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A couple of hot-shot commentators hit the target on Chris Matthews, but neither hits the bullseye. To do that, we need to take a trip back to a classic Seinfeld episode....
Yesterday, both Dday at Hullabaloo and MissLaura at DKos commented on a particularly bizaare piece of cable tv political threatre on Hardball, which was pointed out by Media Matters.
Here's the Media Matters summary:
On Hardball, while remarking on Sen. Barack Obama's reported request for orange juice after being offered coffee at an Indiana diner, David Shuster asserted: "[I]t's just one of those sort of weird things. You know, when the owner of the diner says, 'Here, have some coffee,' you say, 'Yes, thank you,' and, 'Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?' You don't just say, 'No, I'll take orange juice,' and then turn away and start shaking hands." Host Chris Matthews agreed, "You don't ask for a substitute on the menu."
DDay made a fairly solid point:
Now, this isn't limited to Democrats, actually, here's a recent report about how McCain couldn't fold his pizza in half like a real New Yorker. The difference is that those quick hits on Republicans don't usually make that metaphorical leap to turn some random event about bowling or orange juice into a symbolic manifestation of the candidate and Democrats in general. I mean, if this did hit Hardball, someone would say that everyone knows McCain's a real man and he just isn't used to New York's way of chowing down on pizza but he made a game attempt and isn't it great that he tried? What a guy!
And MissLaura got down into the wonky details of Dinerland:
Third, "substitute" doesn't mean what Matthews thinks it means. So I'm going to school him on that one. (But first, to establish my regular-guy authority to speak of diners, I will note that in each of the last two towns I've lived in, there's been a diner waitress who knew my regular order.)
A substitution is when you're ordering a meal and ask to have one of the components of said meal replaced with another. Perhaps you ask for fresh fruit to replace the bacon in your lumberjack breakfast, to choose a hearty-regular-guy-eating-a-big-meal example that I predict will send a thrill up Tweety's leg. Asking for orange juice as a stand-alone order? Not substituting.
And if your waitress likes you -- an experience Tweety may never have had -- you damn well can substitute.
No, those idiots are the ones who don't know how you work a damn diner. Shoot, they apparently don't know how you order in one.
But both, I fear, missed something quite essential here. For what Tweety & Co were talking about was not how one behaves in a diner, but how one performs there-specifically, how a candidate performs the act of being a "regular Jo(e)" in a diner. And, as it turns out-Surprise! Surprise!-performing authenticity is quite another thing than actually being authentic.
What do I mean? Well, it's simple, really....
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Here's the heart of the exchange:
MATTHEWS: He's not that good at that -- handshaking in a diner.
SHUSTER: No --
MATTHEWS: Barack doesn't seem to know how to do that right.
SHUSTER: -- he doesn't do that well. But then you see him in front of 15,000 people in some of these college towns, and that's why, Chris, we've seen Chelsea Clinton and Bill Clinton in Bloomington and South Bend and Terre Haute. I mean --
MATTHEWS: What's so hard about doing a diner? I don't get it. Why doesn't he go in there and say, "Did you see the papers today? What do you think about that team? How did we do last night?" Just some regular connection?
SHUSTER: Well, here's the other thing that we saw on the tape, Chris, is that, when Obama went in, he was offered coffee, and he said, "I'll have orange juice."
MATTHEWS: No.
SHUSTER: He did.
And it's just one of those sort of weird things. You know, when the owner of the diner says, "Here, have some coffee," you say, "Yes, thank you," and, "Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?" You don't just say, "No, I'll take orange juice," and then turn away and start shaking hands. That's what happens [unintelligible] --
MATTHEWS: You don't ask for a substitute on the menu.
SHUSTER: Exactly.
MATTHEWS: David, what a regular guy. You could do this. Anyway, thank you, David Shuster. I mean, go to the diners.
Now, like I said, both Dday and MissLaura hit the target here. They made good points. Matthews clearly has no idea what a "substitute" is. (And here you thought he was only clueless about important government stuff like FISA!) But something more is going on here. It's not that people don't go into a diner and ask for orange juice instead of coffee (especially if they're struggling with quitting smoking--D'oh!) It's that politicians going into a diner pretending to be "regular people" have to follow a very tight script. They can't ask for what they want, just like regular people do. That would be...highly irregular.
So, you see, Obama's great fault is that he doesn't know how to play a politician playing a regular person going to a diner to meet regular people.
Now, of course, there's an ancient tradition of not just politicians, but people of all sorts accepting the hospitality of strangers, and eating whatever manner of food is offered to them. Politicians have perfected this practice more than most, identifying the crucial identity-foods for all their target democraphics. And it's certainly true that coffee in a diner is pretty much routine. But "routine" does not "required" make, especially when were talking mass-marketed beverages, not legendary ethnic concoctions. In fact, diners are full of people who don't drink coffee. They drink decaf, they drink ice tea, they drink soda, they drink lemonade, and yes, Virginia, they even drink orange juice!
Frankly, this is one of the ways that customers are both referred to and, over time, remembered. "The ice tea in the corner needs a refill, and is ready for desert." "The ten o'clock orange juice just walked in-five minutes early!" Anyone regular enough that they'd actually hung out in a diner for a while would pick up on this sort of lingo-at least in most diners I've been in.
So, what I'm getting, really, is pretty simple: Versailles Brand "Authenticity"[TM] is the exact opposite of what it pretends to be. It is the most phony, manipulative, premeditated, scripted, poll-tested, focus-grouped thing imaginable. In fact, it is so much the opposite of real authenticity that it reminded me of the classic Seinfeld episode, of the same name.
In the Season 5 finale, "The Opposite", George realizes:
It became very clear to me sitting out there today, that every decision I've ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, something to eat ... It's all been wrong.
And so he resolves to do the opposite of whatever he would normally do.
As a result, ordering the opposite of what he normally would, he gets a girlfriend:
George: Excuse me, I couldn't help but notice that you were looking in my direction.
Victoria: Oh, that's because you just ordered the exact same lunch as me.
George: My name is George. I'm unemployed and I live with my parents.
Victoria (with a huge smile): I'm Victoria, hi!
He also gets a job with the New York Yankees.
Now, George Costanza is a nebbish, a nobody. And the fact that he can finally get something going for him in his life is cause for the loser in all of us to stand up and cheer-that is, if we can stand the thought of seeing ourselves in him. But there's a price to be paid for everything, and in this episode, the price is paid by Elaine, whose life falls totally apart, so that she is now living George's life. He gets a fantastic new job, she loses hers-in fact, she is responsible for company going out of business.
And so it is in George CostanzaLand. This is a place where truth and lies trade places, as do trivia and matters of great substance. I wrote about this previously in a 3-part series last October, The Truth-Free Zone. In Part 1, I explained:
- Truth and lies have switched places: Lies continually repeated function like the truth, while truths that go unuttered function as if they were lies. A prime example of this in the 2000 election was the conventional wisdom that Gore was a serial liar, while Bush was a man of great integrity-a straight-talker.
- Taken to the extreme, things that cannot possibly be so have taken the place of fundamental truths. A prime example of this is the so-called "war on terror"-something that makes absolutely no sense, if you stop and think about it.
- Verbal formulations are used that are inherently non-sensical and cannot be used rationally-at least in the existing total environment. "Supporting the troops" is a prime example of this.
This is one actually my own version of one of the key themes of Glenn Greenwald's new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling The Big Myths of Republican Politics.-- appearance and reality, trivia and subtance, lies and truth, myth and reality have all changed places.
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