Tuesday, July 11, 2017

David Brooks writes about class differences again.

Didn't read it. Because it goes to some satire site called NYT or something.  But other people did read it and they report that this time the column is rather good and actually makes sense. While the snippet provided shows Brooks' typical self-elevation at the absurd degradation of everyone else outside his desperate imaginary club, told through an anecdote of an imaginary friend.

You can read it yourself if you like, here.

Commenters all over the place are taken by this particular paragraph that supports Brooks' larger point of his club's ruining America, we must all be reminded he's a member.
"Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch.
Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw
her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino”
and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a
striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else
and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican."
But that's not the point of this post.

Instead, David Burge responds to this on Twitter in his inimitable way. It's a beautiful thing to behold.


That's funny. It reminded me of friend of mine, a black dude who I took to King Tutankhamen exhibit because I wanted everyone that I know to see it while it was here right next door as if the whole show came here just for me, and I still feel that, but he had to be bribed with lunch. He wasn't interested in Egyptian artifacts at all. At such a restaurant similar to what David Burge describes my friend studied the menu, all ordinary things, but could not comprehend what a chicken fried steak is. It didn't make sense. I tried a few times to explain it. A poor cut of meat that is flavorful but so tough that it's beaten flat to a pulp, to aid in chewing, then floured and fried quickly, or deep fried, as if it were chicken. He simply could not visualize that. How can a steak be chicken?  I could see the gears grinding, his confusion showed on his face. So I told him to order one just to see it and taste one, along with his real choice. What the heck. Let's have some fun. So he did. He concluded they're terrible.

Correction: Further down David Burges Twitter timeline this same post by Simon Maloy re-tweeted by David Burges. Simon Maloy wrote this response, not David Burges. So I'm wrong, apparently Burges style is imitate-able.

24 comments:

ndspinelli said...

I had never been west of Pittsburgh when I landed in KC and the first meal I was served @ an orientation @ the Holiday Inn was chicken fried steak. Didn't have a clue. I ate it. Liked the meat, not a fan of the white gravy.

Amartel said...

Mexican=low class, deplorable;
Italian=high class, elite!
How raaaaacist.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I believe very strongly the point of a bruschetta is to pierce my delicate pallet.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I believe there was a movie with a premise to mock a guest by inviting him to a fancy dinner party? The guy from the Office played the dumb clueless guest.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Dinner for Schmucks (2010)

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Maybe Brooks lifted the idea from the movie to create column fodder?

Amartel said...

The Importance of Knowing Gourmet Sandwich Terminology.

Amartel said...

Why not just explain the differences? First World Gold Star Special Child problems.

Chip Ahoy said...

Amartel, exactly.

The answer is

a) the story is made up of Brooks stereotypes

and

b) Brooks doesn't know the answers himself.

And asking the clerk isn't helpful because they don't know either. I know that because I asked them. The only clerks who know their products, believe it or not, are at Whole Foods. Those guys are completely into their products. When I asked the cheese guy two questions in a row he goes, "Hang on." And comes from behind the counter to the front to engage face to face and go more deeply in depth. This happened at a couple of different Whole Foods. One time I asked for the various cheese from unpasteurized milk. Then apologized to a customer, a tall older man, for taking up too much of the clerk's time. "Oh no, no, no, this is quite interesting."

While the guys at upscale Tony's market don't know the differences between sausages. For example, I asked them what capicollo is and all they could say is "a type of bologna" and that I can see for myself. Back home with the internet I learned capi = head and collo = shoulders, so it means the neck of a pig.

Gross, huh?

And soppressata is even worse. Check it out, Checkitouters. I had to look up that one today.

I also never heard of nor seen anything like striata baguette. Although I could imagine it based on strata and striation. But I'm often wrong when I guess based on cognitives. It actually looks like totally crap flattened bread fail, but still useful for sandwiches.

Ha! Looking up the bread I see a search result titled, "Everyone is losing their minds over David Brooks in a gourmet ..."

You know, those things really are tasty. And I believe they really are worth their expense. I went on a capicollo binge using my own bread and gained fifteen pounds.

But those pounds were all body fat and felt very uncomfortable. Knocked it off with the steady diet of capicollo when tomatoes went out of season, another thing that's totally worth increased cost, and boom, off went the pounds right back to homeostasis underweight broomstickdom.

Then it magically became peach season.

Trooper York said...

Look. The elites have been like this for a long time. Regular people just laughed at them and went to Denny's for the Moon over My Hammy or Esposito's pork store for a meatball hero. But the elites and the social justice warriors can never leave it alone. They said that all they wanted was equality, same sex marriage and non-discrimination. Once they got that it was not enough. They didn't accept tolerance of their deviancy. They demanded celebration and that only their view point was acceptable. So they could import brown people to do the shit jobs like being nannies to their miserable spawn or cleaning their toilets or cutting their lawns. They wouldn't give a kid that job. No they would rather exploit a beaner. They didn't care that the jobs in the factories went away. Or the jobs in the mall. Not just the factory but the side gig at Radio Shack or Sears or JC Penny that the wife worked at to make ends meet. These jobs are gone and they don't care. They have family money or a sinecure somewhere by virtue of their connections.

