In this 40 minute radio interview, author Susan Cain discusses Quiet, differences between introverts and extroverts, Jung, conformity, Steve Wozniak, Csikszentmihalyi, and the fine line between introversion and misanthropy.
SPECIAL BOOK GIVEAWAY: Are we all prone to the malady of the introvert who turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within? Perhaps this conversation about introverts will clear up this Bertrand Russell idea. And perhaps you, dear listener, can weigh in. The Bat Segundo Show is giving away two copies of Susan Cain’s Quiet. All you have to do is email ed @ edrants.com with the subject line QUIET GIVEAWAY before February 7, 2012. Tell us when you first knew you were an introvert or an extrovert and what effect this has had on your life. Don’t worry. If you’re feeling shy, you can stay anonymous and we’ll keep your names confidential. We’ll read some of the stories on a future program and give away two copies of Quiet to two random people.
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Wondering if Zeno’s paradox is applicable to social types.
Subjects Discussed: Establishing terminology of introverts and extroverts, David Sloan Wilson, new Kinsey scales, Carl Jung, Jonathan Rauch’s “Caring for Your Introvert,” Google and Apple offered as “introvert comeback” examples, introvert glamour in the 21st century, how the loner idea has changed in American culture, Steve Wozniak, Edward Bernays, Western culture founded upon Greco-Roman ideals, how oratory has driven the spread of Western culture, going to business forces and corporations to understand introverts, Tony Robbins seminars, the self-help industry, the ideal self as a marketing device, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow, Peter Hills and Michael Argyle on happy introverts, how flow and happiness differs between introverts and extoverts, responding to myths that introverts aren’t social, the fine line between introversion and misanthropy, Jason Fried’s “No Talk Thursdays” idea, Wozniak’s Homebrew Computer Club, extreme positions from introverts and extroverts, “how to talk to strangers” workshops, the Solomon Asch experiments, conformity and groups, mimicking the opinions of other people, “fitting in,” Gregory Burns’s experiments with the amygdala and groups, high reactive types, shyness, introverted Asian-American populations in Cupertino, pluralism movements involving introverts and extroverts, Jerome Kagan, nature vs. nurture, interactionism, Alex Osborn and brainstorming, Robert Sutton’s response to the brainstorming dilemma, the problems with multitasking, group cohesion in brainstorming, avoiding lopsided perspectives, parents with introverted children, the No Child Left Behind Act, the advantages of role-playing and improvisation, smiling, public speaking as the number one fear, introverted actors and the performance mask, Brian Little looking into introverts being overstimulated, stage fright, being a member of Toastmasters, impromptu speaking, the advantages of anarchy, intense curiosity, Picasso, connections between solitude and creativity, and answers to charges that introverts are filled with hubris and narcissism.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Correspondent: I should point out that, as an ambivert, I’m one of those types who swings both ways. I go ahead and ingratiate myself with all forms of version. I’m wondering if it’s entirely productive to divide the world into these two austere bipolar categories. As you point out in the book, David Sloan Wilson applied these labels to the fruit fly. And I’m wondering if, say, a Kinsey scale of 1 to 6 — to pound the metaphor in here further — is probably more applicable for this kind of thing. I mean, why should introverts of all stripes be lumped together?
Cain: Yeah Okay. So that’s actually a really important question that you’re raising. And the reality is that there’s an introvert-extrovert spectrum and that we’re all situated on different points of the spectrum and that even people who are on the extreme end of the spectrum, whether introverts or extroverts, have sides to themselves that are the opposite side. And Jung — Carl Jung, who is the psychologist who actually popularized these terms — speaks about that. And he says that there’s no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert and that such a man would be in an insane asylum. So it’s an important question that you’re asking. But at the same time that this is true and that we’re all a glorious mishmosh of traits, there is also a reality to what it means to be, in general, oriented towards the outer world or, in general, more oriented to the riches that are inside your own mind. And these things I believe, these orientations, shape who we are in ways that are as profound as our gender shapes us.
Correspondent: But gradients of orientation. I mean, that’s the key thing. Jung, of course, as you point out, he popularizes the terms in 1921. You have Hans Eysenck doing research in the late 1960s, hypothesizing that humans sought “just right” levels of stimulation. And he ran some tests. So where do we, I suppose, calibrate ourselves if we’re all going to all refer to people as “You’re only an introvert” or “You’re only an extrovert.” I mean, we could get vertist, so to speak. (laughs)
Cain: Right. I guess I would take the “only” out of that formulation. It’s not “you’re only an introvert” or “you’re only an extrovert.” You’re a million other things as well. But I guess a metaphor that I could give for you, that I think is helpful here, is gender. So if I had written a book that presumed to say, “Here’s what men are like and here’s what women are like,” I probably would have been able to get it mostly right describing these categories as groups. But in the case of any one individual, there are going to be men with all kinds of female characteristics and women with all kinds of male characteristics. That doesn’t mean though that there’s no such thing as maleness or femaleness. And that doesn’t mean that these things aren’t hugely important and shape our lives in ways we need to pay attention to.
Correspondent: Yes, but such a book would spawn a million Jezebel threads.
Cain: (laughs)
Correspondent: There’s a danger, I suppose, in cleaving to these labels. And I guess maybe another way of trying to figure out what’s going on here in terms of the schism between the introverts and the extroverts is through a wonderful 2003 Jonathan Rauch article in The Atlantic, not quoted here.
Cain: Yes. Fantastic article.
Correspondent: “Caring for Your Introvert.” He was willing to go on the line and say that introverts are oppressed. I’m wondering if you would go on the line as well. You didn’t in this book. But to what degree are they oppressed? I mean, since 2003, we’ve seen Google and Apple, products of introverts, spring up. And we’re all enslaved by them. So I think the balance may be more or less stabilized. What do you think about all this?
Cain: Okay, so first of all, I would say I did go on the line in this book. And the central thesis of my book really is there is a severe bias against most introverts in this society and that operates to all of our losses. Certainly to the loss of introverts who get the message in a million different ways that there’s something wrong with who they are. But I think it operates to the loss of everybody. Because when we set up society in a way that depletes the energies of half to a third of the population, that’s not in anybody’s best interest. So that’s my feeling about it.
Correspondent: But no real oppression. I mean, if the extroverts are in control, do you think that there’s been enough of a comeback of the introverts in the years since that Rauch article?
