Calvin Trillin writes for The New Yorker, and is one of my favorite food writers (I recommend American Fried). But, like many, he’s run afoul of the Easily Offended. In the April 4 issue of the magazine, he published a poem called “Have they run out of provinces yet?”
Have they run out of provinces yet?
If they haven’t, we’ve reason to fret.
Long ago, there was just Cantonese.
(Long ago, we were easy to please.)
But then food from Szechuan came our way,
Making Cantonese strictly passé.
Szechuanese was the song that we sung,
Though the ma po could burn through your tongue.
Then when Shanghainese got in the loop
We slurped dumplings whose insides were soup.
Then Hunan, the birth province of Mao,
Came along with its own style of chow.
So we thought we were finished, and then
A new province arrived: Fukien.
Then respect was a fraction of meagre
For those eaters who’d not eaten Uighur.
And then Xi’an from Shaanxi gained fame,
Plus some others—too many to name.Now, as each brand-new province appears,
It brings tension, increasing our fears:
Could a place we extolled as a find
Be revealed as one province behind?
So we sometimes do miss, I confess,
Simple days of chow mein but no stress,
When we never were faced with the threat
Of more provinces we hadn’t met.
Is there one tucked away near Tibet?
Have they run out of provinces yet?
Now if you’ve read Trillin, you’ll know that he loves all sorts of Chinese food, and writes about it constantly. He HATES chow mein, as he noted in American Fried. In light of that, the poem above is clearly satirical: there’s no way that Trillin would be dismayed about the arrival of new provinces with new dishes!
But of course people took it as some kind of denigration of the diversity of China. As The New York Times reports, these included a writer in Jezebel, who mocked Trillin by writing a critique from the perspective of “a sixth grader” (12 year old in the U.S.):
The imagery of the poem is scary and the mood of the poem is confused and troubled. As Calvin Trillin says in the poem, “Now, as each brand-new province appears/ It brings tensions, increasing our fears./ Could a place we extolled as a find/ Be revealed as one province behind?” He misses “simple days of chow mein but no stress/ When we never were faced with the threat/ Of more provinces we hadn’t met.” This line rhymes with the title of the poem, which is “Have They Run Out of Provinces Yet?” which is a question that is connected to the world because everyone understands that China is too big and they are taking American jobs and there are too many kinds of them.
In conclusion, Calvin Trillin hopes the answer is yes, China has run out of provinces.
And here’s the title of a critique of the poem that appeared in The Stranger, a weekly Seattle alt-mag. Click on the screenshot to go to it:
And the writer, Rich Smith, accuses Trillin of racism (the magazine’s emphasis; note that although this sounds like a parody, it is not):
The poem announces its regressive ideologies in several ways, starting with the title’s employment of the othering “we/they” binary, where “they” are “foreigners” who have a seemingly endless number of those whatsits—Provinces?—and “we” white Americans are the stately realists who have a comprehensible number of states and cuisines.
This longing for a time of chow mein—which is, as I’m sure the food writer knows—a westernized dish—is a longing for the days of a white planet. Those days when we white people comfortably held power, when they made food for us, when the only fear was the fear of another cuisine to conquer, the days before we had to ask ourselves stuff like—does this poem rest on an unexamined racist sentiment?
Trillin’s concluding thought in this poem recalls Tony Hoagland’s concluding thought in “The Change,” which Claudia Rankine famously (relatively speaking) and powerfully and gracefully discussed at the 2011 AWP conference. Like Trillin’s speaker, Hoagland’s speaker yearns for a time when the divide between white people and black people was even more institutionalized than it is now.Aside from adding insult to the centuries of injury done to people of color in the U.S., Trillins’s and Hoagland’s poems commit the poetic sin of resting on stereotypes. Trillin’s talk of potentially endless provinces plays on the stereotype of the Chinese horde and stokes xenophobic fears, and his exoticization of food (“as each brand-new province appears”—brand new to who?) plays into Orientalism. All of these are stereotypes, all stereotypes are cliches, andall cliches are boring. In fact—and here’s some etymology for you, Trillin—the word “cliche” comes from the act of boring into a stereotype. So cliche is born from the stereotype—in that it’s supposedly onomatopoetic of the “sound of a mold striking molten metal” to make a printing plate.
None of this is to say that white writers shouldn’t write about race. After all, as I remember Ta Nehisi Coates quoting Baldwin at a recent talk in Seattle—we invented it. But the idea is to try to write about race without perpetuating racism.
Now here’s a person who’s all heated up over nothing, but his button has been pressed, and the prose comes out automatically, like one of those old dolls that would speak when you pulled a ring on its back.
At the end of his article, Smith adds an update in which he says that, in light of new information he got, this might possibly be an ironic poem. POSSIBLY? Did the author look up anything about Trillin’s history of writing about Chinese food? Apparently not; he just splattered his kneejerk reaction on paper that Trillin’s poem was “racist.” This is the way things work today: shoot first; ask questions later, all the while signaling your moral purity.
In the end, though, Smith dismisses the possibility of Trillin being ironic:
I think that’s a bold bit of irony! It requires you to trust the New Yorker wouldn’t publish a poem like that (and, to their credit, they have been publishing such good ones lately!) and it rests on Trillin’s reputation, which me and many poets my age seem to be unaware of.
This is sheer idiocy. If you’re unaware of Trillin’s history, look it up before you start calling him a racist.
Writer Karissa Chen appears to be obsessed by this poem, as you can see on her Twi**er feed. Here are but two of her reactions, one written after she belatedly realized that the poem might be humorous:
dear @NewYorker: this calvin trillin poem isn't only offensive it's also just… bad. https://t.co/KCAUpQTiKg
— 𝕂𝕒𝕣𝕚𝕤𝕤𝕒 ℂ𝕙𝕖𝕟 (@karissachen) April 6, 2016
Ok so he meant it as parody, but it doesn't work bc fuck, our food has been made fun of for ages. Not the same as making fun of Brie.
— 𝕂𝕒𝕣𝕚𝕤𝕤𝕒 ℂ𝕙𝕖𝕟 (@karissachen) April 7, 2016
From writer Celeste Ng:
PSA: "It's satire!" should not be used as a safety net for poorly conceived, poorly executed, or unwisely published pieces.
