Condiments And The Before Times
Our history is divided up by milestone events that radically change the years that came after them. We all know the events: The Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, the assassination of JFK, the fall of the Berlin Wall, September 11th. Typically it is easier to see these major events as the dividing lines of history once time has provided some separation from the event, and alone with this comes clarity.
September 11th is a great example of this. When it happened and in the immediate aftermath, the story was pretty straightforward. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda planned and executed a major attack and killed thousands of Americans. I think we all knew the world had changed but for me and most people the assumption was we were actually in a global war on terror and 9/11 would be just the beginning of a new normal that included regular Islamic terrorist attacks.
What really happened became clearer in the years since. Tabling the questions surrounding the actual attacks that day, the response and long term aftermath was not what most people expected. I don’t think anyone expected a two decade occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq or that we wouldn’t really have any major Muslim terror attacks in America in the decades following 9/11. The most significant impact of 9/11 isn’t the indignity of old White ladies being forced to remove their Dr Sholls shoes before they can pass through security but instead is the enormous surveillance apparatus that is now in place in America, spying on Americans and doing so in the name of keeping us “safe”. By any reasonable measure America is a less free place today than it was on 9/10/2001. I guess in the end the terrorists did win, although the actual terrorists wear suits and have offices in D.C.
We just experienced a new massive shift in America, one that seemed to occur out of the blue and organically, but even with recent eyes it is clear that the plan had been in the works for a long time. As with most of these major, orchestrated shifts, what we were led to believe at first was not at all what happened. This became even more clear to me via the medium of condiments, at a Cracker Barrel to be more precise.
The other evening I met my wife for dinner. I had dropped off some young Amish couples at Applebee’s and as I loathe Applebee’s we went to the fairly adjacent Cracker Barrel. I like Cracker Barrel, the food is my kind of food and it is reliable and consistent. I used to eat there a lot when I was travelling on business all over the country because I knew what to expect. It is not fancy cuisine but I don’t need fancy. We haven’t been to a Cracker Barrel in a while, our normal go-to place to eat out is a small local Mexican place with no Mexicans working there (perhaps because the local police station is next door?). While I normally get breakfast regardless of the time of day, I opted for the Friday fried fish dinner as I was pretty hungry.
When it arrived I noticed that there wasn’t a whole bunch of fish on the plate. The Barrel usually had fairly generous servings but this was pretty paltry and there was so much breading on the fish that you could hardly taste anything but the breading. While not everyone’s cup of tea, I also like lots of tartar sauce with fried fish and that seems like something that would just be included, but I had to ask the waitress for some. She brought back two containers, handed me one and held the other one kind of back, guarding the little plastic cup like girls used to guard their virginity. She asked me if I wanted one or two, and since one container wasn’t anywhere near enough I said two. We had also ordered biscuits with our meal and she asked if we wanted any jelly or honey. Of course we did and I realized that they no longer had them on the table. She brought two small tins of jelly, one blackberry and one grape, and two tiny containers of butter.
In the Before Times your table at Cracker Barrel had a stack of jellies and jams and a little pitcher of honey. Now you have to almost beg for something as simple as a tiny pat of butter.
While our waitress was very pleasant, she certainly was operating under orders to keep the condiments under wraps. I also noticed later that she never came back to offer me a refill on my Coke. I would have declined as one watered down pop was enough with my meal but she didn’t even offer. Not only was the fish serving pretty stingy, the container holding the fried apples seemed much smaller than I remember. The entire meal seemed to be designed to shave as many pennies off their costs as possible, rather than being what I remembered: a reasonably priced meal with decent portions.
I have seen the tartar sauce hoarding other places like Culvers where you still get a decent amount of fish but they charge extra if you want enough tartar sauce to use on all of the fish you bought.
It seems like a small thing, after all it is just tartar sauce, but it is indicative of a broader change in American society and the relationship between the American people and our institutions. It all started with the “pandemic” but it is safe to assume that the plans for this have been in the works for a long time. Lots of small business went under thanks to the lockdowns but the biggest players, the companies with the most political connections, came out smelling like roses. These are the companies that enforced silly mask mandates and forced their customers to “social distance”, treating them like cattle standing on pieces of tape on the floor.
Look what has happened since 2020. Inflation is soaring while companies continue to squeeze every last bit of profit margin out of their products, making portions smaller, and shifting to self-checkout lanes. While I like some of that, like ordering ahead and picking up my groceries without going in or scanning my items at Sam’s Club and skipping the checkout line entirely, there is clearly an open attitude shift by corporate America. Where once they pretended that the customer was always right, now it seems that they find their core customer base to be an inconvenient annoyance. Their disdain is palpable, we all remember the Gillette commercial with the responsible black guy stopping his crazed White friend from attacking a woman.
While the pandemic wasn’t real, the coordinated cash grab by the largest corporations in America definitely was.
Post-9/11, the outside world had changed. We had a couple of new wars overseas and minor indignities like air travel being much, much worse but our daily lives went on pretty much as they had before. But with Covid and the accompanying race riots that burned American cities, our daily lives changed for the worse. I already find myself talking in terms of pre-pandemic, The Before Times, when our way of life was still mostly preserved contrasted with the rude, petty world we live in today where every day brings us some new insult and humiliation we are forced to not only endure but also to pay for. From trannies to negrophilia, to shrinking portions and condiments being treated as a precious resource, our once cozy way of life has been shattered and it promises to get worse in the near future.
Few realized it at the time when news reports of a new highly contagious disease spreading China began circulating that the disease itself was of almost no danger when compared to the cure that has been inflicted on us.