Cain: Well, okay, so I think it’s an interesting thing. When I talk about a bias, I’m not saying, “Well, therefore introverts have had no happiness and no success in society.” And the examples that you just gave are very interesting and apt ones. But here’s the thing. Those examples, they’re not accidents. We tend to have respect for the loner who’s operating in his garage and is about to launch a fabulously successful company or who holds the promise of launching such a company. We have respect for that person. Because that person carries with him the whiff of great wealth or power. But what I’m talking about is something that operates at a deeper level of self. And the fact is that if you look at our schools and our workplaces, the institutions where we all spend our lives and where our daily happiness is shaped, those institutes are set up for extroverts. In ways that we’re not aware of. So children from the time they go into preschool at a very early age, they are going into an environment that is a group environment where they are expected to behave in certain ways. I’m not saying this is all a bad thing. But I am saying that it’s set up in such a way that introverted children from the get go are kind of expected to act in ways that are being not themselves.
Correspondent: Yes. But it’s interesting to me that the loner has moved from the sort of James Dean Rebel Without a Cause/Marlon Brando kind of thing to the guy going ahead, like Wozniak, and fiddling around with tools in his garage, in his bedroom, starting a company. And I’m wondering if the loner model has always been associated with introverts or whether there has been some outsider label instead. It seems to me that, because the idea of being a loner was predicated in some way on being a loner in relation to society, you weren’t entirely an introvert. You were more an outsider. You were still an extrovert in some sense. And yet it has moved in the decades since to the Wozniakian model, where you’re tinkering with some massive project that’s going to change the world in your garage. I’m wondering if you had some thoughts on why “loner” has almost been co-opted and has become more related to this introversion idea.
Cain: Oh, that’s interesting. I think that’s probably just a function of the role that technology has played in the last decades. You know, what you’re talking about really is ways in which we have shifted notions of glamour as attached to individual people. So in the ’50s, the decade of conformity, there was a glamour attached to the figure who could stand outside that and still have sex appeal. And then what happens in the decades of technology is suddenly we have introverts who, just because of their great technical competence, can create wealth and power. And so glamour attaches to them.
Correspondent: Introverts aren’t sexy? I think they are. I think they’re being celebrated in our culture. The “Think different” billboards that we got with Apple. It’s been all about “Yes, introverts are sexy. But we just don’t communicate with other people.” You think that they aren’t sexy these days?
Cain: No, what I was saying is that what was happening as technology grew up was that there was a glamour that was attached to that. But what I still believe is that that’s a subset of the reality of what it means to be introverted. And even if you go out to Silicon Valley, the heart of the subset where you would say that this glamour model for lack of a better word is operating — you know, even in Silicon Valley, I went out there while I was researching my book. And I talked to many introverts who were working there. And even there, they feel that their personality style is not validated, that it’s not celebrated. And they’re constantly exhorted to act in a way that’s not natural to themselves.
Correspondent: I suppose this relates to the initial line of inquiry. When you are talking about introverts, when you are promoting introverts, they inevitably feed into this marketing, advertorial sort of approach, where it’s not so much about trying to understand the introvert’s place. It’s more about promoting the introvert. This leads me to also name a figure who you didn’t name in the book — Edward Bernays. I mean, we were talking about Jung earlier. But he relied upon Freudian ideas to promote the idea of being empowered, that manipulation could be used to factor in the herd crowd. “Herd” is a word used frequently in your book. Do you think that one of the problems with introverts being misunderstood or not accepted has a lot to do with this maligning or skirmishing of psychology with these larger marketing forces?
Cain: Well, I think that it goes back even earlier than that. It starts out with there being this kernel in our society. We are a culture that is grounded on Greco-Roman ideals. And these are ideals that celebrate oratory and celebrate being able to declaim in front of people. So that’s a piece of it. But that’s only a small piece really. Because what really happened was, at the turn of the 20th century, we moved from what cultural historians call a culture of character and we moved into a culture of personality. And this happened because suddenly we had the rise of big business. And we had urbanization. So you had people flocking into the cities. And instead of living in small towns and working with people they had known all their lives, they’re suddenly in big cities applying for jobs at corporations, where everything depends on their abilities to shine at a job interview and to be able to sell their company’s latest gizmo and, of course, to sell themselves. At the same time, you have the rise of movies. And movie stars are the perfect model for this.
Correspondent: Of course.
Cain: They are the ultimate role models of this kind of charisma that people are starting to feel they need in their everyday lives. And so in a way, there used to be in the earlier years of this country’s founding, where it used to be that these oratorical skills and this ability to command a crowd was seen as being important only for political figures. Now it was something that everybody suddenly had to have. And at the core of all this was the corporation really. That was why people started to feel that they needed to have these skills.
In 1953, the idea of a single female police recruit to the New York City Police Department, let alone a handful, was big news. And when the New York Times wrote up the-then shocking idea of these women engaged in public outdoor physical activity as part of the examinations they needed to pass, naturally they included photos of the department’s newest members — including one young mother and engineer’s wife, born and raised on Ryer Avenue in the Bronx. A decade later, Dorothy Uhnak immortalized her beat-walking experiences — which included knocking down a robber more than twice her size — in her memoir Police Woman.
By the end of the 1960s, Uhnak had added to pioneering police work literary acclaim with a trio of award- winning novels following the career of Christie Opara, a detective protagonist as cool and methodical on the trail of multiple murderers (The Bait) political protesters (The Witness) and mobbed-up types (The Ledger) as she was raising a child on her own and considering a romance with her brash and sharp-tongued boss. Consciously or otherwise, Uhnak was planting the seeds for female detectives more private-minded — like Millhone, McCone and Warshawski — and subsequent generations of hard-boiled literary women. But until the Times reported Uhnak’s death of a self-administered drug overdose in 2006, her contributions went unnoticed by a great many readers — including me. I soon realized this void was shameful on several levels.
Uhnak dispensed with Christie Opara so quickly (a much-altered version of the character surfaced briefly on television in Get Christie Love) because her matter-of-fact prose and complex characters needed more room to breathe. Spurred by her editor’s desire to emulate such 1970s publishing phenomena as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and Joseph Wambaugh’s The New Centurions, Uhnak made the leap from tight-focus cop chronicles to blockbuster sagas, including 1977’s The Investigation and Victims (1985), a loose account of the Kitty Genovese murder. Sadly, the only one of these novels that remains in print is the first, the meaty, multi-generational doorstopper Law and Order (1973), which charts the entwined fates of the O’Malley family and their perpetual employer, the NYPD.
