gastropoda

Which is by way of saying I’m just back from Washington and reeling, yet again, at how radically it’s changed just since 2001, let alone since my first trip there in like 1974 or ’75. Judging only by the restaurant scene, it’s Vegas on the Potomac, and I will not soon get over how bizarre it was to see throngs of young people on the streets at near midnight on Friday in a town that always left the ghosts to prowl after 9 o’clock for as long as I’ve known it (or at least the part I’ve always known). At least this time there was acknowledgement that the city owes it all to the explosion of lobbying money under the reign of error from 2001 to ’09. Now, a pastry chef said, ethics rules are cutting into business; restaurants aren’t benefiting from senators treated to dinners costing hundreds of dollars. They have to adhere to a $15 lunch limit and the toothpick rule — only tidbits than can be eaten off the tip of them are allowed. Which hasn’t stopped a boom in back-room dining, of course. Apparently a whole lot of bought-off legislators will fit into a private party.

I wish I could honestly wonder where the kkkrazies were when the Chimp and his Lump in the Bed opened the People’s House for the rare dinner. But I already know (any view is rather dark with head up rectum). Which makes it all the more pathetic that they attacked Mrs. O for serving a festive menu on a festive occasion. Anyone who believes governors on one big night should eat like everyday schoolkids needs his keyboard taken away.

Panchito has some nerve coming out as a prohibitionist now, 12 long years after he enabled a dry drunk to take the wheel and turn the ship of state into the USS Titanic. Gullible stenographers are much more dangerous to health and welfare than mere booze.

This says everything about how OWS has made the 99% push back: Even I sided firmly with the woman whose cupcake was confiscated for TSA kabuki. Before the terror capitalists won, I would have frothed that of course the goddamn thing was a potential weapon. As with any belly-bombing infantile grossness, the proportion of icing was outsized enough to bring down a plane.

I’ll acknowledge being rather brutal toward the Lump in the Bed (as her husband christened her with less affection than he showed Panchito). But she did kill someone (who was it who said there are no accidents?) And she did sit by “smoking and reading” while her dry drunk drove the country into the ditch. But even she didn’t deserve the ugliness of the attacks on her successor, which all seem to have something to do with melanin. So I was glad to see Media Matters dig around to prove the ugliness has nothing to do with nutrition. Guess whose administration was pushing the very same “eat less & exercise” message. And of course it’s down the memory hole because, like everything the Texan Lady Macbeth was involved with, it was a fail. Processed crap gets crappier, kids get fatter. You can’t explain that.

Even I get weary of picking on Panchito, but he really should take that huge target off his posterior. Didn’t he help keep the Lump in the Bed’s fatal distraction off the national radar until the Chimp was duly installed? And at least he could be gracious enough to address the dissing her successor is taking from the KKKrazies. He is, after all, a guy with his own twisted relationship with pretzels.

And I’m happy to see everyone freaking the crust out over pizza being declared a vegetable, but if food had been treated more seriously by the media all these years maybe Americans would have understood how it happened. I’ve written before how the  backwater on the Potomac suddenly became Restaurant Central under the Chimp’s reign of error (thank you, Panchito), but no one ever connected the dots — a consequence of segregating food coverage in the getting-and-spending sections. Stuffy old French places from the Reagan era were still good enough during the Clinton boom, but somehow money started flowing in the streets in the 21st century, especially around Penn Quarter. If you want to keep frozen Freedom Fries on school lunch menus, you have to buy yourself a few congressmen. Over drinks and dinner.

. . . “Into the Abyss” is one of the most retrospectively powerful movies I’ve seen. Werner Herzog definitely gets at Real America and its gated communities, so safe you could die for want of a clicker. The ending is beyond compelling, and even as I joke about my epitaph from the crematorium being “Twittered Away,” I am thinking more and more about The Dash. Mostly, though, I’m trying to get the crime scene with the vintage cookbook and the half-finished batch of cookies out of my head. Also, too, many furious thoughts about The Chimp and his enabler, Panchito. . .

I keep thinking doughnuts are an overlooked trend story, but then I’m so busy gobbling digital doughnuts I can’t even keep up with my own work. So I’ll just start by ReTweeting myself: This country needs an #OccupyPanchito. He gets paid megabucks to dribble drivel after selling the “ambler” who drove the country into the #OWS ditch. I’d suggest the foie gras treatment, but apparently that would not be painful. . .

I always joke about selling decoder rings, but for this you might want to order brain bleach: I slogged through Panchito’s sad dodge-and-weave alluding to his part in foisting a dry drunk onto the country as a harmless good ol’ boy. And all I could envision was Lady MacBeth shoving double bacon-cheeseburgers embunned in Krispy Kremes into her maw. Only guilt could explain it. And was he really saying take the Big Mac and leave the blow job?

I tried to tune out all 9/11 necro-narcissism while hoping the 10th anniversary of the Iraq invasion inspires more, and real, introspection. But when I heard the Chimp showed up for the memorials I could only imagine what the reaction would have been if a notorious cook had turned up at her victims-of-negligence funerals. Typhoid Mary, though, probably had more shame.

One great thing about the stop-time, eerily silent weekend in Manhattan was that we woke up on Sunday morning to neither of our usual hometown papers on our doormat. No deliveries were getting through; even Famous Famiglia was closed for the first time I’ve ever noticed. Which meant I was spared having to see whatever blithering Panchito engaged in and could instead just watch him get eviscerated all over Twitter and the blogs all day. Happiest part: Finally, after nearly 10 years of me getting ragged on for using that nickname, people have caught on to the idiot who was responsible for bestowing it. Next hurricane, though, should start on Friday so we’re spared 6,000 ways to eat your lobster. How does that fit with sustainable/local/who-will-feed-the-poors?

That said, every time I see the furor over the 1,700-calorie cheeseburger — the shit heard ’round the world — I just think: Dead boyfriend in the middle of the road. The Lump in the Bed was damned lucky with the media. Now they’re so desperate for traffic they’re throwing out the same red meat to the kkkrazies that was chewed over endlessly in 2009 and again in 2010. Imagine the “whitey tape” hysteria if Mrs. didn’t eat cheeseburgers.

Just back from Parma and Milan, I’m obviously having a slow time processing where I was and where I am. But I do know Panchito should be lambasted, not lauded, for his nonfood debut — he had his head so far up the Chimp’s ambling ass he apparently didn’t notice equal rights were being held back a decade along with everything else in this country (all chaps, no saddle?) And I do know it was nice to be among people demoralized about their own leader for a change (as the Economist put it, he screwed an entire country). For once, the only jokes I heard about the occupants of the White House were lame ones, about Mrs. O and her ortus. I guess they’d be happier if she were growing wars? Mowing down boyfriends?

All those fools who voted for a dry drunk they wanted to have a beer with must have been happy to see what the Chimp said he was eating when he got the Osama news: a fucking soufflé. Just the sort of Freedom Food you’d crave after clearing brush. But my favorite detail is that the restaurant, which also boasts of serving very American “vin et Champagne,” has to define its signature offering on its website for the rubes — “a fluffy baked dish made with egg yolks and beaten egg whites.” Which sounds a bit like yellowcake, non?