stomp a Sikh, after all, or hold a nationally televised press conference in which he urged every patriotic American to grab a gun and take aim at the closest Muslim, what does it matter that he definitely led the country to a pointless war under false circumstances against a country that didn’t attack us? What is the far-away violence of a million dead in a destabilized Middle East compared to the genteel propriety of a reactionary warmonger having nothing personal against Arabs? Why, Krugman was even able to take a nice tropical vacation with his wife afterwards!
Possible future public event solemn-face-maker Kamala Harris, too, took her shot at showing us what next year will be like, on top of all the environmental destruction, plagues, and economic depression, by claiming that the 9/11 attacks, far from serving to “envelop us” in “darkness”, brought forth “our most radiant and defined human instincts”. I’m at a bit of a loss to understand what noble and heroic human instincts were summoned in those days; was it the rampant Islamophobia? The unquestioning acceptance of a vast and brutal national security apparatus? The inward-turning hostility towards foreign relations and the abandoning of an international consensus? The embrace of austerity? The mindless belligerence of the military towards peasants’ wedding parties? The abandonment of our veterans to poverty and suicide? The forever wars that have destabilized entire hemispheres and eaten up every penny that could have been used to save far more Americans than died on that dreadful day? Or the ‘keep on shopping’ ideology that inculcated our citizenry to ignore the cruelty and degradation of a dying empire as long as they can still afford Roombas?
We’ve outsourced the suffering of our constant warfare now, just as we have our economy, our infrastructure, and everything else we want to reap the benefits of without having to look at the ugly byproducts. We’re still in Afghanistan, still in Iraq—hell, we’re still in Guantanamo!—but those places are very far away, so far that we can pretend that drone warfare has ‘saved’ us from future terror attacks instead of just making sure they happen in places like the Philippines and Pakistan and other client states. Until the next big terror attack, or the next war brought to us by lies and in aid of cheap labor and open markets, or the next resource skirmish to prop up our billionaires’ need to live that much richer than the rest of us, we can pretend 9/11 only happened in the sole context we care about: the one where bad things are done to us, by bad people, who can be appropriately punished with death and outlawry.
But there is a constructive counter-example of what we should remember and what we should celebrate, and we don’t even have to switch days. All we have to do is look at Chile, which, on September 11 of 1973, underwent a savagely violent coup—abetted by American intelligence and American power, at the behest of the wealthy American elite, and engineered by American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is still with us and still enjoying all the luxury and immunity to consequence that great wealth can purchase in America—which saw the overthrow and demise of the elected socialist leader Salvador Allende. It also saw the mass arrest, detention, mistreatment, imprisonment, and murder of hundreds of thousands of peaceful Chileans, guilty of nothing more than trying to receive fair pay and benefits for their labor, and it led to dozens of more similar coups, overthrows, and massacres throughout the world of democratic leftists governments, leaders, and civilians. All were backed by American power, and all led to massive amounts of suffering that echoes to this day.
The day after the coup, the socialist organizer, actor, and singer Victor Jara was arrested and taken to Estadio Chile, which was already stuffed with arrested dissidents, socialists, unionists, and enemies of the state. Recognized instantly, he was tortured and beaten, and the hands he’d used to play the guitar were smashed and his fingers severed. He still sang of Chile’s suffering and ultimate redemption from fascism, right up until the men loyal to coup leader Augusto Pinochet—the golden boy of the Kissinger and the U.S.—pumped him full of bullets. Today the stadium in which he died is named after him. This is why we say “Socialism or barbarism”; it’s not a threat or a promise or an ideal, but a shining, hard reality based on our experience. Perhaps Donald Trump is not the incipient fascist he is painted as, but I have no doubt about America raising any real objection if this kind of authoritarian terror ever comes home again; and perhaps Joe Biden will not just be a weak defender of a neoliberal consensus that demands blood. But those are just two futures. A third is here, and it’s waiting. We can be on the side of Pinochet and his bloody henchmen; or we can be on the side of an America that still celebrates Kissinger and pretends his victims don’t exist all over the world. Or we can be on the side of Allende, of Jara, and of the people who only wanted a better life—and we can decide no one has to die for wanting that ever again.
I have spent my life enraging my peers with my famous hot takes. I was taking hot before hot-taking was a thing. Who argued, correctly, that Marge Gunderson was not meant to be a figure of sympathy or respect in Fargo? Who declared war on fussiness with Steely Dan, and carried the fight all the way to Garrison Keillor? Who was it who warned of the imminent monstrosity of Billy Joel? Me. It was me. You all know it was me. And yet, today, I must dispense possibly the hottest take of them all, a take so radioactively steamy that it might Fukushima my reputation as a liker of things and a dislike of other things and cause me to be banished to the land of long-irrelevant honkies:
I don’t think Guy Fieri is bad.
Now, let me clarify, before you douse me with donkey sauce and send me to Flavortown in the locked trunk of a flaming car: I don’t mean that Guy Fieri is a good person. He might be a monster for all I know. He might be a sex creep, he might be a Nazi, he might have the blood of innocent infants on his goofy soul patch. I also am not saying that Guy Fieri is a good cook. I wouldn’t know that either, but I have seen the menus from some of his restaurants, and, well, no thanks. I’m not too proud to say that I love to eat junky shit, but I have some standards. I wouldn’t let Guy Fieri cook my dinner if he paid me.
