I’m so behind on email that I’m just getting around to one sent about a week ago by my friend Elizabeth, the de facto curator at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. In said email, she mentions a New York Times article by David Brooks, one of the most admirable, thoughtful, level-headed, socially progressive Republicans I know (and no, believe it or not, those aren’t all oxymorons).
It’s a beautiful piece Mr. Brooks has written, summing up some of the feelings I have about life in general and New Orleans culture in particular. I’m posting it here in its entirety because it’ll be moved to the NYT archive soon and only available for paying customers. (It’s also available at something called the Daily Breeze, but, like, who are those people?) Anyway read it, ignore it, whatever. Frank Rich still ranks first in my book, but David’s jumped a peg….
SATURDAY NIGHT LITE
By David Brooks
Let me tell you a story to illustrate that we are living in a pusillanimous age. I was in New Orleans last Saturday night, dining with a wonderful group of people at a culinary landmark called Antoine’s. Our host had arranged for a remorseless avalanche of delicious food, served in prodigious 19th-century style. There were about six appetizers, including oysters, foie gras and various lobster confabulations. There were main courses aplenty – fish, then crab, then steak.
Then dessert floated onto the table: a meringue pie roughly the size of a football helmet. And with it came coffee, but not just any coffee. It was called “devil’s brew.” A copper bowl was put in the middle of the table with some roiling mixture of brandy-ish spirits inside. Coffee was poured in and the concoction set aflame.
The waiter thrust a ladle into the inferno and lifted up long, dripping streams of blue fire, hoisting the burning liquid into hypnotizing, showy cascades. He poured out a circle of flame onto the tablecloth in front of us. It was a lavish pyre of molten, inebriating java and then, when he swung around to where I was sitting, I turned and asked the climactic question:
“Is it decaf?”
I was sitting there in an orgy of excess. My head was fogged with wine, bourbon, conversation and a couple of hours at the craps tables at Harrah’s, but strong is the power of the zeitgeist. So I did what all of us middle-aged Prufrocks do when coffee follows dinner. I asked, “Is it decaf?”
In this circumstance, this was like Nero pausing during the incineration of Rome to worry about the dangers of secondhand smoke. This was like Henry VIII, lying amid a great mound of gnawed bones and empty steins, remarking, “I’ll take the low-carb mead.” This is like the Marquis de Sade fretting nervously over his leather collection because it might be an affront to animal rights.
If 18,000 calories and four kinds of booze didn’t kill me, there was no way a smidgen of caffeine was going to keep me awake.
And yet we live in the age of the lily-livered, in which fretting over things like excessive caffeination is built into the cultural code.
I blame the people at the top for setting the tone. We live in an age in which the White House is staffed by tidy-desked, white-shirted, crisply coiffed StairMaster addicts, whose idea of sensual decadence is an extra pinch of NutraSweet in the lunchtime iced tea. We’ve got a president whose personal philosophy is: freedom is God’s gift to humanity, but bedtime is 9:30.
This isn’t the empire of an American Caesar; it’s the empire of faux Caesar salad.
I blame parents. Kids are raised amid foam corner protectors and schooled amid flame-retardant construction paper. They’re drugged with a vast array of pharmaceuticals to keep them from becoming interesting. They go from adult-structured tutorials to highly padded sports practices to career-counselor-approved summer internships.
I blame the titans of corporatism. Fitness is now the prime marker of capitalist machismo, so the higher reaches of corporate America are filled with tightly calved Blackberries in human form, who believe that extremism in pursuit of moderation is no vice. They have become such obsessive time-maximizers that all evening, in what used to be known as social life, they keep an eye on the need to be up, fit and early, for the next day’s productivity marathon.
I blame the arbiters of virtue. Sometime over the past generation we became less likely to object to something because it is immoral and more likely to object to something because it is unhealthy or unsafe. So smoking is now a worse evil than six of the Ten Commandments, and the word “sinful” is most commonly associated with chocolate.
Now we lead lives in which everything is a pallid parody of itself: fat-free yogurt, salt-free pretzels, milk-free milk. Gone, at least among the responsible professional class, is the exuberance of the feast. Gone is the grand and pointless gesture.
But at least we have New Orleans. After stumbling out of Antoine’s, some of us headed across the street to a piano bar run by Gennifer Flowers, Bill Clinton’s old flame. And there was Gennifer herself in a black leather miniskirt, belting out a song called “Ya Gotta Have Boobs.”
It was a reminder that no matter how dull and responsible you become, an alternative and much stranger moral universe is always just one slippery step away.
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