Chocolate-Syrup Designs and American Isolationism
Coming up in the 2007 edition of the Oxford Book of Quotations:
"A city probably needs a Fascist to run it."--Nora Ephron
"And a country definitely needs an anchorman from South Dakota to run
it."--Kurt Andersen, paraphrasing Ephron
If Nick is right, as he surely is, that the cops are driven to bust more
non-criminals in order to keep their arrest numbers up, isn't it just a
(non-simple) matter of tweaking the incentivization scheme? What I mean is,
couldn't they build in some bad-arrest penalty provision--so that the
apprehension of a person like your friend would make the policeperson lose
credit for two or three good arrests? I'm sort of serious. It would be like
when you challenge somebody's word in Scrabble and you're wrong, you lose
points.
The memorized-order phenomenon in restaurants is meant, I think, to suggest
an extreme competence, as well as some more subtextual kind of intimacy--as if
the waiter is really just a guy you know and you're telling him what you'd like
to eat as long as he's going to the kitchen anyway. Also, maybe, it's another
form of mid/late-'90s minimalism: Less is more, and nothing is everything.
Maybe I should become a Buddhist instead of a Scientologist.
And those horrible little designs made of chocolate syrup on the dessert
plate, by the way, are also about show-offy competence, but so very, very
1989.
I didn't really want to talk about East Timor, by the way. I have no
opinion, no information, nothing to say. I feel the same way you do about it
and wars like it. To me they're not unlike those roving New York City malathion
trucks--by which I mean international crises these days also seem like
something out of an earlier era. Which is to say, before the Cold War and World
War II, when this is how Americans registered nearly all foreign wars ...
isolated two-month news stories, a sudden ghastly horror show in some obscure
exotic place where America has no obvious national interest, wars that fit into
no grand struggle (e.g. capitalism vs. communism) that interests or inflames
us. I think the American default mode is still isolationist, intellectually as
well as militarily (if not economically). So maybe we wince a little at the
headlines and photographs from East Timor, and then, like our grandparents did
when they read about Armenia, turn the page to read about Doris Duke--I mean,
Caleigh Duff-Perelman.
On that happy note, I'm off to cook dinner, and remain
Yours truly,
Kurt
