Good afternoon. Since I started The Gene Pool late last year, many readers have asked me to address the events leading to — basically — my cancellation from The Washington Post. It’s taken me a while to put this together so it is readable and honest, but here it is. Alert: You will be shocked, but only to the extent of some poor schmuck in an electric chair. It’s kinda long. I am not going to take questions today because I am drained. We meet again, full force, on Thursday.
Gene, I apologize that I could not bring myself to cancel my Post subscription when you got dropped. I know the exodus would have given you a moment of schadenfreude. I just really, really like their news reporting.
It is three centuries since the publication of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal". EVERYBODY knows about it. It is the favorite example of satire for use in high school and college English classes because it is beautifully written yet not super subtle, so that it achieves its satiric goal without leaving the reader uncertain as to what it is actually about or what the writer actually intends. It is humorous but not laugh-out-loud funny; it does not traffic in simple jokes. It is easily Googled, and there are numerous essays about it. And yet, I get the sense that there still are vast multitudes of English-speakers, both native-speaking and as a second language, who would be utterly horrified that high school and college texts retain an essay that advocates eating babies. Because some people are just absolutely unable to read between the lines. These are the people who still, today, read Gene's original humor column or this further dissection of it, complete with taking out every organ from the humor like dissecting a frog (Mark Twain reference! classic! I award myself many points!) and after all that... still think that the intention of the column was to share a joke about how awful Indian food is.
Can't spell twitter without "twit." I'm sure someone somewhere made that connection before me, but whatever . . . Insert resigned-faced emoji at this point.
Knowing the full stories here is the last straw for me paying WaPo anything. Thank you for sharing, and for being you. I hope this Substack succeeds well enough for you to keep it going for years.
I loved this column. A simple Google search would have given the lynch mob information about your background as a humor columnist. The Washington Post, like most modern managers, are under the mistaken impression that the customer is always right (they are wrong). Glad you are here to share your humor with us. Feel free to make fun of all foods UK - Irish, Scottish, British. We know our food is a one-note spice and often (as in the case of haggis) a middle school dare that obviously went too far.
I wonder how many of the offended would have been rolling on the floor laughing at your column had you instead ripped on the cuisine of any other country besides theirs. It all depends on whose ox is being gored, so to speak. I think the Irish in particular are used to their (our 🇮🇪 😁) cuisine being pilloried so I doubt you’d have gotten an editorial beat down and another via Twitter had you picked my particular culture instead of theirs. The fact that this was a satirical obviously exaggerated take was somehow lost on some people, which amazes me.
I think that had you chosen to criticize the food from a country with only, say, 1.3 thousand potential Post subscribers rather than 1.3 billion potential Post subscribers, I’m sure the editors wouldn’t have cared.
You are a gifted, phenomenal writer. I’ve enjoyed your columns and chats for years and years and loved your book One Day. This column is another example of your exemplary work. Thank you.
About "L'affaire Curry:" you must start at the beginning. If you haven't figured it out by now, Gene Weingarten is a New York wise guy (although his actual relationship with organized crime remains unknown). The crux here is that HE made the off-the-cuff, wise guy remarks --- honest, if uninformed though they were. I have been in the middle of at least two (that I can remember) heated arguments among Indians about southern v. northern Indian food, with insults flowing freely. The point being, that while "cultural insensitivity" was blatantly exhibited in these (and other territorial cultural quarrels for which I was an innocent bystander) they were clearly understood to be "OUR cultural insensitivity." Not some wise guy westerner's. Having said that, allow me to also say that I had the pleasure of spending a bit of time in India and several other former British colonies on the subcontinent. Although variable, I found a general, almost encultured, and understandable, defensiveness, which I attribute to nearly a century of British officially sanctioned browbeating (and worse). Gene doesn't need me to somehow provide excuses, but I have to believe that, had he been aware of this sensitivity about food, in particular, he would have seized on the whole subject with relish (pun intended) and we would have been able to dine out on his riffs on food and culture or the idiosyncrasies of national cuisines ---including, no doubt, the one province in China which has no cuisine--- whose residents must order carry-out from a neighboring canton. (attempt at humor supplied).
Today's Gene Pool got me thinking about what I might make for dinner. I was hungry for Indian cuisine. I decided to make a batch of Butter Chicken. Confession: I used a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken and a jar of Mr. Kook's Butter Sauce. Added chopped red bell pepper and a sliced yellow onion sauteed in butter, along with a generous shaking of Slap Ya Mama, some home-made raita and brown rice. My wife and I had ourselves a good meal. We made a point of NOT inviting Padma Lakshmi.