What I am saying, though, is that as a television host, Guy Fieri is just fine.
Let me explain. Times are tough, and even if I had a lot of money to go out and do things, things have been temporarily suspended by plague, and so like everyone else, I am watching too much television. I like food shows, and I like competition shows, but I’ve also been quarantined for about five months, and I’m starting to run out of shit to watch. I’ve finished Top Chef (and it’s probably not coming back until post-coronavirus); I’ve finished Chopped; I’ve finished GBBO and Iron Chef and countless others. (Please do not spoil this pleasant conversation by mentioning Gordon Ramsay.) And so, yes, I’m dipping into the television equivalent of junk food: your Cutthroat Kitchens, your Throwdown! With Bobby Flays, your whatever that show is called with the stiffly whimsical Australian who is like Willie Wonka if he learned to code. And yes, your Guy’s Grocery Games and your Drive-Ins, Diners, and Dives.
And here’s the thing: Yes, Guy Fieri is a dipshit with a dumb haircut who wears polo shirts with flames on them. And yes, Guy Fieri is a self-satisfied goof who likes dad jokes, classic cars, and all the other accoutrements of Boomerdom. But Guy Fieri is also a nice, gregarious dope who seems to genuinely like the people he works with, gives a ton of money to charity, will not ever in his career be mean or snobbish or lecture you, and—here’s the crux of it all—really likes to eat. I wouldn’t want him to cook me a meal, but I’d gladly go to a restaurant he’s recommended (and, in fact, I have). He’s enthusiastic about food and he is, I think, on a certain level, very aware of and grateful for his good luck in doing what he does. He’s an old showbiz trooper, a classic entertainer like Perry Como. He’s given attention to a lot of restaurants that deserved it, and he’s been instrumental in trying to help out the kind of restaurants he loves—barely-there dives with ridiculous but beloved menu items—at a time when dozens of them a day are biting the dust.
So, no, I will not make Guy Fieri the easy cultural punchline others have decided is his natural fate. I will not die on the hill of defending him, but I think he’s probably a lot more tolerable than other, better chefs. But I do understand that there is a need to have, in every artistic field, a figure against whom we can all rally, around whom we can be united in hate. In the area of cooking, may I suggest Justin Warner? That guy sucks so bad I can feel it from halfway across the country.
I’m sorry I like dumb ironic joke lists. God made me watch a lot of David Letterman as a kid.
IN FOR 2021:
- holistic plumbing
- frozen okra on a stick (with or without chocolate)
- artless euphemisms
- prick-lit (lightly humorous urban novels about male stock market traders)
- ironic old-lady sequined kitty sweatshirts
- Shakespeare revivals (not of his plays, but attempts to reanimate his corpse)
- Welsh-style pizza (lamb, leeks & Caerphilly)
PROPOSED NEW NAMES FOR THE MONTHS OF THE YEAR
- January: Colduary
- February: Shortuary
- March: March (or Supportourtroopsuary)
- April: SPRING BREAK!
- May: Will
- June: Summer
- July: The Month of America
- August: Summer II -- Summer's Revenge
- September: Falltember
- October: Halloweeber
- November: Votevember
- December: Christember
INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS FROM THE LOWEST RACK AT THE THRIFT STORE
- Let’s Make Cave Art
- Get Hot Air Balloonin'!
- Taxidermy Superstar!
- Everybody Loves Fish-Gutting
- Saturday Night Scrimshaw
- Tap Dancin' Backwards with Rodney Allen Rippy
- Kanban Production Operations Management for the Holidays
- Rock 'n' Roll Sand Painting
- Operate a Weather Station Like the NFL Legends!
ACADEMY OF THE OVERPLATED
- Lionel Fanthorpe: The James Joyce of Gamlingay Village
- Patricia Highsmith’s Women: A Study in Three Dimensions
- Joe Dolce: No, Whatsa Matta You?
- The 2003 Detroit Tigers, Revisited
- There’s a Heart Where My Wang Should Be: The Golden Age of “Love Is”
- Brief Interviews with People Who Think the Last Episode of The Prisoner Made Perfect Sense
- Adrian Tomine, the Blatantly-Ripping-Off-Dan-Clowes Years
- “My Son is Day-ud! You Bas-terd!”: Andie MacDowell and the Art of Forced Line Readings
- David Gerrold: Nearly Half a Dozen Episodes of Land of the Lost and Every Goddamn One a Gem
- How “Mallard Fillmore” Solved the Israel-Palestine Conflict
This week in links: Alex Press discusses the great Lodge 49 in Jacobin; Keeler News wonders if the legendarily eccentric novelist was a red; WIRED contrasts the cultural fantasy of apocalypse with the banal reality of coronavirus; the Hill Reporter looks at the unprecedented degree of voter suppression in Georgia; and the L.A. Sheriff’s Department is the most organized gang in L.A.