Those twin worlds, depicted between 1937 and 1970, are insular ones. The O’Malleys, with their repeating names and vigorous breeding habits, are too busy taking care of their own — personally and professionally –to bother with what happens outside their Ryer Avenue environs or the codes, written or otherwise, of the department. A brutal opening scene sketches the boundaries of the mindset. When the elder Brian O’Malley, a hard-drinking, rough-living Irish cop, meets his grisly death at the hands of a black prostitute he frequents, “I don’t want any part of it,” thinks his brand-new partner, Aaron Levine. “God he wished they were on their way back to the precinct house. It was nearly time for the tour to end. He never thought that filthy precinct would feel like home, but it was where he wanted to be right now.”
Levine’s wilful blindness, which continues as he slides all the way up to a cushy academic position (the reward for his “not wanting any part of it”) is the key metaphor for how people operate in Law & Order. O’Malley’s death is covered up, blamed on a robbery gone wrong. His eponymous son Brian steps in his father’s place, a brilliant recruit on the fast track to becoming Detective Chief Inspector — but not before he also tunes out the disturbing signals that don’t fit the overall narrative of cop culture. As for the O’Malleys as a family, they too doom themselves to repeating the same mistakes, generation after generation. Margaret, wife of the original Brian, grows from a young woman fearful of the clan she’s married into a hardened shell prone to snapping at her children. Eldest daughter Roseanne pays the price of her insolent adolescence when the wild young man she fancies turns out to be a rotten husband (her niece Maureen, the daughter of Brian Jr., will make virtually the same mistakes decades later.) Brian is himself prone to self-castigation about “sins of the flesh”, going so far as to try purging himself at the confessional, but — even after marrying a girl whose supposed job it is to rid himself of base desires — he indulges in multiple affairs.
The sense of fait accompli comes out even in how Uhnak depicts Brian Jr.’s original police examination: “Thirty-three thousand young men took the examination for Patrolman, New York City Police Department. Fewer than twelve hundred survived the written, physical, medical and background check-out. The class at the Police Academy was comprised of the top 10 per cent of the resulting list of eligibles. Eighty-five per cent of them held college degrees. By the time they received their appointments, they all knew they were something special.”
No wonder then such recruits, like Brian, are invited to do as they please; to free, for example, a statutory rapist of a neighborhood girl considered to be a slut — while another man, guilty of raping Brian’s young sister, merits a life-threatening assault. No wonder certain recruits are allowed to take a doctored exam while others cavalierly murder in the name of shutting up a would-be snitch determined to expose department-wide corruption. It’s only when the stage is set for Brian’s son Patrick, fresh off a tour in Vietnam that’s exposed him as much to war as it has to racial divides, to take his place in the cop pantheon, that the presumptions undergirding the system are threatened.
Which is why, when the bad apples have been shaken loose and events mimicking the 1972 Knapp Commission partially reveal the fault line of corruption – as well as the truth about what happened to Brian, Sr. — we’re left with Patrick, having a drink with his old man, his mouth open and holding his hands up. “Christ, isn’t there a moral way to commit a moral act?” asks the younger O’Malley, sick with disillusionment over how the Department handles corruption from within. His father has none of it. “In all of my life I’ve found morality counts shit when it comes to getting a job done. What counts is doing it any goddamn way you can, but get the job done.”
When their minds meet, resolved in a middle ground, Law & Order completes its newest generational cycle, where innocence crumbles in the face of hard-earned cynicism and means justified by the ends. The NYPD is as much family as the O’Malleys, and in Uhnak’s hard-bitten world, both of them — no matter the cost — take care of their own.
In the January 15, 2012 edition of The New York Times, Dwight Garner reviewed Deborah Scroggins’s Wanted Women — a dual biography of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui — and leveled some irresponsible, reckless, and highly misleading charges at the book’s author. Accusing Scroggins of “a rowdy assault on Ms. Hirsi Ali,” Garner set forth a litany of misleading modifiers at Scroggins, claiming that she had accused Hirsi Ali of “being imperious, deceitful, egomaniacal and divisive, of whipping up racial hatred through her unsubtle criticism of Islam.”
The problem with Garner’s attack is that he has failed to dredge up any significant facts to support his foolhardy fulminations even as he has simultaneously omitted two key points in the record: (1) that Hirsi Ali lied about her asylum application, yet used this story to garner sympathy and eventually earn a Parliament seat in the Netherlands to promote her over-the-top attacks on Islam (motivated by a legitimate concern for radical Islam’s oppression of women which quickly grew to subsume considerations of Islamic pluralism: a peaceful pluralistic option that doesn’t work the first time doesn’t necessarily have to be thrown out with the bathwater) and (2) that Hirsi Ali demanded costly and possibly unreasonable overseas security while she was in the United States. (In overlooking the second point, Garner slams Scroggins by claiming that she “swings lower” in pointing out that Hirsi Ali “visited an ‘expensive hairdresser’ to straighten her hair.” As Development Cooperation Minister Bert Koenders stated at the time, “Hirsi Ali is protected in the Netherlands. She herself has chosen to go to the U.S.” It’s no surprise that Garner, fixated like a sad middle-aged man on Hirsi Ali’s looks rather than the vital crux of her actions, would be more interested in Hirsi Ali’s minor image-conscious offenses rather than her quite serious efforts to milk money from the likes of Nicholas Sarkozy and Benoit Hamon — the latter involving the unsuccessful establishment of a 50-million-Euro security detail. As Scroggins observes, Hirsi Ali’s appeals to various governments were futile. She returned to professional speaking with her tail between her legs, factoring the security costs into her lecture fees, before the Foundation for Freedom of Expression was established, in part, to solve the money problem.)