No one should have to endure angry Twitter mob attacks for something that was simply a clear case of poor judgment and not meant hurtfully; sorry you had to deal with that. That must have been rough, and sincerely good on you to have powered through being the temporary whipping boy of the twitterati. That's not to say that the Post editors were wrong or that you were a victim, though. As you mention, you had enjoyed special treatment for a long time. It's understandable that you would feel resentful about that changing and having to consider and follow guidelines just like anyone else, but times change, and being "prudent" isn't the horrible thing you make it out to be. (And the Ben Bradlee anecdote didn't help your case-if in fact he knew that his writers had made a grievous error and were falsely harming someone's reputation and the paper's credibility, then standing by the story was a terrible decision.) You're still a terrific long form feature writer and with luck have some stories in the pipeline to be published somewhere later.
It's wrong to call Trump a dick. The aforementioned appendage is useful and mostly reliable at work and at play; Trump is neither. I do agree about hating sweet pickles, though. (OK, that was kind of a Freudian segue. Now let's talk hazelnuts.)
In the words of the immortal, censored Johnny Fever -- "Booger."
Gene, you had no idea how hurtful stereotypes about Indian food are because you have never been educated out of them.
* Watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and please note that every single item is actually anathema, and highly repellent to a predominantly lacto-vegetarian cuisine in India. (Monkey brains may be a mistranslation of monkey head mushroom... from China.) This movie was banned in India just because of the outrageous stereotyping.
* Curry powder is actually an American invention. The monotonous curries you remember from your youth are American-- a set mix. Indian "curries" are much more varied by region than you think and the spice blends are called masalas. Garam masalas, Bombay masala etc. So from the first you stereotyped food and then bashed the stereotype, instead of the actuality.
* I have been told by Americans your age or slightly older that curry (and by this they often meant American curry usually as that was what they had tasted)-- was invented to mask the smell of spoilt meat. It was an oft-repeated stereotype that was ridiculous to anyone who understands that Indian cuisine is predominantly lacto-vegetarian (although the meat dishes are good too.) This is inaccurate: spices can help preserve meat, but the role of spices in Indian cooking is to include flavor and lots of micronutrients to balance out the flavor of VEGETABLES (and dairy.)
I am sorry you've not fully grasped how deeply racist it in fact was. I know you didn't know. You also didn't know to run this by any Indian-Americans or or any deeply knowledgable Indian food gourmets before publishing.
You could have gone with the baby theme and claimed that celery was too spicy for you, your butt smokes after eating bell peppers, or something silly like that. That part did work. But when you criticize an entire cuisine, you implicitly criticize the people whose cuisine it is. Italian and Greek immigrants of yesteryear remember being criticized over garlicky food or "weird food." And when you do it with inaccurate stereotypes-- ouch. Yeah. Stick to being afraid of celery.
Touchy bunch, aren't they? Reminds me of how an article in The New York Times once criticized the cadets at West Point for "having no sense of humor." The school paper responded with a headline declaring: " What does a newspaper with no comic strips know about a sense of humor?"
It's not you, it's them. You still rock in my book. Envelopes need pushing. Ah, if we only had Jason Robards back at the Post...
By sheer coincidence, I just a few days ago watched a documentary on YouTube about the Smothers Brothers and their battle with CBS. A mid-level executive said that after so many rounds of rancor between the Suits and the Smothers, the show's producer was out of the country one week and failed to get their script for the next week's show to the execs for review by the ordained deadline. A quick meeting of Suits was convened, at which a CBS lawyer was heard to exclaim: "We got 'em!" And they were cancelled.
Apparently, funny is often too serious to be left to humorists. Keep on keepin' on!
Gene, I apologize that I could not bring myself to cancel my Post subscription when you got dropped. I know the exodus would have given you a moment of schadenfreude. I just really, really like their news reporting.
It is three centuries since the publication of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal". EVERYBODY knows about it. It is the favorite example of satire for use in high school and college English classes because it is beautifully written yet not super subtle, so that it achieves its satiric goal without leaving the reader uncertain as to what it is actually about or what the writer actually intends. It is humorous but not laugh-out-loud funny; it does not traffic in simple jokes. It is easily Googled, and there are numerous essays about it. And yet, I get the sense that there still are vast multitudes of English-speakers, both native-speaking and as a second language, who would be utterly horrified that high school and college texts retain an essay that advocates eating babies. Because some people are just absolutely unable to read between the lines. These are the people who still, today, read Gene's original humor column or this further dissection of it, complete with taking out every organ from the humor like dissecting a frog (Mark Twain reference! classic! I award myself many points!) and after all that... still think that the intention of the column was to share a joke about how awful Indian food is.