Donald Trump changed all that.

Yeah he is a rich douchebag but he is our rich douchebag. He grew up interacting with construction guys and working class guys and yes mob guys. He speaks their language. That is why he connects with the crowds in his rallies. Not just in New York but all over the country where regular guys live. He has those people and they are rock solid in their support.

I don't know how much a change he can make. I wish that he would be more aggressive. It's tough because the Cuck Republicans are fighting him at every turn. But I know he is just about our last hope. If he is removed by some sort of elitist chicanery there will be an explosion.

The elites will really not like what comes next.

AllenS said...

I can eat anything.

Trooper York said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Trooper York said...

Personally I would like to be like Liam Neeson in the first scene of "The Gangs of New York."

You know where he goes through the warren of the "Old Brewery" in the lower East side and gets all the gangs to follow him. The Dead Rabbits. The Bowery Bhoy's. The Hudson Dusters. And all the rest.

We would all gather and go out and murder the elites. The Havard educated douches. David Brooks. Jake Tapper. Jim Acosta. Elizabeth Warren. Hillary. The media. All of them. Cut them down or smash them in the noggin with our shillelaghs as we mark a notch in it.

Of course that is just a daydream. I am too old and sick and law abiding to do something like that.

But not everyone is like me.

The Dude said...

Is that what that was? Tiny video with no subtitles and they all sounded Irish.

As I have said before, any movie that ends with the US Navy shelling Manhattan is a great movie.

Rabel said...

Isn't Padrino simply Italian for Godfather, not a particular type of meat or sandwich? So they had a big Italian sandwich like a million other places and instead of calling it the Godfather they called it the Padrino and charged 50% more?

If the story is true then the lady's reaction was more likely due to the language issue than to the gourmet status of the sandwich shop. But who knows what type of people are "friends" of David Brooks.

Anyway, I can only think of two people I knew fairly well who were what I'll call "real" Italian-Americans. By that I mean that they had a little bit of an accent and a little bit of that Joe Pesci/Goodfella thing going (without the mob links as far as I knew).

Wouldn't you know their names were Nick and Rocky. One a good guy and the other, well, enough said.

Rabel said...

And shouldn't an Italian gourmet sandwich shop be called a buongustaio sandwich shop. Brooks should be ashamed of his disturbing lack of cultural sophistication.

ampersand said...

Chances are his acquaintance wasn't freezing up on the names but on the prices and afraid he was going to stick her with the bill while he was mesmerized by the crease in some guy's pants.

ColoradoJim said...

On food misunderstandings, my dad has a great story about that. He was drafted by the army during the Korean War. You have to understand that he was a Texan small town country boy just a few years out of high school so he grew up hunting and fishing and all of that stuff and comfort food like grits and collard greens. So the Army sends him off to different bases mainly in the eastern United States. A very different culture plus a lot of snow which was a rare thing for him. Anyway his fellow soldiers kept pestering him asking him to supply his share of money if he wanted some "tomato pies" that they were getting. He thought, "Tomato pies? Who in their right mind would want tomatos stuffed in a pie! No thank you!". He kept turning them down until the day came when he was in a restaurant with some other soldiers and some of them ordered tomato pie. Which of course turned out to be pizza, completely different from his concept of what a tomato pie looked like!

virgil xenophon said...

Speaking of pizza "pies" in the early 50s in my whitebread midwestern rural (altho collegiate) town I was watching Jackie Gleason one Sunday night and asked my Dad "What are these 'Pizza Pies' that Jackie and Ed Norton are always ordering" "Oh", came the answer, they're just something that Italians in NYC eat," lol. Now Pizza is the national food..

The Dude said...

I have written this story here before, but what the hey, here it is again. My brother got snowed in at an across-town friend's house in the big blizzard of '57. When he came home he told us of this amazing food-like substance they had consumed - something called "Pizza". We had heard of it, but never actually seen one.

Soon enough we had our own, baked in our own kitchen, assembled from the Chef Boyardee Pizza kit. It was as wonderful as one might imagine - like ketchup on a saltine sprinkled with a cheeze-flavored topping. Yum.

Chip Ahoy said...

60, you got the delux Chef Boy-R-Dee.

The Dude said...

LOL - we were livin' large, that's for sure.

virgil xenophon said...

My Mother used to make small "party pizzas" by taking burger buns, layering them with tomato paste, some kind of cheese, and two crossed bacon strips, toasted in oven broiler and topped off with two stuffed olives on toothpicks. lol. Hey, it was the 50s midwest, after all.. :)

The Dude said...

Those sound awesome.