— Celeste Ng (@pronounced_ing) April 7, 2016
And writter Jenny Zhang:
https://twitter.com/Jennybagel/status/717746632138301441
https://twitter.com/Jennybagel/status/717836891438112770
In the face of this food-related social media onslaught (I’ve omitted some other attacks), Trillin was forced to explain himself to The Guardian, saying “his poem was being misinterpreted and that it ‘was simply a way of making fun of food-obsessed bourgeoisie’ – and further defended the piece by saying that it was a device that he’d used before. The Guardian explains:
It was used in a previous poem:
Trillin pointed out another poem he published in the New Yorker, entitled What Happened to Brie and Chablis?
That poem, published in 2003, also pokes fun at the foibles of foodies, although the satirical tone is clearer:
What happened to Brie and Chablis?
Both Brie and Chablis used to be
The sort of thing everyone ate
When goat cheese and Napa Merlot
Weren’t purchased by those in the know,
And monkfish was thought of as bait.“It was not a put-down of the French,” Trillin wrote.
I’m sorry, but this kind of social media pile-on, completely unjustified in this case, is ludicrous. It is as if people are looking everywhere to find offense, and to see themselves as victims. Yes, sometimes they are, and pushback is acceptable. But in this case it isn’t. Before you attack someone for your perception that their ideology is impure, try understanding what they meant. That, after all, was the downfall of many who criticized Charlie Hebdo.
sub
Calvin Trillin has been wrecking havoc with American gastronomy since he declared Kansas City to be the epicenter of the American palate. He appears anonymously in the brilliant “I Like Killing Flies.” It was Calvin Trillin who noted to his grandmother—who complained about eating Chinese food two nights in a row—that the Chinese eat Chinese food for every meal of every day.
The poor befuddled critics know neither food nor Calvin Trillin. That’s understandable. That the editors knew nothing either is less excusable.
I love Trillin’s food articles, but I do need to read his book. Trillin is from Kansas City, so when he praises food in Kansas City, he may be serious at times and not so at other times. I used to go to Kansas City frequently when I was working, and I know, as does Calvin Trillin, that Arthur Bryant’s BBQ is one of the most enjoyable eating experiences you can have. Not only is Bryants a source of great food, but it is a source of a great food experience.
It’s hard to wreck havoc, as it’s already sort of wrecked by definition. It’s easy to wreak havoc on grammar, though. 😉
/pedant
OK, so it’s official then, these people are just fucking stupid. Period. Full stop.
Eeyup.
“which me and many poets my age seem to be unaware of”
He seems equally unaware of proper grammar. Not a good thing in a “poet”, surely.
Calvin Trillin has been a national treasure for decades. His was the first item I turned to whenever the new Nation arrived. So it would behoove these various would-be critics to learn some basics before parading their ignorance for all to see. Such as doing their homework – it’s not like Trillin is obscure. Hell, he has TWO Wikipedia pages (one for him, one for his bibliography). The poem at issue here is vintage Trillin, clever, whimsical, perfect. He has been doing this, and doing it better than anyone else, for a very long time now (he’s 80).
So congratulations to these budding auditors of the acceptable: You have embarrassed yourselves in grand style on an international scale. Were there any doubt of your total cluelessness before, it has been wiped clean. Worse, this goes on your “permanent record”. Ask Mr. Trillin if you are baffled by that term. I’m sure he’d write a nice poem about it. If he hasn’t already.
Him is definitely a dunce.
That was a regulation dashing of intersectional regressive nonsense, nicely done. I’m a complete novice when it comes to food critics or fine dining, but the narrow selection of Mr. Trillin’s work I have read, including the excerpt above, I’ve found to be whitty and elegant and no good reason to take offense at all.
It was immediately obvious to me that he was lampooning the attitude in the arts, culinary and otherwise, that obscurity or esotericism are virtues in and of themselves, and can be used to assess the value of the dish or work without thinking about the actual content.
Of course the poseurs are going to miss his point. The perceptive capabilities of those who use obscurity as the primary criterion for judging something creative are manifestly lacking.
It was immediately obvious to me what Trillin was doing too. Wtf is wrong with these people? I understand that for some their brains just might not work in a way to get this sort of thing, but if you know that about yourself you check your facts. These people just seem to be fu*kwits of the first order.
“It was immediately obvious to me what Trillin was doing too. Wtf is wrong with these people?”
It was immediately obvious to anyone with half a brain. Which answers your question.
OK Diane G. Now me is offended.
Are you saying me has half a brain.?
Seven Warning Signs that you have only half a brain:
1. You are easily offended.
2-7. Sorry, these are beyond you.
Agreed – I’ve never heard of the guy, but the suggestion that the poem is making fun of the Chinese is just ridiculous; I don’t see how people read that into the text without willful blindness.
But what convinces me that these people are “fu*kwits of the first order” is not their making this mistake, nor even their initial confidence without bothering to check their facts; it’s their response when their mistake is pointed out. I’m particularly exasperated by their seamless switch to the “Oh, the poem isn’t really any good” line of attack – this shows a willingness to try anything ahead of saying, “Oops, I goofed.”
‘Tear him for his bad verses!’
(Link in case I’m being too obscure –
http://www.shmoop.com/julius-caesar/cinna-poet.html )
cr
Excellent point!
Agreed. I’d never heard of Trillin until today, but it was immediately obvious that this was a satirical criticism of some Western foodies, not Chinese cuisine. Perhaps the tech equivalent of the foodies would be those Apple obsessives who despair if they don’t have the latest igadget which is 2mm thinner than their existing one.
He can perhaps be criticized by poetry purists for writing doggerel, but doggerel is quite an acceptable style for popular satire.
I think the authors of these complaints should all be condemned to a course in rhetoric (a proper one, lasting centuries). They seem, despite the protestations that they are poets, etc, not to be well-read at all and to be wholly insensitive to tone.
“(a proper one, lasting centuries)”
That’s what I call tenure!
“Oppression” is the currency of choice amongst the regressive crowd.
15 years ago one of my best friends said “oppression” is a word just as overused by the left as “treason” is by the right.
My complaining about this trend to some of the top brass in the Unitarian church was a significant factor (among others) in the demise of my career plans back then to be a Unitarian minister.
The problem has gotten worse, and it’s a dangerous trend and actually makes REAL racism harder to combat.
Five words:
The Boy Who Cried Wolf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf
The commentariat at “The Stranger” are eviscerating this guy beautifully.
In light of this and other events, we are lurching to a time where satire will need to be qualified with a warning label:
Warning: This posting contains satire that is written by a person of European descent. Readers who cannot detect satire from a person of this ethnicity are advised to not read further. If you experience outrage or other feelings that indicate that you don’t get it, please click this link to watch kittens until you feel better.
