I suppose when you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth, and you have little tiny hands, you have to eat dainty. Like a little girl at a tea party. If that's you, It's understandable that watching men eat, they way they belch, wipe food off their shin with their sleeve, and God forbid have their elbows on the table, and maybe toss a bit of food to the dog under the table, it might freak you out a bit.
Donaldus Minimus calling out John Kasich (quick, someone come up with a good nickname on the jerk, I'm parched!)
on his food manners may be just about the
only thing to respect about him these days, granted that his tongue
is no more civil than Mr. Kasich's apparent public dining style. Remember that, because I don't sing Donaldus Minimus's
praises about just about anything very often, if at all. And his campaign style has done nothing but to suggest himself
as the last upon whom I'd call for counsel about civilised behaviours.
It isn't just the silver spoon crowd (or, in The Donald's case, those who were born with silver feet in their mouths)
who were taught once upon a time that a good meal was more than just shoving it into your trap until your trap couldn't
hold anymore and you had a hugely visible lump in your throat when the food went down. Popeye the Sailor downing a
can of spinach in a cartoon was amusing. (And when most of us were children, we knew better. [Didn't we?]) John
Kasich shoveling his mouth full of whatever slop he was shoveling into his mouth was a slob.
I'm not speaking from a perch atop some platinum tower. I wasn't exactly born into poverty, but it wouldn't
have been unfair to say I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth and adopted as a baby by parents who could
afford to feed me with a stainless steel spoon. Until, of course, I was old enough to learn how to use eating utensils.
There was no debate in our house. You ate the proper way at the table, or you starved for the time being, whether
it was legitimate finger food or a full course meal.
I once asked my parents, cleverly enough, where the next dinner party was, then. That'd teach me. They
took me to one, thrown by friends of theirs. I was six years old and awkward enough as it was, but I knew
a small something of dinner parties. (One or another set of friends of theirs was throwing one regularly.) Now I
had wisecracked myself right into my first such one. Somehow, some way, I passed my circumcision of fire
(what did you expect a Jewish guy to describe, his baptism of fire?) at that rather large, somewhat festive,
and (when the mashed turnips came out, in this case) rather intimidating table.
Mine were not the most democratic parents alive. But they never again counter-challenged me when asking
questions regarding food. On the other hand, the childhood cliche (addressed to the particularly unruly), "Dress
you up but can't take you anywhere," meant something deeper. What was the point of dressing up a pig, with
or without lipstick? So, allowing that in the early to mid 1960s money wasn't half as inflated as today and
a family of four whose breadwinner earned passable if not extravagant bread could do so at reasonable
intervals, my parents were frequent believers in dining out. It gave them a distinct pleasure and, while they
were at it, imposed a few reasonable exercises in manners upon their two young sons.
They didn't come by this pretentiously or as any kind of yuppie (
oops---in those years we would have said
"upwardly mobile" and not even touched the idea of a pun off the name of a band of radical bean-heads)
affectation. My father was the son of a New York City police officer (in a generation during which "New York's
Finest" really did mean something, if you didn't count
the Harry Gross scandal of 1950); my mother, the
daughter of a New York City jeweler. Men's men, the pair of them. Married to stout hearted daughters of
Sarah. They didn't come from money new, old, or ancient.
My grandparents never discouraged the pleasure of food. (My maternal grandmother's kitchen would have
put the toniest restaurant's cuisine to absolute shame; my mother's, almost equal, emphasis on
almost.)
They would have been appalled at today's apparent mission (consecrated by whom?) to rid our world, or at
least our meal tables, of everything other than officially sanctioned nutrition. My two grandfathers died in
1972 and 1984, respectively, but I'd bet my maternal grandmother demanded the Nobel Peace Prize for Julia
Child in 1990, when that engaging chef
said plainly and factually, "[People] are no longer enjoying food the
way they once did, and the dinner table is becoming a trap rather than a pleasure."
As my grandparents taught their children, who taught their own children in turn, a mannered meal table
was not a trap but a kind of liberation, and a mannered diner was in fact a kind of liberated man or woman.
Liberated from what? How does from the beast strike you. Did we humans evolve in order to devolve? G.K.
Chesterton once asked whether it indicated "civilisation" if a cannibal learned to use a knife and a fork. What
would he call a human who learned (probably not at his parents' or grandparents' meal tables) to eat like a
beast?
I don't know John Kasich personally at all, never mind having experienced a meal with him elsewhere. At least
two generations of nannies---official, merely professional, and otherwise---have had it backward. They carp
about what we eat and care nothing about how we do it. They fear our poisoned bodies and don't give a
thought to our poisoned civilities. "The abolition of
ancien-regime etiquette by French revolutionaries was all
very well," Judith (Miss Manners) Martin once said, lecturing at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government,
"but who wants to watch a bunch of revolutionaries eat dinner?"
Apparently, Mr. Kasich and his defenders think the civilised dinner table was a trap designed to emasculate
men who have been emasculated by many things but
not their parents' and grandparents' civilised
meals. Since I reject nannyism in any way, shape, or form (I
parented my own son, I
taught my son,
I didn't just object or repel things for the perverse pleasure of carping), I am obliged to say it simply
and, God help me, democratically:
If someone wants to eat like a pig, feel free. If someone can't hold a belch or cover their mouths if it proves
impossible, or use a legitimate napkin in place of your shirt sleeve, or save his or her flatulence for the
appropriate closed bathroom, that's their business entirely. Just don't expect to see me at their dinner tables.
Or them at mine.