Can't spell twitter without "twit." I'm sure someone somewhere made that connection before me, but whatever . . . Insert resigned-faced emoji at this point.
Knowing the full stories here is the last straw for me paying WaPo anything. Thank you for sharing, and for being you. I hope this Substack succeeds well enough for you to keep it going for years.
I loved this column. A simple Google search would have given the lynch mob information about your background as a humor columnist. The Washington Post, like most modern managers, are under the mistaken impression that the customer is always right (they are wrong). Glad you are here to share your humor with us. Feel free to make fun of all foods UK - Irish, Scottish, British. We know our food is a one-note spice and often (as in the case of haggis) a middle school dare that obviously went too far.
Look what shows up in the fishwrap edition of TWP the day after this discussion posts:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2023/04/11/raghavan-iyer-cookbook/
"A tour through curry's complex history"
Coincidence?
I wonder how many of the offended would have been rolling on the floor laughing at your column had you instead ripped on the cuisine of any other country besides theirs. It all depends on whose ox is being gored, so to speak. I think the Irish in particular are used to their (our 🇮🇪 😁) cuisine being pilloried so I doubt you’d have gotten an editorial beat down and another via Twitter had you picked my particular culture instead of theirs. The fact that this was a satirical obviously exaggerated take was somehow lost on some people, which amazes me.
I think that had you chosen to criticize the food from a country with only, say, 1.3 thousand potential Post subscribers rather than 1.3 billion potential Post subscribers, I’m sure the editors wouldn’t have cared.
You are a gifted, phenomenal writer. I’ve enjoyed your columns and chats for years and years and loved your book One Day. This column is another example of your exemplary work. Thank you.
About "L'affaire Curry:" you must start at the beginning. If you haven't figured it out by now, Gene Weingarten is a New York wise guy (although his actual relationship with organized crime remains unknown). The crux here is that HE made the off-the-cuff, wise guy remarks --- honest, if uninformed though they were. I have been in the middle of at least two (that I can remember) heated arguments among Indians about southern v. northern Indian food, with insults flowing freely. The point being, that while "cultural insensitivity" was blatantly exhibited in these (and other territorial cultural quarrels for which I was an innocent bystander) they were clearly understood to be "OUR cultural insensitivity." Not some wise guy westerner's. Having said that, allow me to also say that I had the pleasure of spending a bit of time in India and several other former British colonies on the subcontinent. Although variable, I found a general, almost encultured, and understandable, defensiveness, which I attribute to nearly a century of British officially sanctioned browbeating (and worse). Gene doesn't need me to somehow provide excuses, but I have to believe that, had he been aware of this sensitivity about food, in particular, he would have seized on the whole subject with relish (pun intended) and we would have been able to dine out on his riffs on food and culture or the idiosyncrasies of national cuisines ---including, no doubt, the one province in China which has no cuisine--- whose residents must order carry-out from a neighboring canton. (attempt at humor supplied).
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/books/review/humanly-possible-sarah-bakewell.html?unlocked_article_code=pwUN86NqYUmQ0Adm4rVV8ZjI4OFvnnDTNrrTwBf9AfaIO-94Vk6YRlcYsEKnM4joK6s0Dy23UUUpBClNdKB9tBBaWu7Pr9JVEllj766VZavmS6m2se79bXo9LRysL7JbO2uwmRajOSO4T2LZf3_dfEb4HeQQjp5UnMxo5tZjOIKtrX9ZZMjqMs120RIPz_2NmPdzn2QUCAsx74V-91Zf9ngBtYPfL7B1i9JWghiY7di8fMyEC5Pk-Hrh4_4MTt3xWH12OLR_R2NWZQbfp0N8hNF8CSFxxZOMMP95e6wzqNhBgpqNOeqHAHmbp2fVmgZCSrQUWn_VfvxSkZwmX69JTDFhhjeguHMwd5sPUFEC&giftCopy=4_Disclaimer&smid=url-share
I was also reminded of Terry Pratchett writing of "English curry" as tasting of swedes, sultanas, and urine.
I just realized as I was approaching the end of this piece that I had been reading it while mindlessly eating leftover Indian food (which I love).