The fact hat something is satire is irrelevant to SJWs.
If someone claims to have hurt feelings, it may as well not be satire .
Some lovely folks on Pharyngula said that people who hurt the feelings of oppressed groups with their satire deseve to have their lives ruined, because reasons.
Intent is meaningless.
Oh, don’t get me started on what pomo relativism has done to the concept of intent in art. And I think this little poem can reasonably be classified as art.
Thanks Mark, that’s another day wasted 🙂
Clearly, we have a half-wit problem in this country. We have a way to many and many of them have advanced education.
Perhaps it should be noted that chow mein is not Chinese but American.
You may have just oppressed werewolves in London.
Him already noted it.
I think these people need a grounding in reality, but I don’t know how they could get it.
Perhaps they could join up, and be shouted at by a good old-style British RSM (regimental sergeant major)…
Very good story. The title could be – Ready, Fire, Aim.
Please take no offense, I’m not shooting a gun.
The professional victims don’t want to understand what Trillin meant.
They just want to signal their virtue.
I read an article yesterday wherein the Walking Dead TV show was accused of anti-gay sentiment because a lesbian character died. Because the actress had other commitments. But no, TWD hates minorities because in that show, everyone dies, and this plot device includes minorities.
It would be much duller, and I think nastier, world if the Calvin Trillins were replaced by snowflakes – nastier because they, unlike Trillin, KNOW WHAT”S RIGHT FOR YOU and have no difficulty telling you about it and insisting you follow it: Trillin just wants to entertain you.
Good grief. Knowing nothing about Trillin other than what you said in your introduction it was immediately apparent to me that he was lampooning foodies who must always be seen at the leading edge of trends in cuisine.
The critics suffer from a severe lack of reading comprehension.
I’m with Dean. Additionally, I have trouble understanding poetry, including my own sometimes. And yet Trillin’s intention here was pretty clear to me.
I fear, but also anticipate, the backlash against this sort of thinking.
The emperor has no clothes: many of us in the humanities have had to endure this nonsense for years, but between censorious students and sanctimonious critics, the ugly legacy of post modernism and intersectionality is now fully visible to the public. Let’s hope these ideas will wilt in the light of public scrutiny, but if the Sokal affair shows us anything, it’s the tenacity of aggressively bad ideas in some quarters of the humanities and social sciences.
Someone should start a website dedicated to lampoons of the Easily Offended. Sadly, it would a full-time job keeping up with the Snowflakes and their ilk.
Douglas- I recommend Everything’s A Problem on Tumblr.
Thanks – I will check it out.
I think that if you’re going to criticize a poet for being a Western-centric snob who is utterly ignorant of the rich Chinese history and culture and is only interested in the dish in front of his nose – you might want to familiarize yourself with the bibliography and style of the poet, instead of focusing on that one poem in front of your nose, no?
Context is for imperialists.
Interestingly given Jerry’s satirical yet perfectly legitimate critique of bagel-appropriation, the final tweeter in the post has the handle ‘jennybagel’. #NoToBagelBurglars.
The most devastating weapon against thinking like this is to actually take it seriously – to hold these people to their beliefs. Eg. ‘please change your bagel-related twitter handle immediately’. Two can play this facile little game.
Dear Calvin Trillin,
I apologize to you for the know-nothings who have mouthed off in ignorance about you, your life, your work and your poem. Their inability to recognize humor is scary. It is difficult to
care for such specimens of humanity that are so militantly ignorant. Thank you for your written work over the years about food and other aspects of human life. I have enjoyed your writing so much. Please don’t let such ignoramuses cause you a moment’s concern. They haven’t yet learned to engage brain before mouth.
Some days I’d just rather not know what is passing for thought in some people’s heads.
The update to the Seattle mag article is interesting. After having had it pointed out to him by a professor of English that the poem is actually ironic, Mr. Smith says that to view the poem as humor you have to trust the New Yorker not to have printed it otherwise, or you have to know that Mr. Trilling is a humorist. Then he apparently rejects the idea.
Didn’t they used to teach people to recognize irony in college? Did that get lost in postmodernism? Did humor get lost altogether?
Humor, lost altogether. Everything, literally everything, is part of an epic struggle for world without oppression. Or, apparently, joy, humor, or human emotion of any kind.
“Mr. Smith says that to view the poem as humor you have to trust the New Yorker not to have printed it otherwise, or you have to know that Mr. Trilling is a humorist. Then he apparently rejects the idea.”
This falls in line the the common conception of microagressions which emphasizes a listener’s interpretation over a speaker’s intent.
These arguments ultimately undermine anything approaching a shared context for communication; if a few members of the audience are offended, we should defer to their lived experience rather than objectively analyzing the original material in the first place. This is how authoritarian leftists often deflect criticism—by claiming that no one can legitimately criticize subjective perspectives.
Except them.
“militantly ignorant”! I like that! It’s perfect! You don’t have to know anything at all about Calvin Trillin to enjoy this amusing poem and understand its tone. It is disheartening for a writer to find that some readers actually don’t know how to read. And I love the hilarious ignorance of “…Trillin’s reputation, which me and many poets my age seem to be unaware of”. Priceless!
I think Bud is probably a little bit imerpialist, but he’s not a “racist” and whatever racism lives in him can not be made tantamount with the racism of Nazis or of Ferguson police or of people at the Donald Trump rallies. He is a Jew from the midwest, a first generation American, and not the Establishment WASP people assume he is. I am so freaking fed up with the PC racists trying to muzzle and condemn and finger wag at every available turn. It’s boring, reductive and bad for Chinese people and chow mein lovers and everything else.
Trillion simply has a stomach that enjoys eating, including Chinese food. He simply goes too deep about Chinese food, and he’s funny.
Did Jerry eat at “Joe’s Shanghai” for the dumplings that “We slurped dumplings whose insides were soup.” when you visit NYC Chinatown last time? :)) Also, thanks Jerry for “Szechuanese was the song that we sung, Though the ma po could burn through your tongue.” — I really think these words are just talking about you, professor! :)))
I get the feeling a lot of people have an irony or satire blind spot.
On youtube there is a comedian, Edward Current, whose satire seems to bamboozle people. Read some of the comments, you will be surprised that people do not see the satire.
Sorry I committed a comment faux pas, hope this works, shoot me if it doesn’t (I’m joking you know that right!)
Edward Current on youtube
Will you be wanting the customary blindfold and cigarette in advance of the shooting, Stephen?
Anything special you’d like for the condemned’s last meal?
