The Meat and Potatoes Crowd

Hello. Welcome to The Weekend Gene Pool.

Rachel and I went out last night to a fancy steakhouse a few blocks from The White House. It was an uncharacteristic choice for us, a thumb-your-nose celebration of the end of a despotic mutual diet that had permitted no meat.

After about fifteen minutes, we sensed something awry. It was Uncanny Valley awry. Something was not quite anthropoid about our surroundings. Whatever it was encouraged paranoia; it felt as though we were trapped in sort of pod-person dystopia.

Rachel was the first to deconstruct it. She said it in a panicked whisper.

“I think we’re surrounded by Republicans.”

I looked around. Bingo. The inauguration had descended.

It was obvious, once you saw it, and then you saw only it. You watched. You eavesdropped. These were not Washington Republicans, who look kinda normal and unobjectionable, if reliably identifiable by being a little overdressed and under-humored. No, these were Republicans from all over — square states and panhandled states and states that border the Gulf of America. And yet, there was a certain … sameness … to them: People comfortable with decadence, lustily attacking forearm-sized ingots of meat. A guy at the next table was literally talking about plastics technology. The women were almost all blondes of a certain type. What was it about the way they looked?

Rachel leaned in. “First, you dye your hair, then you straighten it, then you curl it near the ends so it flips exactly two inches below your shoulders.”

I looked around again. Yes!

“Then you do that little-girl thing with your voice, even if you are 55.”

That thing?

“Yas,” Rachel said.

Yas, that was it! They all said “yas.” With a slight nasality, like Borat.

Elaborate efforts to recapture youth had had disturbing half-and-half results: These ladies looked both chipper and world-weary at the same time. There were bee-stung lips. Improbably prominent cheekbones. All the features prominent, like a drawing of a face.

There was nothing about the men; they were generic and balding. There was everything about the women. They were elaborately engineered.

Look, I know this column is impolitic and elitist and unfair. I am making broad-brush generalities. I am judging people, which is said to be an awful thing to do — worse, a counterproductive thing to do in times that call for unity and mutual respect and tolerance and understanding and suchwhich. I know that. I know that snotty attitudes like like mine diminish us all as humans.

But this is my town, and they’ve come here to preen and swagger and gloat and close down half the roads. They’re buoyant and celebratory, like eager spectators at a hanging. They’re oblivious to the pain they have caused, like owners of big yachts who never even think about the drivers who are long delayed every time the boat blares its klaxon for the drawbridge to open.

So I’ll feel free to judge them just a teensy bit. It’s not like it’s going to anger them: They ignore judging. They shrug it off. After all, their guy was judged guilty 35 times, and they got all pouty and beetle-browed and flounced out and put him into The White House. Again.

One thing was gnawing at me. Rachel and I were smugly sure of ourselves, but were we right?

On the way out, I buttonholed the maitre-d’. He’d taken the reservations. He knew his regulars.

I got close, conspiratorially, and whispered: “These are all Republicans, aren’t they?

“Absolutely not.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” he said, pointing to two small tables near the rear. “Those people came into town for the protests.”

A smile and a twinkle.

“The rest are Republicans.”

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