A more competent reader than Garner would easily comprehend that, in asking critical questions of Hirsi Ali, Scroggins is considering the need for free expression (which would include the 2004 film, Submission, which Hirsi Ali wrote for Theo van Gogh and resulted in van Gogh’s barbaric murder — another key fact elided from Garner’s review) along with the impact of unfettered words. None of Scroggins’s investigations state or implicate that Hirsi Ali should be silenced. But if a prominent figure is promoting Muslim liberation within Enlightenment values, shouldn’t the evolution of these thoughts be examined? Bear in mind that, in her Dutch political career, Hirsi Ali abandoned the Labor Party to join the more conservative VVD, viewed in the Netherlands as the “party of businessmen.” In 2003, as a member of Parliament, Hirsi Ali called Mohammed a “perverse tyrant.” And her belligerence didn’t stop with invective. As Hirsi Ali confirmed in a 2007 interview, she hoped to abolish Article 23 of the Dutch Constitution, which guaranteed freedom of education, and sought to close down all Muslim schools — even as she refused to consider reports which “emphatically stated that Islamic schools are no cause for alarm,” with most maintaining an open attitude towards Dutch society. And as she revealed in her book Infidel, Hirsi Ali’s hard-line stance against basic rights was often predicated on specious work experience:
I had also proposed dramatically reducing unemployment benefits and abolishing the minimum wage. From my experience as a translator with welfare cases, I knew that easy access to generous unemployment benefits leads to a poverty trap: people in Holland often make more money from welfare than they would in actual jobs. Everyone told me these ideas were far too right wing — meaning that they would lead to a society polarized between wealthy and poor, teeming with beggars and very rich people, with lots of violence and exploitation.
All of these facts are plainly stated in Scroggins’s book and are helpfully backed up by endnotes (many of which I have consulted for this piece). Scroggins’s book is a welcome reconsideration (rather than an attack) of a complicated individual who charmed the pants off many intellectual figures. Consider how Anne Applebaum (“a Muslim immigrant who embraces Western culture with the excitement of the convert” — a remarkably rose-tinted summation), Christopher Hitchens (“calls for a pluralist democracy where all opinion is protected” — but not moderate Muslim schools), and Sam Harris and Salman Rushdie (“one of the most poised, intelligent, and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience” — but not when it comes to freedom of religion, even when separate from state) all proved mostly unwilling to perceive any flaws in their cherished heroine. Is Hirsi Ali’s Manichean ultimatum between Islam and liberation tenable? Are all strands of Islam radical, dangerous, and anti-Semitic? Isn’t the truth more subtle and less one-sided? These are the questions which Scroggins’s book raises in examining two significant figures.
Garner has chosen to simplify these very important issues, reducing them to the muddled and tendentious viewpoint of a country bumpkin incapable of comprehending the other side of imperialism. He cannot seem to see how extreme fears of Muslims (like any extreme hate, including radical Islam) can produce figures like Geert Wilders or, even deadlier, Anders Behring Breivik (Garner suggests that Scroggins has laid the Breivik association “at Ms. Hirsi Ali’s feet” when she is merely pointing out that Breivik believed she should win the Nobel Peace prize). These intricate concerns require more than cheap dualities. They require serious thinkers, not suburban burnouts whose view beyond Levittown isn’t altogether different from a Helen Bannerman vista.
A detailed essay on John P. Marquand, who specialized in gentle satire, once graced the covers of Time and Newsweek, and reached millions of readers in the early 20th century, before becoming needlessly forgotten.
If there are no second acts in American lives, then John P. Marquand’s straying bankers and layabout lawyers certainly pine for a turning point.
Marquand, who won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for his satirical masterpiece, The Late George Apley, has remained a remarkably overlooked author despite his midcentury accolades. Martha Spaulding, Terry Teachout, and Jonathan Yardley have all made valiant critical efforts to restore Marquand’s reputation, but, today, many of his novels remain out of print. This dropoff is astonishing, considering that Marquand once graced the covers of Time and Newsweek. But the Harvard-educated author’s razor-sharp examinations of upward mobility and class trappings also appealed to a mass audience, not unlike the weekly wistfulness of Dunder Mifflin workers depicted in the television comedy The Office. His rudderless protagonists are overly concerned with how they appear to others. They pine for the next rung on the corporate ladder, even as eidetic recall from the past freezes their possibilities in the present.
Marquand cut his teeth writing slick stories for The Saturday Evening Post, not unlike the early potboilers written by his satirical contemporary Sinclair Lewis. He found additional commercial success with a Charlie Chan knockoff named Mr. Moto, whose adventures were serialized in the Post before being published as books. And while this generated money, Marquand soon revolted against his agent’s hopes for steady lucre with an epistolary novel featuring a belated Boston aristocrat named George Apley, whose letters were organized by a fictitious biographer (and family friend) to reveal “the spirit of the man and his influence on the life around him.” While the novel found some Post supporters, more than a few editors felt it necessary to stick with the foundation. Unlike Marquand’s previous novels, only four excerpts from Apley were published. But to everyone’s surprise, including the author himself, Apley was a critical and commercial hit.
In Apley, it is the biographer’s voice, frequently proffering lofty context (“It would be a slur upon George Apley’s integrity to doubt the absolute sincerity of his statement”), that reveals a kind yet bumbling upper-class man attempting to be true to his inner ingenuousness while running afoul of societal expectations. A private matter of baby naming becomes a needless tempest with the in-laws (“It has been the custom in our family…to give the first son of a new generation one of the Apley names”). Apley takes up Saturday morning birdwatching with an “old playmate and lifetime friend, Mrs. Clara Goodrich.” Yet even this quiet moment cannot escape scrutiny. A reverend, also an old friend of Apley’s mother, fires off a letter: “Could you not arrange to see a little less of Clara Goodrich, or at any rate to visit her in the company of others?”
Marquand’s unique satirical approach involved skewering folkways, institutions, and other assorted tableaux while remaining sincere to his characters, even when his characters could not perceive their own telltale follies. In H. M. Pulham, Esquire, the eponymous attorney, Harry, attempts to read his way through The Education of Henry Adams for personal enlightenment, but he cannot discern that his wife is carrying on an affair with his best friend. Later in the book, Harry sees the two sitting in the dining room, but the ethereal affair has drifted into uncomfortable territory: “Bill must have been telling Kay again what a good time he had had, because they were both sitting saying nothing. Whatever it was that Bill said, it made Kay look awfully sad.”
Many of Marquand’s unhappy marriages are, like George Babbitt’s, founded and maintained on an almost conformist common ground. In Pulham, Harry reports of his marriage: “The best part of it was that Kay and I seemed to have a good many of the same ideas — the same tastes in furniture, the same ways of spending our time.” Marquand’s remarkably bitter final novel, Women and Thomas Harrow, offers what may be the author’s worst nightmare: a man defined almost exclusively by his relationships to wives and mistresses.