“… kinky sexual positions like doggy-style and gangnam style …” — that one alone was worth the price of admission. 🙂
gangnam style as a sexual position?? LOL
I’ve enjoyed many of Current’s videos.
Current is terrific and it’s simultaneously hilarious and appalling that so many take him seriously. Wasn’t he doing his shtick before Colbert was Colbert?
I’m aghast.
I don’t think I have any more words in response to seeing these examples of offense-mining. I just sit slack-jawed at what I’m reading.
Thank you for pointing Mr Trillin out to me. I had not previously been aware of him, and will seek out more (if he is available in the land of OZ).
BTW, I think I got stuck at the Szechuan stage of the series, and I still like ma po tofu!
“None of this is to say that white writers shouldn’t write about race “….
… they just must not write about rice! Huh?!
I hate that feeling of having landed on Bizarro World.
Well duh, rice is white, isn’t it?
How dare you ignore brown rice in favour of white rice’s cerealist hegemony??!! You ricist!!!!!
Ha Ha, hilarious ending! 😀
We had the great good fortune to accompany Trillin on a guided “foodie” tour of the area around his home in Greenwich Village, with samples of his favorites, including Chinese, Vietnamese and Italian specialties. It was clear that he relished the diversity and had utmost respect for and appreciation of the cultures that produce such diversity.
lucky you;-)
Color me green with envy!
(No disrespect for Muppets intended.)
Even The New Republic: “White Poets Want Chinese Culture Without Chinese People”
Apparently Timothy Yu should be added to the growing list of people who think The Emperor’s New Clothes is a story about invisible clothes.
I’ve long been an admirer of Trillin’s witty writing. But when it comes to elitist white privilege, ya gotta admit he presents (to put it in Rumsfeldian parlance) a target-rich environment. (Which isn’t to say that the offense-taking here was at all merited; even if it were, his critics could’ve at least tried to take him down with some waggish doggerel of their own.)
There’s no way to take him down for this with doggerel, waggish or not, because he did absolutely nothing wrong.
Sure Trillin comes across as an upper-class white guy. That’s part of his schtick. It is the critics that are ignorant and clueless. He’s Calvin Trillin. They never will be. Too bad for them.
Oh, I think some fun could’ve been had by turning Trillin’s shtick back on him with a few well-chosen couplets — all while making a valid, if subtle, point about cultural imperialism. It’s the offense and outrage expressed in this instance that’s wholly undeserved.
But then, these SJW types are a humorless and ill-informed lot, ill-equipped to make a point with style or wit.
(I’m a longtime subscriber to, and fan of, The New Yorker. But there’s always room for a laugh at its inflated, high-Anglican self-regard — of which the Jewish Trillin is a prime exemplar, albeit in his often tongue-in-cheek manner. After all, The New Yorker‘s long been home to the tiny mummies … of 43rd street’s land of the walking dead.)
As I noted, Trillin is 80, and so understandably not as familiar to younger readers as others. I’ve been reading him for many, many years, more in The Nation than The New Yorker (which I do like, but I pretty much would have to be forced at gunpoint to read a food column). He’s been on Letterman (who?) and many other talk shows, and he’s always a hoot because of his dry delivery and unflappable demeanor. (His account of how the Smithsonian lost a set of George Washington’s teeth had me near tears.)
But this stuff ain’t rocket surgery, either. Poems like this are trifles, and hardly meant to be emblematic of anything other than light humor. More to the point, if you’re going to go off on the sort of insane tears these idiots seem to specialize in, best to do a little homework first, lest you embarrass yourself.
There were people around before 1990. Quite a few, I hear.
Whoa! It’s not 1990 anymore? Somebody shoulda woken me up to tell me. Have a habit of imagining I’m still back in my salad days, I do …
Makes me wonder if there is any other kind.
Absolutely ridiculous. I loved the poem, but, IMO, you really have to be A) familiar with the NYC Chinese food scene and history, and B) understand that he is a food critic writing about the fear of writing a good review of a restaurant which falls out of style because the next big thing comes along! He’s making fun of how food trends are so shallow. It has nothing to do at all with Chinese food or chow main. Thanks for getting me all pissed off, Jerry.
“Dire Lobo” — cool name for a tribute band that plays alternating sets of Dire Straits and Los Lobos.
If Dire Straits and Chris Rea joined up, they would be called Dire Rea.
Idiots!!! No WAY Trillin is in any way a racist. Love all his writing, food and otherwise. Just thinking about His “taureaux-piscine” piece from eons ago is enough to make me break out in uncontrollable giggles. Heard him debate bagels ( NY vs Montreal) with Adam Gopnik a couple of years ago.
And dipshit “me and other poets don’t know anything about him”…Where to begin???
Pâtisseries, for sure — but Montreal bagels? I gotta go with Trillin on this one; no way can Montreal compete with the bagels in Gotham. (It’s all about the water brought down in the Catskill Aqueduct.)
I recommend American Fried
Leave us not forget Alice, Let’s Eat and Third Helpings.
It was very sad when Alice died. Trillin wrote such a moving piece about it.
This is like reading Housman’s When I was One and Twenty as N ageist hate poem.
I remain convinced Twitter was created by space aliens to help identify the stupid in advance of any invasion.
I don’t know Calvin Trillin; so I’ll assume he was just being funny in his poem. However, it’s of paramount importance to be culturally sensitive whenever you write things meant to be satirical or funny about another culture, just like the kind of sensitivity when you say things about the other gender. A number of things to bear in mind here. Unless one already knows Calvin Trillin, few people would do research on his background before they read the poem; so they would probably just take it at face value without delving into it too much. To be honest, Calvin Trillin is far from being a household name, and most people would not know or care about his actual gastronomic or cultural leanings. So misunderstanding is bound to happen when people read his poem even though he was just being funny (assuming it is indeed so). Just think about this: would you think twice before making fun of your close friend, your co-worker …? Another thing. The way Trillin described the Chinese provinces would lead many Chinese into believing he doesn’t know much about China (maybe actually he does, who knows): the provinces have been around for many many years; the Sichuan, Fujian and other cuisines have been there all along. I do believe Trillin was being funny when he said new provinces kept coming up but people may take it as his ignorance. And the spellings of the provinces! Last time I checked we are in 2016 but Trillin used spellings from the Qing dynasty! And that was a time when various foreign powers freely carved out their turfs in China using their military might (colonialism). It was so last century; actually it was so last millenium! My point is, even if Trillin did not mean to be derogatory, he simply didn’t demonstrate enough culturally sensitivity in the poem and that was a stupid way of being funny!
