Malice In George CostanzaLand

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Apr 12, 2008 at 18:38

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....