It is this juxtaposition between marriage and identity that likewise presents a troubling dilemma for Point of No Return‘s Charles Gray. Charles is a banker who commutes from his suburban “thirty-thousand-dollar house — not including extras” to his New York job on an 8:30 train “designed for the executive aristocracy.” Not having graduated from Harvard or Yale, he is sometimes embarrassed because “the New York banks he dealt with most were full of Harvard and Yale men.” He does not know if he will get a coveted promotion to vice president. But his wife Nancy coaches him on what he needs to do and how he needs to act, urging him as she does to turn out the downstairs light — because the neighbors might think they’re having a fight. And he certainly doesn’t want to remember Clyde, Massachusetts — the hamlet where he grew up and fell in love with a young woman from an affluent family. (Just as Lewis set many of his novels in the fictitious state of Winnemac, many of Marquand’s novels take place in the fictitious Clyde.)
Upon the 1949 publication of Point of No Return, Marquand’s six previous novels had sold nearly three million copies; three were turned into movies and three selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club. Some highbrow critics furrowed with suspicion. Edmund Wilson once wrote of Marquand, “We have plenty of novelists in America who make Mr. Marquand’s abilities seem as modest as his pretensions.” In the same essay, Wilson pardoned Sinclair Lewis for similar sins, suggesting that a Lewis novel was “a work of the imagination that imposes its atmosphere, a creation that shows the color and modeling of a particular artist’s hand.”
Wilson, however, overlooked the plain fact that Marquand not only got through to his audience, but embedded much beneath his seemingly slick formalism. Marquand’s characters frequently received the short end of the stick, but he was the very rare novelist to make domestic heartache both enthralling and entertaining. If Marquand gave into the demands of his audience, it was precisely because he hoped to impart his own particular atmosphere, conjured from careful observation with an abundance of Morris and Windsor chairs hiding in studies and lonely rooms, but without Sinclair’s smoky bluntness.
Unable to curry favor with a literati set demanding a refined spice, Marquand spent many of his years serving as a Book-of-the-Month Club judge, sticking his neck out for such titles as Animal Farm and Aurora Dawn for an appreciative populist audience. While Lewis tackled prejudice and a fascist president in his later novels, Marquand confined his narratives to domestic environments. And while this insular territory accounted for some of his limitations, Marquand recirculated his keen insight into the class aspirations that inhabited this modest sphere. It’s a literary injustice that this intriguing comic tension between the twain is now almost forgotten.
This 6,000 word document could be the most important American intellectual piece you’ll read in 2012. Taking a cue from a 1939 piece in The Pancake Review, we asked several prominent breakfast experts about The Situation in American Waffles. Their thoughts may alarm you.
In 1939, The Pancake Review sent out a questionnaire to a number of prominent waffle eaters, asking them about waffles, maple syrup, and their breakfast-eating identities. While the questionnaire hasn’t been completely forgotten (right now, a Henry Darger type in Chicago hasn’t finished his response to the initial survey; an excerpt of this man’s ongoing 12,000 page work, In the Realms of the Waffles will be published next year by New Directions), we felt that these breakfast-related questions were rarely being asked of today’s waffle eaters. Considering that 2011 was a year of significant waffle eating and that most questionnaires are inherently pointless, we felt that it would be particularly relevant to update The Pancake Review’s questions.
In pursuing these vital questions with today’s breakfast experts, some figures were forced to recuse themselves or offer short answers to mimic recent breakfast austerity measures in Europe. Susannah Breslin pointed out that her gluten allergy prevented her from consuming them, even as she recognized that “everything hinges on waffles.” Elizabeth Crane Brandt professed to be “blind to this plight.” Lev Grossman insisted that he was “a French toast man.” Sheila McClear didn’t quite answer our questions, but she did inform us that she didn’t eat waffles in regular New York diners. “I will say I had a waffle at a semi-upscale breakfast place about three years ago,” reported McClear. “I was with my boyfriend, and I was cheerfully dousing it with syrup. He found this display so repulsive he actually walked. out. of. the. restaurant. on me.”
Ed Park claimed that he didn’t eat waffles anymore, but revealed that he sometimes eats a bit of leftover Eggos if they remain on other people’s plates. Dan Chaon said that he didn’t believe in the existence of breakfast, and, wishing to respect his beliefs, we didn’t press him further. Emma Straub pointed out that the New Kids on the Block “always have their after-parties at Waffle House restaurants, which tells you all you need to know about the state of American waffles.” She followed this astute observation with a Rita Coolidge quote.
But many of the waffle experts we consulted were both confident and comfortable with our questions, very frequently answering all of them.
THE BREAKFAST EXPERTS
Megan Abbott is most recently the author of The End of Everything.
Diana Abu-Jaber is most recently the author of Birds of Paradise. She is known for writing food-related prose that makes her readers very hungry.
Adrienne Davich is a writer, journalist, and editor based in Brooklyn.
Laurel Snyder grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and now makes her haome in Atlanta. She does not miss scrapple, but neither does she bother with grits.
Sarah Weinman is an author, journalist, and freelance adventurer.
THE QUESTIONS
2011 was the year of the Sectarian Breakfast. There have also been massive protests in Greece, Spain, Britain, and most recently, the United States. Experts now say that the pancake/waffle conflict shows no sign of abatement in 2012. Does breakfast have a responsibility to respond to popular upheaval?
Marcy Dermansky: This is a serious issue. Breakfast does have a responsibility to respond to popular upheaval, now more than ever. My concern, rather than the waffle or the pancake, is the bagel. The bagel needs to made its presence known in Europe. I say this, currently living in Europe and feeling increasingly deprived.
Laurel Snyder: Honestly, my emotional response to the current situation is one of sadness and loss. I know that in my youth, my parents’ generation engaged loudly in the breakfast debate. They marched and demanded. They were such dreamers… but it always felt smart too, like an exchange of ideas. There was respect back then. Now it seems like we’ve lost sight of breakfast itself — and what it really means, what it stands for — almost entirely. I think it says something about this generation, about what America has become. Don’t you?
Sarah Weinman: Indeed it does. Breakfast preferences alter with time and as a result of economic hardship and revolutionary fervor. A waffle is more appropriate for boom times while pancakes thrive in recessions. But then it is also more likely for people to shout “let them eat pancakes!” So the conflict continues, unresolved.