Thank you for demonstrating how Trilling lacked ENOUGH cultural sensitivity.
Which one lacked sufficient cultural sensitivity, Lionel or Diana?
There’s an embarrassing personal anecdote here: in my callow youth, I was under the misapprehension that Calvin was their son (until a girlfriend pointed out that his last name lacked the terminal “g”).
And I had somehow thought that Lionel and Diana were siblings…
If only my embarrassing personal anecdotes were so lofty…
As I recall, I was holding one of Trillin’s New Yorker columns, expounding on something about the two “Trilling” generations. She came over, and without a word, took the magazine out of one hand and my marginalia pen out of the other, scratched out a “g” after Trillin’s name in the byline, underlined it and put an exclamation point behind it. She then handed both pen and magazine back, gave me a tight smile and head shake, rolled her eyes, and walked into another room.
I haven’t thought of the incident in decades, until Jerry juxtaposed a “Trilling” with a “Trillin” here. Now that I do, though — and feel free to call me a weirdo here, if you want — the way she did it was kinda hawt. 🙂
Weirdo.
Guess you hadta be there (in my head, decades later, when I recollected it, I mean).
😀
Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.
This is for Jerry. Two things.
1. Further clarification to my first post in relation to the spellings of the provinces. Trillin used the old names when referring to the provinces and for some people, the old names carry a colonial connotation. Twenty or thirty years ago, people were still using Peking when they referred to the capital of China, but as everyone knows, it’s now Beijing, as the government wanted to unify the names with Pinyin and to get rid of that colonial connotation. When one makes references to other countries or cultures, there may be these subtle things they may not know of. Let me give you another example. I once came across a Chinese from China who was learning English in the US and he used the N word for African Americans. He didn’t mean to be derogatory; he just incorrectly thought that’s one of the words for African Americans. If he had used the n word openly, imagine what would’ve happened. So you see, an innocent misuse of words could’ve created a lot of misunderstanding or worse.
2. Back to the theme of your blog, evolution. The US is supposed to be the most advanced country in science and technologies R&D. Why are there so many people refusing to accept Evolution in light of the overwhelming evidence supporting it? I bought your book Why Evolution is True when it first came out a few years ago; I was surprised that there are so many people opposing Evolution in the US, as I thought all along that Evolution had been a well-established theory (in the scientific sense) supported by all kinds of evidence.
Byron: No matter WHAT a person says, there’s probably going to be someone who gets offended by it- get over it!
You do not have the “right” to NOT be offended; that’s the main thing all you ludicrously P.C. types have completely forgotten. Are you aware that there are a great many other problems in this world that need to be addressed LONG before we devote any energy to the problem of some people being offended by what other people SAY?
As I’ve indicated previously, I wasn’t offended by Trillin’s poem; I was only pointing out the source of the misunderstanding that made some people feel offended. I was pointing out what I observed. While Trillin is absolutely free to write that poem, others also have the right to interpret it in their own ways and express their like or dislike. If people have indeed misinterpreted Trillin’s intentions, fine, let’s clarify it. The New Yorker is circulated globally and read by many people in other countries. The freedom of expression also applies to other people on this planet. Like it or not, there are other countries, other cultures, other opinions, on this planet. As long as everyone expresses his/her opinions and feelings in a civilized manner, we should respect what others say. Whenever there’s misinterpretation, we should clarify it, not make things worse.
You seem to think that your not having been personally offended is relevant in some way. It isn’t. Nobody cares and this detail provides zero support for your position.
Does Trillin, in your opinion, really need to get everyone up to speed on his many many years of writing incredibly humorous and non-offensive pieces in The New Yorker and elsewhere? Not to be disrespectful, but OMFG, do you have no sense of humor? I come from mixed Norwegian, English, Italian-Swiss background and I have no problem with lutefisk, bangers and mash, pasta, whatever jokes.
Well, I guess that’s what cultural sensitivity is about, right? Don’t forget that The New Yorker is circulated globally, and people in other parts of the world probably do not know who Trillin is, even though he could be a celeb in the US or Europe. I have no issue against Trillin’s poem but I’m not representative of the more than 1.3 billion Chinese around the world. The global Chinese community is not monolithic; actually the majority of them are still quite traditional and may not perfectly understand what this ‘western guy’ Trillin is getting at (again, cultural sensitivity!) So Trillin’s intentions would be interpreted by each individual differently, and these people certainly have the rights of expressing their like or dislike. Having said that, I haven’t read the original article in The New Yorker so I’m not sure what the context is.
Well not to put too fine a point on it, but thinking like this appears to be part of the problem. Trillin was not writing to, or about, the 1.3 billion Chinese who don’t “get” him. Who cares what they think?
Exactemundo!!
Frankly, Byron, I find what you have written highly offensive to anyone with senses of humor and proportion. If you didn’t intend to be offensive then you should have written in a way that didn’t offend us.
It doesn’t need context. It’s satire, it’s humor, and in this case it’s not offensive anyway.
I do, however, subscribe to the Stephen Fry School in these matters: “I find that offensive!” “So? I don’t give a fuck!”
(And yes, if that sounds “offensive”, point made.)
As opposed to the sensitivity Mao demonstrated during the Cultural Revolution? Or that Chiang and the Kuomintang showed in the Shanghai massacre? Or, for that matter, that Deng did at Tiananmen Square?
I think one of the things Trillin was chiding the bourgeois foodies for, at least implicitly, is their mild cultural imperialism. But in so doing, Trillin made of himself not just an observer, but a participant.
As such, as I’ve suggested above, he could’ve come in for a bit of mild chastening himself — especially had it been done by deflecting his wit back at him. Instead, his critics lost the opportunity to make a valid, if minor, point by responding with faux offense, a trap you’ve fallen into here yourself, BW.
In case you are not aware of this, throughout Chinese history, the average Chinese react very differently to civil wars / internsl power struggles and to invasions by foreign powers. Chinese thoughout history would tend to accept with resignation that the civil wars were part of the normal course of history, especially when a new dynasty replaced an old one. What happened during the Cultural Revolution, the purge of communists by KMT and at Tiananmen Square were horrible atrocities, but for historical reasons, the average Chinese view these atrocities or even crimes differently from, say, the Japanese invasions during the late 1800s and WW2.
I’m familiar with the concept of cultural triumphalism, yes. In the US it takes the unfortunate form of “American exceptionalism.”
