The Human Equivalent of Guar Gum
(Further Thoughts on the Cycle of Perpetual Fraud)
Many years ago we started our daughter in a school that emphasized experiential learning. Kindergartners walked the neighborhood, went to the fire station, and explored the church across the street. First-graders had restaurant day, spending a week writing menus and preparing food that they then cooked and served to parents — at the end of a school year that they spent visiting farms and local restaurants and food processing facilities. The point was to connect to the real, to see the context and shape of life. You live in this world — what is it?
I was a parent chaperone on a field trip to a giant industrial bakery, a place that contracted to make things like store-brand cookies. At the moment we were touring the place, California was going through a bizarre statewide spike in egg prices, the cause of which I’ve long since forgotten, and I asked the bakery owner how he was dealing with severe cost increases in what I assumed was a core ingredient in baking. “Oh, we haven’t used eggs for years,” he said. “There are, you know, industrial replacements, now.”
Makes your mouth water, doesn’t it?
The magnificent Dr. Suneel Dhand talked about just this topic, recently, as he reviewed the dozens of ingredients — soy oil, soy protein isolate, corn starch, potato starch, guar gum, xanthan gum, and so on — in a Starbucks egg and cheese wrap, a product that would have four or five ingredients if you made it at home:
Food that looks like food increasingly isn’t. Things you can buy look like the versions you would have bought thirty years ago, or a hundred years ago, but the current versions are cobbled together from cheap industrial shit.
The challenge is to find places in our lives where this replacement with empty shit isn’t happening. Forms remain the same: movies look like movies, television looks like television, elected officials look like elected officials, news looks like news. But there’s nothing in there. A Supreme Court nominee, an appellate court judge who trained at Harvard Law, has just said in a congressional hearing that she has no judicial philosophy beyond the method of trying to be fair, and answered a question about natural rights like this:
“I do not hold a position on whether individuals possess natural rights.” She’ll be a Supreme Court justice soon, not knowing the substance or the source of the rights she’s charged with protecting.
The view that individuals possess natural rights that precede government is to the United States of America what Vishnu Schist is to the Grand Canyon. It animated the abolitionist movement, and it gave the Seneca Falls Convention its vocabulary. If you take it away — or if, somehow, you can’t say whether or not it’s there — you stand in empty space like Wile E. Coyote, pumping your feet in the air until you start to fall. You can’t not have an answer to this question; to say that you don’t is to admit that you’re cosplaying “judge.” It’s the form without the substance. Yes, I say this a lot, and in different ways.
This emptiness is grimly creative; the absence of the X-ness in the X allows for endless twisting and redefinition. When forms have no underlying substance, when people in positions of responsibility don’t believe in anything, when words are empty, anything can become anything. Reality floats, unmoored.
Florida is growing, drawing people from other states as they seek a home in a place that has been relatively free of lockdowns and mandates during a pandemic which has often seemed to have driven government officials crazy with unchecked power. The migration of families to a high-freedom state is now producing news articles — stories that purport to describe reality — that warn about the “autocracy” of a governor who has resisted mandates. Politico warns, for example, that Ron DeSantis is “imperious” and seen as an “autocratic bully” because he tells people they don’t have to wear masks. He’s an autocrat; for example, he says people can make their own choices. Telling people they don’t have to do something if they don’t want to is being a dictator.
It looks like a news story, but it isn’t one — the form without the substance, an Alice in Wonderland fantasy in which freedom is autocracy, an empty vessel that makes noise when you bang on it. We have news that subtracts information, leaving you knowing a little less than you did before you read it.
We have forms without substance, emptied of the things they go on pretending to be. To consume this emptiness is to be filled with it.
You write well, Chris. I enjoy reading these, inasmuch as I enjoy good writing. Can't say I enjoy the immediate subject matter, but it's pretty generally well worth an unflinching gaze or two.
You have a good argument to make, and you've made it. You've convinced me: as a society, we are increasingly ruled by LARPers who judge themselves and each other on essentially aesthetic criteria divorced from any original meaning of the roles they play. The symbolic superstructures of our institutions have come unmoored from their earthy foundations, and the next tectonic hiccup will render it all disjoint rubble.
It's an acute diagnosis, in every sense of the word. You've done an admirable job of describing the symptoms, over and over again, in each of these posts. Occasionally I feel like you're making progress toward discovering the root causes of this illness. (I don't mean to imply that I have those answers. I can speculate and point at things, but it's a big subject and well beyond the intended scope of this comment.) But I don't see much in the way of a cure, here. Hold the line, sure. Ridicule them whenever you can. Fair enough, but that's all pretty much the consensus position of (say) the Babylon Bee. I'm not convinced it will suffice to save us. The emperor may be naked, but his army still holds most of the pointy sticks, and they are genuinely sharp on the business end.
I hope you're working on a book. It would be a good book, maybe even an important book. But, with all your eloquent iterations over the problem, I think it's only about half written. Press on!
As to your introductory matter, I try to avoid gums (guar, xanthan, etc.). They don't sit well with me. I find Trader Joe's is the best place to find groceries without too much stuff, at least I can usually find some things there that I tolerate well. Canola (rapeseed) oil may be fine for most people, but it doesn't go down well with my stomach. Not a fan of organic.
As to your substance I really think the rallying cry of our time is the simple question, "What is a woman?" To deny having a position on natural rights simply evades the question. A good litigator would hammer the witness with, "Do you believe all humans have certain rights? Who or what gives them these rights?" etc. until I got her real answer. "When does an individual get these rights? Do you believe that people are responsible for their own actions, or are we predestined to act as our ancestors or evolution trained us? What is the difference between a human and an animal as to rights and responsibilities?"
It's sad that we need to be asking these questions, but as I say, I think the most straightforward and simple question is, "What is a woman?" Never stop asking that. Hammer them with it.