J. Robert Lennon: I think breakfast has more integrity than that, don’t you? It can remain aloof.
Jesus Angel Garcia: Absolutely. In the United States at least, breakfast owes it to the people to listen to their needs. The people cannot survive on lunch and dinner alone.
Megan Abbott: Part of me wants to say that breakfast is in fact a part of that popular upheaval. It’s the thing we all share, after all. Where would we be without breakfast? How would anything begin? How would we know how to get through the day? That said, I rely primarily on legacy media to provide me with my information, and so I guess that marks me a dinosaur when it comes to breakfast considerations. But I am from Michigan.
Michael Schaub: It would be foolish not to. What we’re seeing in the world isn’t just, as some have posited, an inchoate anger. It’s not just a movement of bored young people who don’t fully understand the breakfast system. It’s the expression of population — several populations, actually — who have decided that enough is enough, that the old system is unsustainable. And they have a point — for too long the powers that be have forced their narrow-minded idea of breakfast on people who are just now deciding they want — they need — to think for themselves. If that means rejecting the eggs/bacon/pancakes model in favor of a gingerbread waffle with pecans, or even just a lowly Eggo, thrown in the toaster and eaten on the way to work, then that’s what is bound to happen. Huxley told us all we have the right to be unhappy, and if that means Toaster Strudels with alarmingly-colored frosting, then so be it. That is democracy; we expect no less.
Alex Shephard and Eric Jett: The best thing a waffle eater can do at a time of unrest is what he does best: eat waffles. In tumultuous times, people need something constant to remind them what really matters. Waffles provide that comfort. Sure, the way we take our waffles may change -— I gave up my beloved banana-nut waffles after reading Neruda’s “La United Fruit Co.” -— but as long as we continue to eat, life goes on.
Andrew Shaffer: Conflicts within the breakfast community are unfortunate but inevitable. Breakfast eaters tend to be emotionally engaged and passionate in their food preferences than non-breakfast eaters. The pancake/waffle conflict is minor compared to the eternal war between the breakfast eater and the non-breakfast eater. While skirmishes such as the pancake/waffle conflict break out from time to time (the ugly oatmeal/grits showdown during the Kennedy administration comes readily to mind), we need to be aware that pancake and waffle eaters are more alike than different.
Jacob Silverman: Yes, absolutely. For too long breakfast has allowed other meals to do the heavy-lifting when it comes for the lobbying of political rights and social change. If one takes the time to look at the burden borne by brunch during the aughts, frankly, it’s a scandal. We have much catching up to do.
Diana Abu-Jaber: Well, clearly this is the year of the Waffle Spring. After years of being marginalized — even vilified — as a kind of forbidding yet exclusive terrain, the “Waffle Street,” they’re making their way into the main stream, with all its inherent complexity.
* * *
Do you think that waffle eating should be directed towards a definite audience? If so, how would you describe this audience? Would you say that the audience for serious waffle eating (along with all related activities) has grown or contracted in the last ten years?
Jacob Silverman: We are long removed from the days when waffle eating was a serious social activity, when Buckley and Mailer ate waffles together on television, locked in mortal intellectual combat over which vintage of syrup reigned supreme. (Unsurprisingly, National Review, in its latter day jingoistic incarnation, has scrubbed from its archives all mention of Buckley’s preference for Canadian maple.) I do not expect the audience for serious waffle eating to recover. Like my friend Philip Roth, I anticipate that it will one day have all the popularity in this country of epic poetry. Unfortunately, that day may not be long in coming.
Jesus Angel Garcia: Like all good consumption, true waffle eating will always finds its audience.
Sarah Weinman: That’s a good question. The number of Waffle Houses have increased but the number of Eggo commercials are on the wane. I guess that means waffles are directed more towards those with disposable income, or who wish to celebrate their waffle-eating in public instead of heating up the frozen ersatz kind at home. So then: Waffles are So 1 Percent.
Laurel Snyder: I don’t think we can really talk about “the waffle” without first defining our terms. What is a waffle today? It isn’t the same waffle my grandmother knew. We eat waffles in our house, but they’re crappy waffles, frozen waffles. They’re an afterthought. We’re just to busy, or that’s what we say. I’d like to think there’s a bigger market out there for waffles, that we just need to find it. But with the current waffle, I’m not sure that’s true. I think of myself as a “waffle person” but half the time, I just eat a Stella D’oro Breakfast Treat on my way out the door.
Marcy Dermansky: I think waffle makers should be distributed at birth. How grateful I would have been if I had been given a waffle maker when Nina was born. I would make her waffles all the time. Instead, I have not made her a single waffle. She is two and a half years old.
Megan Abbott: I’ve never believed in eating only for oneself, for the sating of oneself. What is eating for if not for an audience? That won’t ever change. The way we do it -— the vehicle, the mode, even the time of day may change, but that longing won’t. Appetite is appetite.
Michael Schaub: It’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Direct waffle consumption toward the traditional audience — the affluent, Wall Street-employed Manhattanites who regularly line up at The Breslin or Fedora for their fix — and you risk extincting the doughy cake if and when the next economic meltdown occurs. But if you try to expand the audience, you risk turning something undeniably special into just another run-of-the-mill breakfast food. Still, I think it’s best to at least try to market the waffle to a slightly larger audience — while most blue-collar, lower-income Midwesterners won’t be willing to give up the foie gras and Almas caviar that constitutes their traditional morning meal, the survival of the cultural icon we call the waffle may well depend on it.
Alex Shephard and Eric Jett: Homemade waffles have certainly taken a hit from Eggos and other pop pastries, frozen or otherwise, but as the video of that riot over $2 waffle irons on Black Friday shows, there will always be a demand for quality.
Adrienne Davich: I think waffle eating is personality driven. People don’t love all waffles. They love particular waffles. Waffles with blueberries & whipped cream.
Diana Abu-Jaber: Look, the Pancake 99 percent has dominated our hearts and imaginations for far too long. Pancakes are Joe the plumber. I say it’s time to occupy the waffle maker — bring the batter to the people.
J. Robert Lennon: I don’t think about audience when I’m making waffles — I’m thinking about waffles. It’s about process for me — the process of baking, and the process of eating.