The US was born in colonialism. Haven’t had to deal much with foreign invasion, though. Well, there was that time in 1812 when the Brits came back for another ass-kickin’. 🙂 Set the White House on fire. even.
But Ol’ Andrew Jackson sent ’em packin’ at the Battle of New Orleans. You know, the one where “we fired our guns and the British kept a-comin’, though there wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago. We fired once more and they commenced to runnin’, down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.”
Yeah, cultural triumphalism — we USians can relate to the Chinese there, big time. 🙂
Well, 1812 was more of a draw than an ass whoopin’,
You mean the kinda draw where the home team chases the visiting team through briars and through brambles and through the bushes where a rabbit couldn’t go?
I mean, if you can’t trust the historiography of a jingoistic American pop song, who can you trust? 🙂
Ray Stevens?
It’s interesting to note that the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, was signed on Dec. 24th, 1814. The speed of communications at that time being exceedingly slow, the battle of New Orleans was fought on Jan. 8th, 1815, three full weeks after peace was declared!
That’s Johnny Horton. Wouldn’t surprise me if Ray Stevens covered it — though he no doubt would’ve made it (intentionally) funny.
Yeah, I know. Kind of a joke. Though just kind of.
At least there was the excuse of slow communications for the Battle of New Orleans, Jeffery.
There’s no similar excuse for the commanders who sent all those poor souls to their death for no damn reason at all on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918.
Damn, that’s such a catchy tune. Still have my Johnny Horton LP. True American original. Sort of a vocal version of Robert Service.
(Though I guess Johnny didn’t write TBoNO.)
Horton must’ve felt bad about dissing the Brits over New Orleans, since he tried to make up for it with his paean to The Royal Navy “Sink the Bismark”.
A song I drove my parents crazy singing, endlessly. Especially after forcing my father to take me to see the movie.
Come to think of it, the neighbors weren’t best pleased with me either.
lol – I think my 3 brothers and I tortured my parents the same way (after we got tired of 100 bottles of beer on the wall…)
Ken: You know, I was actually going to bring that up (11/11/18), but thought it might be getting too far off track- I’m glad you did. Over 5,000 men died, on all sides, in meaningless attacks when their commanders (who were looking to make reputations for themselves) knew full well hostilities were to end at 11 AM.
I don’t seem to have that worrying-about-getting-too-far-off-track gene, Jeffery. I should — Jerry no doubt sometimes wishes I did, and would stick to the letter of Da Roolz — but somehow I don’t. 🙂
“Armistice Day” must have been a bitter pill to swallow each year for the loved ones of the 5,000 needlessly killed on The Great War’s last day.
I was going to make the same comment about the casualties in the Battle of New Orleans. Must have been very frustrating for them. Well, their rellies, anyway.
cr
I just watched that ‘Bismarck’ video and, never mind the simplistic jingoism, the inaccuracies made me cringe. Bismarck was never the fastest ship afloat (many light cruisers and destroyers were faster), it didn’t have the biggest guns (8×15″; Rodney, for example, which helped finish Bismarck off, had 9×16″); Bismarck didn’t, as implied, fire first in the exchange with Hood and Prince of Wales, the British ships did; Prinz Eugen also hit Hood, and Prince of Wales hit and damaged Bismarck even before the German ships opened fire; Hood did not ‘go down’ so much as blow up…
And no mention that Bismarck’s final woes began when it was hit by an aircraft torpedo.
But I suppose such details don’t fit easily in a ballad that sounds as if it was adapted from Pat Garrett vs Billy the Kid…
(I won’t even start on the errors in the pictures in that video)
cr
Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid featured Dylan’s haunting tune “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” Also featured Bob in his first dramatic film role.
For whatever that’s worth …
‘Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid featured Dylan’s haunting tune “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.”’
Oops, I sincerely apologise to Peckinpah and Dylan. I hadn’t seen the movie and I wasn’t referencing it musically. Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a fine piece of music.
I was just trying to think of some hackneyed Western cliche about which one of those trite cowboy ballads might have been written. Obviously I shot myself in the foot.
cr
At least you didn’t shoot the sherrif.
Btw, may I recommend a fantastically brilliant new Booker-Prize-winning novel by Jamaican Marlon James, A Brief History of 7 Killings. It is sort of “about” an attack on Bob Marley’s life in 1976, told from the points of view of many characters ( sort of ala Faulkner) including gang leaders named Shotta Sherrif and Josey Wales;-)
’76 was the year Mistah Marley released Rastaman Vibration.
I and I played the shit outta that 8-track, mon.
Also the same year Clintwood did The Outlaw JW. Coincidence?
I think not.
Clint’s best early film, IMHO; his best early Western, anyway.
“However, it’s of paramount importance to be culturally sensitive whenever you write things meant to be satirical or funny about another culture…”
No, it isn’t.
When writing satire or comedy, the only thing of paramount importance is to be funny.
It doesn’t matter who wrote that piece. No person with a functioning brain that isn’t steeped in offense-culture ideology would find it objectionable.
In fact I’d say that satire and cultural sensitivity are usually, if not always, mutually exclusive.
The only cultural sensitivity required, I would say, is just enough to know if your satire goes so far over the edge as to be offensive to everybody (not just hypersenitive special snowflakes).
cr
Agreed. Sometimes it’s hard to draw the line especially when the satire spills over into other countries unless you know those cultures really well. I’m saying this purely from the perspective of avoiding unnecessary misunderstanding. Presumably we all want to make this world a better snd more peaceful place, right?
No, we don’t. What a cowardly, bland hell to live in.
In which case it is truly great satire, and mission accomplished. Some of the best humor is totally offensive. And should be.
I guess that’s what cultural sensitivity is about. Please don’t get me wrong, I’ve never said I was offended by Trillin’s poem; I was just pointing out the source of the misunderstanding. Don’t forget The New Yorker is circulated globally and read by people in other countries. And people from other cultures may not share the same sense of humor, and they are absolutely free to interpret the poem and express their like or dislike. It would be unfair to say Trillin is free to write a poem but other people are not free to express their like or dislike. Imagine this: what would happen if a Chinese or an Arab writes something satiric about American food, I’m pretty sure many people would find it funny but at the same time a thunderstorm would be stirred up on the web with many people pointing out how ignorant or wrong the writer is.
