A good chef may spit on your steak if you order it well done. I thought everyone knew that…
But Matthew Continetti writes:
Over the last year however the press has fixated on the steak and its accompaniment, returned to them again and again, fetishized them, contorted them into a metaphor for the childishness and vulgarity and gaucheness that Trump’s opponents so despise. “Putting ketchup on his $54 steak drives a wedge between Trump and his fans,” reports Marketwatch.com, citing a silly PPP poll in order to expel Trump from the in-group. Does Trump put “Bernaise? Chimichurri? Peppercorn?” on his steak? Negative. “Instead, Trump went with ketchup, that most pedestrian of all condiments.” Lock him up!
I am fascinated by the condescending use of “pedestrian,” with its connotations of déclassement, to describe one of America’s most popular condiments. What it suggests is that the fixation with Trump’s manner of eating is in reality a fixation with the persistence of habits and attitudes and trends that the over-schooled and undereducated metropolitan producers of news and opinion do not like, deem retrograde, wish would recede into the past as humanity progresses toward its gender-neutral, multicultural, borderless, medium-rare steak au poivre future. (…)
It is hard to read stories like these without coming to the conclusion that so much of our elite’s abhorrence of Trump is a matter of aesthetics, of his not fitting in, of his stubborn devotion to practices and ideas deemed retrograde by opinion leaders but that still appeal to, oh, about half the country.
Duh. Thanks for coming out, Matt!
But putting ketchup on steak and ordering it well-done is childish, vulgar and gauche, although I will obviously forgive the “well-done” bit if you keep kosher.
The rest of the liberal outrage Continetti quotes sound fairly reasonable.
What IS unreasonable is automatically and petulantly taking up an opposing viewpoint, especially after insisting throughout (as Continetti does) that the liberal viewpoint on this particular matter is too trivial to be bothered with in the first place.
Liberals or leftists or whatever are not wrong about everything.
For example, while I find hearing about it tiresome, “privilege” is a thing, and in fact I’ve been talking and writing about it for decades:
With each successive new yet equally irritating boyfriend, I’d ask my then best friend what exactly all these “educated able-bodied white men were always so angry about.”
And the nuns I worked with — when they weren’t off on yet another “sabbatical,” that is — existed in a kind of artisanal aspic of Ph.Ds, world travel and childlessness that bore no resemblance to the “poor” they genuinely cared about and even lived around but didn’t or couldn’t understand. Whenever I tried to explain to them, and pretty much any left wing activist, that the “poor” really just want big screen tvs, cheap beer and lottery tickets — not “liberation” from same — they twist their faces into truly astonishing shapes.
And liberals are not wrong about steak.
In fact we should feel relieved that not all of them have gone vegan, at least.
