more complaints on Roger Cohen, and a bit on the embittered elite

As if by fate, Roger Cohen writes in Tuesday’s New York Times of taking it slow, at least where high cuisine is concerned. Echoing the concerns of the slow food movement, he bemoans and decries the practice in many a fancy restaurant in New York of aggressive wine pouring, a practice that, in his words, reduces “a bottle of wine to a seven-minute, four-glass experience through overfilling and topping-up of a fanaticism found rarely outside the Middle East.” Barely-masked jab at the ways of those in the Middle East aside (where, I might add, it is doubtful that any such wine-pouring techniques are currently in use), he makes a rather good point about the modern, rushed lives we too often lead.

He writes, “I thought, we need to take our lives back. Drinking at your own pace is the best revenge.”

The primary argument he makes in this article, that the way fine New York restaurants are run these days seems mostly geared towards maximizing efficient movement of customers in and out, coupled with as high a consumption of wine as possible, at the cost of giving the food or drink served the time that it is due. Perhaps the chef remains an artist, and his product a work of art, but the restaurant has been transformed into a money-maker, the manager and the servers acting only to maximize profit, “guided by an acute understanding of the nature of commerce.”

However Cohen does not make the connection between the larger economic and social context and this phenomenon of restaurants rushing you towards the door. Cohen does say, “we need to take our lives back,” but for him it seems primarily a problem in the restaurants, not in broader values and attitudes. After all, isn’t this love of speed and money inextricably related to the post-industrial condition? Of a general cultural valuing of profit and consumption at maximum speed, and a devaluing of leisure, rest, and the small yet significant pleasures that can only be had at a slow speed when one has let go of concerns for the loss of time and therefore revenue it represents?

What he is complaining of in America is precisely the same thing as what he had lauded a couple weeks earlier in his article on the imminent outpacing of the West, and of the white man, by Asia. In that article, it had been all roses, the optimism and fearlessness of Asian businessmen, and the unstoppability of their rise, being the primary focus, with nary a mention of the human, environmental, cultural, or culinary cost of such growth. Cohen watches with admiring wonder as the new, non-Western elites consume in that great edifice of consumption and unbridled growth, Dubai, and as flock of Indians migrate en masse to the cities resulting in the (unprepared-for) explosion of urban populations.

This is interesting in the context of his comments that border on infatuation vis-a-vis the rapidly expanding economies of Asia. Why is hurry and haste good in Hong Kong, and bad in New York? The restaurant he describes in which wine is poured and tucked away at record speeds, where plates are snatched up by waiters trying to move patrons through as fast as possible, is simply trying to make a profit, though of course at the cost of creating something really valuable, a fulfilling experience that leaves diners after it is over with more than just a rather leaner wallet. In much the same way, the rapid modernization and embrace of consumerism in Asia is achieved at the expense of the many, economic imperatives trampling much underfoot, including but not limited to a more traditional leisurely approach to life (including meals) as well as producing endless tons of junk, plastic trinkets or poorly-produced clothing rather than a finely crafted product such as the wine that Cohen holds so dear.

He lauds the work of modernization in one place, and mourns it in another. It is too bad that he does not make the connection between the two. And whatever the wonder that is the economic emergence of Asia, there are some things that are worth more than business.

Perhaps he was too busy indulging his bitterness over, well, the whole “bitterness” thing to think to hard on that aspect of the problem. For from how he is talking, it seems that it is not only the small-town folk who are bitter these days. And so where he should be making linkages between rushed restaurants and post-industrial life, he instead blames it all on anti-French and anti-elite sentiment.

In his own (impressively vitriolic, not to mention anti-American) words:

American wine is rushed onto the table, as well as into the glass. Most is drunk five to ten years too early. But, hey, this is a country in a hurry: Google’s founders made a couple of billion dollars overnight last week, an un-French achievement. This is a great nation.

Perhaps it’s so great I should wear an American flag lapel pin. Perhaps it’s so great I should put myself in a duck blind this weekend. Perhaps it’s so great I should join the great U.S. blood sport of anti-intellectualism. Perhaps it’s so great I should go bowling more often. Perhaps it’s so great I should stop praising France and conceal the fact I speak French.

There is so much packed into here that it is hard to begin addressing it all. The hate he seems to be bursting with for such innocent pastimes as bowling is baffling, as is his assertion of a French disdain for money… or was it just a disdain for American dollars, à la Gisele Bundchen? Although I would agree with Cohen that there is indeed a strain of virulent anti-intellectualism to be found among certain segments of the American population, in addition to an under-developed appreciation for wine, I would not conflate that, an understandable aversion to elitism and straight-up snobbery.

In fact, I would very careful to distinguish between the issue of anti-intellectualism and the issue of respect towards those who are not the beneficiaries of elite educations, and who very well might object to being condescended to. The problem is not being an educated individual, the product of some isolated academic enclave, cloistered from the bread-and-butter concerns of those who are perhaps not as privileged. The problem is looking down one’s nose at those not enlightened enough to realize what you say is good for them, denying them the right to judge reality, denying them the faculties to understand where they are coming from. Because, be real, a comfortably provided-for New Yorker, whether he swills his fine wine or savors it, cannot be in touch with the realities of the small-town, working class voter. These are separate Americas, and Cohen, along with s fellows, should do that America the justice of acknowledging at the very least that even those Americans are in possession of judgment, and common sense, as well as the right to speak for their own reality, rather than suffer being spoken down to.