The current “cultural sensitivity” craze contains within it the seeds of self-devouring and many unsettling implications: (1) For one to discern what “cultural sensitivity” is, one must first discern what it ISN’T; a definition of “cultural INsensitivity”- having determined that,and once it is eliminated (in a perfect world, maybe), there will be nothing left to base any concept of “cultural sensitivity” on. (2) During this “process” of eliminating specific acts of C.I., once the major ones are gone, then more and more “fine-tuning” must be done to keep the thing going, to the point where formerly innocuous statements, matters of fashion, and even hand gestures and body language become suspect and become linked to vague, sinister motives (3)”What’s good for the goose, is good for the gander”: Of course, in order to make people C.U., there will have to be punishments for when they aren’t as you can’t depend upon these perverted people to police themselves out of the goodness of their hearts. What’s it to be? Fines? Imprisonment? Death, perhaps? Suppose there’s a culture where it’s considered OK to mock others’ cultures, race, religions, or customs? Wouldn’t you be “culturally insensitive” in trying to force YOUR viewpoints on them? Or are some, formerly “exploited” groups given greater leeway in this? If so, for how long? When the jihadists massacred the Charlie Hebdo staff, were they being culturally insensitive for not respecting the French custom of allowing such satire, or did the mocking of their religion somehow grant them the “right” to kill?
The whole craze is ludicrous.
Exactly! Dying is easy; it’s comedy that’s hard.
Mel Brooks once said, “If I cut my finger, that’s a tragedy; if YOU fall in an open manhole and break your neck and die, now THAT’S comedy!”
He was wrong.
If you fall in an open manhole, that’s comedy. If you break your neck, it stops being funny.
In general, accidents (and particularly near-misses) are funny so long as nobody gets seriously hurt. See the numerous car-crash and rally-crash videos on Youtube for example.
cr
He was wrong. If you fall in a manhole it’s comedy; if you break your neck it stops being funny.
Accidents (and near misses) are funny or entertaining so long as no-one is seriously hurt. See all the car-crash and rally-crash videos on Youtube, for example.
cr
(Damn. Comment disappears into nothingness, retype the whole thing, and they *both* suddenly appear… 🙁
cr
The universe is oppressing you.
I randomly assign you +10 oppression points as most oppressed person in this thread until someone else comes along and suffers more!
😛
Thank you. That minor distinction almost makes up for being oppressed by the whole universe.
🙂
cr
[That there’s no] karma is a bitch.
“… just like the kind of sensitivity when you say things about the other gender.”
The other gender? Any idea how many non-cis gendered individuals you’ve completely disenfranchised there?!
“To be honest, Calvin Trillin is far from being a household name…”
IOW, anyone you haven’t heard of better keep their trap shut, eh?
That poem could have been written by my dog and it’d still be an obvious satire of extremist foodies.
“The other gender” — You don’t suppose Mr. Wan was making a clever play off of Simone de Beauvoir’s famous feminist tract, do you?
Nah, me neither.
“To be honest, Simone de Beauvoir is far from being a household name, and most people would not know or care about her actual feminist or cultural leanings.”
Not know or care? She was the chick Nelson Algren and Sartre fought over …
Repeat Byron Wan’s quote; sub in Algren & Sartre…
This would be a fertile premise for beer pong.
Oh, noes! Ken said “chick”! I need to clutch my pearls and swoon offendedly for the rest of the day. I would love to have seen an Algren/Sartre shitstorm, with Simone waving pom poms.
I too had noticed the ‘chick’, and – given that Ken just chided me for stereotyping Chinese – I was about to take him to task for the ‘chick’ when I decided I had more pressing concerns. Primarily involving cold beer. 😉
cr
Context, context, context. I didn’t find Ken’s use in this context remotely offensive.
infinite i –
I was just funnin’ with ya. (That’s what the paratextual smiley-face semiosis was meant to connote. 🙂 )
Enjoy another cold one on me.
Hi Ken
In case it wasn’t apparent (though I hope it was) – I wasn’t being exactly serious.
The beer was nice, thanks.
🙂
cr
Look, I’m only pointing out a source of misunderstanding; personally I have no issue against Trillin’s poem. I was only highlighting the reasons why others may feel offended by the poem. On the other hand, there are words in English with derogatory meanings and people would avoid using them; similarly, certain ways of naming things and places may create negative feelings due to historical and political reasons, and people without the prerequisite knowledge may accidentally use such words and create misunderstandings. Again, I’m just pointing out the sources of the misunderstandings, not that I was offended.
I think most everyone understands the reasons people get offended, and have ceased to care about them.
Thanks for the guess, but…
Please read my first post again; I’ve never said I was offended by Trillin’s poem. I was only pointing out the sources of the misunderstanding (I said ‘misunderstanding’ not offense). While Trillin is absolutely free to write that poem, do others have the right to interpret it their own ways and express their like or dislike? And if misunderstanding has happened, does an onlooker have the right to point out the source of misunderstanding? I was brought up and educated in two different cultures and my business now is cross-culture; trust me, a joke not well-understood may do more damage than a joke that didn’t pan out. Even when stand-up comedians come to Asia they also need to pay sufficient attention to cultural issues. Well, if your dog is able to write that poem, maybe it’s time for him/her to move on and learn about other cultures too.
Yes, yes, you’ve repeatedly stressed how incredibly, not-at-all offended you were by this poem. You’re just pointing out the source of our misunderstanding, and standing up for people’s right to be offended…which is very magnanimous of you.
No-one here is denying anyone the right to be offended – not that it’d make much difference if they did. The point most people are making is how asinine and pathetically self-indulgent the offense-takers are being.
My argument is very simple – if you live by these rules you die by them too:
It’s perfectly within my power to complain about every second thing I hear from ‘other cultures’; to bring an absolute shitstorm of whining, entitled complaining tweets down on any of the many, many people whose hypocrisy offends me on a regular basis.
I could quite easily start with you, and highlight the incredible arrogance and cultural insensitivity of criticising a satirical poem by a well-liked, established cultural icon, published in the revered New Yorker. I find that offensive. It’s an offense to…well, since we’re playing this fatuous game, it’s an offense to ‘my culture as a westerner’.
I’m also offended by the idea that the sentiments of a bunch of avowedly ignorant, humourless drones should shape and constrain the creative instincts of ‘western’ writers(and by the way, there is something vastly more offensive, disturbing even, in the creepy cultural balkanisation that undergirds your thinking, the way in which your reading of a work of art seems only to begin once you’ve discovered the artist’s ‘cultural designation’. I find it nauseating, this constant labelling of writers, politicians and musicians, according to their group identity, and I baulk at having to write a phrase like ‘western writers’ in the first place. I was rather hoping we’d left behind the idea that groups had claims on their members, or that culture was something to be jealously guarded and protected from the possibility of interbreeding and evolution.).