* * *
Do you place much value on the criticism your waffle eating has received? For the past decade we’ve seen a series of cuts to predominant pancake and waffle magazines, and in response, breakfast criticism has moved online. Do you think this move to the non-professional realm has made breakfast criticism more or less of an isolated cult?
Megan Abbott: I’ve always been a reluctant consumer in that regard. After you are made aware of how your waffles are received, how can one make waffles in a pure way again? Once we know what’s in them, everything changes, the waffles themselves change. You begin to think of them as a product. On the other hand, I count on these magazines to excite me about new waffles and occasionally even pancakes, so I rely on them, depend on them utterly. As one would on any cult.
Michael Schaub: I do what I do for the waffles, not the critics, and if they don’t get it, it’s their problem, not mine. I will say that the transition of waffle criticism from print to the Internet is not, in my opinion, a good thing. It’s become saturated with amateurs and bloggers, who think that just because they have an Internet connection and a (usually uneducated) point of view, their opinions are just as valid as the professionals. Those of us who have dedicated our careers to the art — yes, art — of waffles, even to the point of getting advanced degrees (in my case, Ph.D. in Breakfast Pastries, Dartmouth University, 2005), disagree.
J. Robert Lennon: I don’t read waffle criticism. I’m an eater, not a critic.
Sarah Weinman: Well, remember that the rise of breakfast also includes the meteoric commensurate rise of brunch, and lord knows that’s become quite the cult in rarified circles. But I’d like to see more breakfast criticism, not less! We need people to assert their opinions on the best of the best and pan the worst of the worst. Oh wait, I said “pan.” I think that’s a pun.
Laurel Snyder: I think it has value of a sort, because some interesting things have developed from the conversation, but yeah — it’s a closed loop. If you look at the comment threads, it’s easy to see people are just preaching to their own crowds, and occasionally seeking out a fight, to drive traffic, garner some attention.
Jesus Angel Garcia: Those who criticize breakfast wish they were eating breakfast all the time. Period. They’re fat and they’re hungry. You can’t fault them. We live in lean times. A time for foraging and hoarding. That said, it’s tough to take breakfast critics seriously, especially online where bagels with cream on their faces get more play than superdeluxe three — cheese omelettes with diced Kalamata olives, capers, cayenne pepper and cilantro. In print, this would never happen.
Marcy Dermansky: I fear that I am constantly criticized for my lack of waffle eating. I am ashamed to answer these questions. I fear the public outcry when my readership learns that I have never cooked my daughter a waffle. We recently ate freshly cooked waffles at a festival. They came with powdered sugar on top and were delicious.
Alex Shephard and Eric Jett: Thoughtful, constructive criticism should always be well received. If I’m chewing my waffles with my mouth open, by all means let me know. Unfortunately, democratization has, as always, been accompanied by mediocrity. With all the waffle products on the market now, it’s great that they can get individual attention from the smaller presses (no pun intended), but a green webzine writer who has spent one morning watching me eat is not going to provide the type of insights that one could get from the pages of Waffle Aficionado, which I, like many, was sad to see dissolve. I remember reading their review of Wells’ first Belgian waffle baker when I was in high school and being blown away. When was the last time a blog blew you away?
Adrienne Davich: Speaking from no experience, no. The move seems to have made breakfast less of an isolated cult. However, breakfast seems more fractured. I guess there’s more free breakfast too. I’m not sure how I feel about that as an eater.
Jacob Silverman: I do take such criticism to heart, and it may be my downfall as a breakfast eater. I find neither shame nor pride, only a weary sadness, in admitting that many are the days I have wasted rending my clothes and weeping over the vicious barbs of a breakfast blogger (pajama-wearing and basement-dwelling, no doubt!). Through these spells, I have torn apart many wardrobes, soaked all of my handkerchiefs to their very monograms, while Frederick, my Chantilly cat, eyes me, baffled. What can be wrong with him, he must be thinking. If only I had the meows to communicate my torment. Alas, it is bottomless.
Diana Abu-Jaber: Ho hum. Everyone who’s ever held a fork or photographed a plate of cheese grits now claims they’re a breakfast critic! I say, show me the bacon. Apple-smoked.
* * *
Have you found it possible to make a living by eating the types of waffles you want to, without other work? Do you think there is a place in our current economic system and climate for waffle eating as a profession?
Michael Schaub: Sadly, I’m unable to support myself solely by waffle eating. There was a time, of course, when one could do so — when the nation treasured its breakfast heritage more. Then came the Reagan administration, which abolished the Department of Breakfast and Brunch. (President Obama’s promise to reinstate the department has, sadly, proved to be a false one.) And without the DBB, the profession has faded into, in my case, a hobby. I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for me. I’m asking them to feel sorry for America.
Andrew Shaffer: One could, theoretically, make a living eating waffles, but what kind of life would that be? Even if the waffles were given to you, it’s a terrifying prospect to even contemplate. While it’s true that you are unlikely to starve by eating waffles, man cannot live on waffles alone. You must also have butter. You must have Vermont maple syrup. You must have non-dairy whipped cream topping. You must have sliced strawberries. You must have crushed pecans. And, if you are doing it correctly, chocolate chips. For these reasons, it is simply not possible to comfortably eat waffles without a steady source of income in the current economic climate.
Laurel Snyder: It’s a hard question for me to answer. I’m hardly a committed full-time waffle person. My husband makes more than I do. I’m more of a hobbyist. I don’t take it as seriously as I should. This is a chicken-and-egg situation though. Am I not doing it full-time because my waffles are sub-par, or are my waffles sub-par because I’m not taking them seriously enough? Who can really say?
Jesus Angel Garcia: Are we being honest here? If so, let’s admit the obvious: Waffles aren’t real food. But that doesn’t mean anyone with a dream shouldn’t be given the same opportunities to succeed as defense contractors, investment bankers and drug dealers. That’s the United States of America I know and love.
Marcy Dermansky: It occurs to me now that perhaps the time has come for me to be a professional waffle maker. It is time for me to have a marketable skill. Thank you for the suggestion.
Megan Abbott: I’ve heard of some waffle eaters believing it can bring them millions, or that it can bring them the waffle-eating life they always dreamed of, as portrayed in popular television programs, where they will be portrayed by David Duchovny, or in motion pictures, such as those of Woody Allen, or fantasies that just, quite frankly, aren’t realistic, like appearing in a Vogue in sexy outdoors gear or having their image splayed across a massive billboard in Times Square. I’ve had dreams like that too. But it’s not the real world.
