CAUTION: RESTAURANT AHEAD
Civility in the Age of Incivility
Editor’s note: T.M. Collins takes a week off from writing about food and local restaurants to provide his take on the politicization of the dining experience for some prominent Americans.
No shoes. No shirt. No service.
No humanity. No morals. No service, either.
People, people, people. It’s time we devote a few precious column inches to proper etiquette in restaurants and other public places in this shocking, disheartening Age of American Awfulism.
In the past week and a half, since U.S. immigration policy along the southern border has featured the state-sponsored kidnapping of children, some as young as newborns, there have been more than a few instances of civil incivility.
In the D.C. area, several of the present administration’s top people have been confronted in restaurants and rudely or politely asked to leave the premises. (Weirdly, perversely, two of the places were Mexican restaurants. Kinda’ like Hitler walks into a deli … . There’s a joke there somewhere, but right now I can’t seem to find it.)
Public shaming is a new trend, it seems, with social consequences for professional and personal choices and behavior. And where does one draw the line? At what point is it OK to be ill-mannered in public? Ever? Never? What if O.J. Simpson walked into a restaurant or cafe? Mark Zuckerberg?
Former Nixon meanie John Ehrlichman took some grief in Santa Fe in the ’80s. A friend of mine wanted to get in his face at a restaurant once, and I persuaded him not to. (Unusual for me.) Ehrlichman was out of politics, he’d served his time in jail, been disbarred and he’d come to live here in some sort of privacy. Leave him to his own demons, I figured.
People got in Donald Rumsfeld’s face up in Taos and Taos Ski Valley when he was secretary of defense and instigator of the Iraq tragedy. An organized mob even marched on one of his homes in Arroyo Seco. I never agreed with it. Go to his office in the Pentagon, or the Mall in D.C., I thought.
And so here we are with a political situation whose antecedents echo the most painful in American history — slavery, Native Americans, Japanese-Americans. And there will be, and there are right now, social repercussions for some people. In their personal lives.
In the meantime, our advice to the (rightfully) outraged restaurant-goer these days:
If Jeff Sessions happens to be sitting near you at a local eatery — and believe me, it could happen — please, I beg you, restrain yourself. Perhaps the best policy is simply to ask to be seated in another area. Or leave the restaurant yourself. And you needn’t announce why. People will know.
Or, if you really can’t help yourself, go ahead, say something, if that makes you feel better. But maybe sotto voce, and up close and personal would be best.
But this public shaming trend is both bad manners and bad politics in the end, and it only makes the current resident of the Oval Office look like the victim. And boy, do he and his aptly called “base” know how to play the aggrieved victim card. So, consider that.
Just as violence begets more violence, incivility breeds further incivility, and further accelerates the debasement of civic, social and political life. Consider that, as well.