Imagine if I were to randomly choose a Chinese magazine(assuming it had a free press in the first place of course), pluck out an article, lay into it on embarrassingly tenuous grounds whilst completely missing the satirical intent and then double down when my ignorance was pointed out…would you consider that a legitimate and serious protest? I doubt it. But it doesn’t matter, because I don’t do things like that.
In fact I bite my tongue in most instances because the stakes are generally so low and the offences aren’t important enough for me to consider demanding total intellectual compliance from complete strangers. But then I’m a westerner. That’s what we’re like – very humble. You wouldn’t understand. 😉
well-said, Saul
Round of applause, Saul.
Hear, hear!
Byron:
Yes I would think twice about making fun of coworkers but only because there are coworkers who are looking for offence where none is intended — but if they were ALSO a close friend, then no.
And making fun of a close friend — No I would not think twice about it — but then again that’s what makes friends close — being able to see and laugh at (with) each other faults and foibles. That’s what humour is FOR; for the sake of Pete.
My best friend at work and I – (we worked together for 25+ years, and when the office Social Club fizzled away under managerial disapproval and a few of us persisted in going for a beer after work, we were the last two holdouts to uphold this tradition) – used to insult each other with enthusiasm all the time. So convincing were we that one new manager, who didn’t know us, felt obliged to warn us that we would be severely disciplined should our verbal ‘disagreements’ result in a punch-up. We barely managed to keep our faces straight.
cr
Is sake of Pete best served warm or chilled?
And why has Pete appropriated this bit of Japanese culture?
These people REALLY need to get, like, jobs or something…..
Trillin is among the writers who make me laugh out loud while reading their works. If his critics knew anything about him, they’d cheer his mocking of faux Chinese food like chow mein (and he used to write about a friend he dubbed the Man with the Naugahyde Tongue, for the gentleman’s penchant for egg fu yung).
I can’t help noticing that one of those dickwitted Tw*tter critics, apparently of Chinese descent, who chides ‘don’t say it’s “self-aware parody”‘, styles herself “@Jennybagel”.
Do I detect a degree of cultural appropriation there (and a correspondingly huge gap in self-awareness)? 😉
I must admit I’m disappointed, I always thought (trigger warning: stereotyping) the Chinese had more sense. But I guess these are educated Chinese-Americans, so I guess my preconception is inapplicable.
cr
The “sagacious yet inscrutable Oriental” stereotype? Didn’t take Charlie Chan to see that one coming. What other offensive stereotypes you got tucked away, ii, the Dragon Lady, maybe? 🙂
Charlie Chan would be wrong. That particular stereotype hadn’t crossed my mind. I just have this mental image of the typical westernised Chinese person as someone who gets on with making a living and leaves all the pretensiousness to others. I don’t think that’s offensive (unless the very act of having a mental image of a ‘typical’ ethnicity is classed as an offence. In which case we’re all guilty, I think).
cr
Yes, I saw that too – sometimes I think it’d be good to play them at their own game, and to chew this woman out for her neo-neo-imperialistic attitude towards other people’s foodstuffs…and then I get a glimpse of how much of a twat I’d be if I did and I let it slide.
Rapid cultural appropriation is perhaps the difference between humans and Neanderthals. It’s amazing that anyone could complain about this in a language which “not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary.”
Take Mexican food, my staple: the cows and pigs came from Europe as did the rice, though the latter originated in Asia. Delectable mole was concocted in exigent circumstances from local ingredients by nuns. The border has always been porous, and cuisine travels in both directions.
What is more characteristically Irish than the potato (or Jewish: latkes, Italian: gnocchi), or more authentically Italian than the tomato, both of which were unknown in the Eastern Hemisphere before Columbus? The history of food, and music and story-telling, is a celebration of sharing.
Well said!
How about a trigger warning for my long-dead matrilineal ancestors who came to these shores owing to the great Irish diaspora induced by the tuber famine, huh?
I like that pejorative term “snowflakes.” I hope it catches on and helps dissociate this excessively-offended group from the left.
Cory Doctorov today published a picture of a ‘Kimchee ham croissant’ on his flickr page
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/26074686310/
sorry spam not ham. Who the hell was spam appropriated from?
“Bloody Vikings!”
I had it growing up. When cooked up with brown sugar, not bad at all.
Spam cooked in a cast-iron skillet over a campfire is among my fondest childhood memories.
I always kept a few cans stashed in the cupboard when my sons were growing up. I’d feed it to ’em at least once a year, figuring they better learn to eat it “just in case.” (Just in case of what, I’m not certain; maybe if they had to finish growing up in a fall-out shelter.)
The first year, they mocked their meal of Spam ruthlessly; by the next, they ate it without complaint. Matter of fact, in later years, I’d notice that an occasional can had gone missing (though I could never get either of ’em to fess up).
The Brits don’t seem to have forgiven us for it, though.
Yeah, well, rarely is the statement heard, “Let’s go eat British food tonight!”
So, how ’bout the pommie bastards call it even for the indignities of Spam?
Yes, well before we Yanks get all jingoistic and huffy, remember that it is the good ol’ U.S.A. who gave the world Spam in the first place, to say nothing of “American” cheese and Velveeta. (Velveeta alone should bar any American from getting holier-than-thou about “furrin'” cuisine in perpetuity. It is a culinary original sin.)
Besides, haven’t you ever had Yorkshire pudding done right? Something to be said for the “roast beef of England”, no?
‘rarely is the statement heard, “Let’s go eat British food tonight!”’
This is possibly because the British, almost uniquely among nations, don’t have any illusions about the quality of their food. If even we British know it’s dreadful, why would anyone else want to eat it?
cr
Just finished watching 60 Minutes and apparentlty US movie studio are self censoring movies at the pre-production stage so as not to offend Chinese censors once the movie is exported to China.
So, for example, no scenes in Chinese diners, such as in Men In Black 3. Such scenes will not even be filmed.
Somebody tell Mickey Rooney he won’t be able to reprise his role in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Bit late for that now. Though I understand that he was always ashamed of that role, and regretted ever doing it.
Interesting guy, but that’s another story.
Any guy his size that can get eight separate showgirls to marry him — including Ava Gardner! — musta been doin’ somethin’ right!
“Whaddya say, Judy, let’s put on a show!”
He was a dynamo.
This is how The Ohio State University handles snowflakes and cry babies. Proud to be an OSU alum:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/434047/ohio-state-university-gives-us-video-day-how-confront-campus-crybabies