This may be the best piece I've read on cancel culture. I felt every emotion along with you. The Post could use a writer like you.
Today's Gene Pool got me thinking about what I might make for dinner. I was hungry for Indian cuisine. I decided to make a batch of Butter Chicken. Confession: I used a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken and a jar of Mr. Kook's Butter Sauce. Added chopped red bell pepper and a sliced yellow onion sauteed in butter, along with a generous shaking of Slap Ya Mama, some home-made raita and brown rice. My wife and I had ourselves a good meal. We made a point of NOT inviting Padma Lakshmi.
No one should have to endure angry Twitter mob attacks for something that was simply a clear case of poor judgment and not meant hurtfully; sorry you had to deal with that. That must have been rough, and sincerely good on you to have powered through being the temporary whipping boy of the twitterati. That's not to say that the Post editors were wrong or that you were a victim, though. As you mention, you had enjoyed special treatment for a long time. It's understandable that you would feel resentful about that changing and having to consider and follow guidelines just like anyone else, but times change, and being "prudent" isn't the horrible thing you make it out to be. (And the Ben Bradlee anecdote didn't help your case-if in fact he knew that his writers had made a grievous error and were falsely harming someone's reputation and the paper's credibility, then standing by the story was a terrible decision.) You're still a terrific long form feature writer and with luck have some stories in the pipeline to be published somewhere later.
Your article shows admirable introspection. I enjoyed it.
Padma Lakshmi is still on my "hall pass" list with Uma Thurman, but I now lust after her slightly less than I did before reading your article..
Mmm, Padma...
It's wrong to call Trump a dick. The aforementioned appendage is useful and mostly reliable at work and at play; Trump is neither. I do agree about hating sweet pickles, though. (OK, that was kind of a Freudian segue. Now let's talk hazelnuts.)
In the words of the immortal, censored Johnny Fever -- "Booger."
Gene, you had no idea how hurtful stereotypes about Indian food are because you have never been educated out of them.
* Watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and please note that every single item is actually anathema, and highly repellent to a predominantly lacto-vegetarian cuisine in India. (Monkey brains may be a mistranslation of monkey head mushroom... from China.) This movie was banned in India just because of the outrageous stereotyping.
* Curry powder is actually an American invention. The monotonous curries you remember from your youth are American-- a set mix. Indian "curries" are much more varied by region than you think and the spice blends are called masalas. Garam masalas, Bombay masala etc. So from the first you stereotyped food and then bashed the stereotype, instead of the actuality.
* I have been told by Americans your age or slightly older that curry (and by this they often meant American curry usually as that was what they had tasted)-- was invented to mask the smell of spoilt meat. It was an oft-repeated stereotype that was ridiculous to anyone who understands that Indian cuisine is predominantly lacto-vegetarian (although the meat dishes are good too.) This is inaccurate: spices can help preserve meat, but the role of spices in Indian cooking is to include flavor and lots of micronutrients to balance out the flavor of VEGETABLES (and dairy.)
I am sorry you've not fully grasped how deeply racist it in fact was. I know you didn't know. You also didn't know to run this by any Indian-Americans or or any deeply knowledgable Indian food gourmets before publishing.
You could have gone with the baby theme and claimed that celery was too spicy for you, your butt smokes after eating bell peppers, or something silly like that. That part did work. But when you criticize an entire cuisine, you implicitly criticize the people whose cuisine it is. Italian and Greek immigrants of yesteryear remember being criticized over garlicky food or "weird food." And when you do it with inaccurate stereotypes-- ouch. Yeah. Stick to being afraid of celery.
Touchy bunch, aren't they? Reminds me of how an article in The New York Times once criticized the cadets at West Point for "having no sense of humor." The school paper responded with a headline declaring: " What does a newspaper with no comic strips know about a sense of humor?"
It's not you, it's them. You still rock in my book. Envelopes need pushing. Ah, if we only had Jason Robards back at the Post...
By sheer coincidence, I just a few days ago watched a documentary on YouTube about the Smothers Brothers and their battle with CBS. A mid-level executive said that after so many rounds of rancor between the Suits and the Smothers, the show's producer was out of the country one week and failed to get their script for the next week's show to the execs for review by the ordained deadline. A quick meeting of Suits was convened, at which a CBS lawyer was heard to exclaim: "We got 'em!" And they were cancelled.
Apparently, funny is often too serious to be left to humorists. Keep on keepin' on!