Alex Shephard and Eric Jett: Of course there will always be a few stars who are able to make a living off waffles. But the majority of us will increasingly have to extend our palates to other meals. There will be more chicken salad sandwich critics, more Salisbury steak critics. Many will even take jobs at IHOP or Denny’s. But some of our best critics were already working there anyway.
Adrienne Davich: I am glad you asked this question. But what about America’s waffle and pancake servers? The tipped minimum wage in many states has stagnated at $2.13 an hour. That means pancake and waffle servers across America are living below the poverty line, sometimes starving, while waffle eaters naval-gaze and intellectualize about breakfast values! At least waffle eaters eat. Have you been to IHOP lately? The people who cook, serve, and clean up your breakfast don’t have health care either.
Sarah Weinman: As I pointed out before, waffles are more for boom times. So when the economy rebounds, there will be much more waffle-eating among the proletariat. Needless to say I’ve supplemented my waffle-eating with a ton of frittatas, parfaits and other petit dejeuner foods to get by. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, right?
Jacob Silverman: No. The waffle eating economy has been torn asunder, and I assign equal blame to IHOP and the Huffington Post. As to how I sustain my lifestyle, that is between me and my court-appointed attorney.
Diana Abu-Jaber: You really have to hustle if you want to make it in the breakfast rat race. I, for one, have had to subsidize my waffle arts by offering hot iron workshops — mainly online, of course.
J. Robert Lennon: Well, I used to be able to make a living with the waffles, but at some point in the mid-2000’s I realized I would have to go on the job market, and now I’m the Director of Waffle Studies at Cornmeal University.
* * *
Do you find in retrospect, that your waffle eating reveals any allegiance to any group, class, organization, region, religion, or system of thought, or do you conceive of it as mainly the expression of yourself as an individual?
Diana Abu-Jaber: I discussed waffle allegiances at length with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Mother Theresa. The jury is still out.
Alex Shephard and Eric Jett: I like to think that my breakfast menu is relatively eclectic, but if I’m being honest, when it’s 8 a.m. and I’m sitting at the kitchen table in my pajamas with a long day ahead of me, I’m a committed continentalist. After all, waffles, with their trademark grids, are the breakfast food most directly influenced by Descartes. Give me something sweet, something with meat, some coffee, and some juice. (Perhaps I inherited this from my grandmother, who was born in Belgium. She’s American now—also dead). We critics like to split hairs over how many pancakes make a short stack, what diameter makes a silver dollar, but at the end of the day—or the beginning, I should say (an old joke, I know)—we have more in common than not. Breakfast satisfies basic human needs—hunger, nourishment, community—and when all is said and done, what is a crêpe, really, but a thin pancake? And what is a pancake but a Euclidean waffle?
Sarah Weinman: 100 percent individual preference, though now I am might curious about the correlation between waffle-eating and Objectivism. Perhaps a study can be commissioned on this post-haste?
Laurel Snyder: Can I say both? I’m generally a fence sitter. I think of my waffle-life as deeply personal, an extension of my daily life, but how can I separate that from my life as a Jew? Am woman? A mother, above all else? And those things certainly define my politics…
Jesus Angel Garcia: You’re forcing my hand, Mr. Champion. I can’t honestly answer this question. I don’t belong in this conversation. I’m a charlatan, a fraud, but I am flattered that you think of me as a waffle eater. Truth to tell, for breakfast I only eat French toast (and granola).
Marcy Dermansky: It seems like I march alone, eating waffles only when they are available at street festivals in Germany. Truth to be told, I rarely eat waffles or pancakes. Recently, my friend Tami made me pancakes for breakfast and they were so good. Usually, when I go to brunch, I order an omelet.
Megan Abbott: I think if all of us looked inside, we’d see surprising attributes about ourselves that can explain the lure of waffle eating, or particular kinds of waffles. A kind of longing for an imagined idea about American breakfasting we’d like to be a part of. An American breakfast that perhaps never really existed. But it’s very personal, very private—and yet we like to attach larger ideological resonance to it. Maybe because it makes us feel part of something now. Are we the relics of lost civilizations? Are we the last vanguard against The End? Or are we the new revolutionaries, erecting a new challenge to society? All three of those options may all feel infinitely sexier than admitting we just like waffles. They make us feel good. They are delicious.
J. Robert Lennon: I think my waffle making and eating has really strengthened my connection to the Inuit people, and to white Southerners.
Michael Schaub: Of course I try to keep an open mind, and be objective as possible, with regard to my waffle eating. But my heritage necessarily influences my breakfast habits, and I see no point in trying to change that. I’m Southern, so I often put pecans on my waffles. I was raised Catholic, so I usually accompany my waffles with whiskey. I grew up in the suburbs, so quite often I find myself using Aunt Jemima “syrup” instead of the real, hardcore Vermont stuff. And I’m a male in my thirties, so I almost always eat waffles while viewing pornography.
Adrienne Davich: I think waffle eating without any allegiance whatsoever is impossible. Marguerite Duras said, “Every waffle eater is a moralist. It’s absolutely unavoidable. A waffle eater is someone who looks at the world and the way it works, someone who takes a close look at things every day and reports what she sees, someone who represents the world, the event, for others.”
Jacob Silverman: My waffle eating belongs to me and me alone. And any agribusiness conglomerate that wishes to sponsor me.
* * *
How would you describe the political tendency of American waffle eating, as a whole, since 2001? How do you feel about it yourself?
J. Robert Lennon: Politics come and go, waffles are forever.
Michael Schaub: There’s no doubt that 9/11 changed everything. My point of view is that of, I believe, most Americans: if we give up on waffles, if we toss our waffle irons in a box and leave it outside a Goodwill store, if we — God forbid — start eating pancakes, then the terrorists have won. The French toast lobby would like us, of course, to adopt a policy of appeasement. As a real American, I would not.
Diana Abu-Jaber: Now that we’ve got the plodding old biscuit-gummers and egg-boilers out, I’m hopeful that a bold, new, imaginative approach to buttering and syruping may once more hold sway over our fair nation.
Sarah Weinman: If waffles are for the 1 percent, as I theorized already, then it’s all about the plutocracy, baby. And money trumps politics.
Laurel Snyder: I don’t think people even notice the waffles in their lives very much. But when they no longer have waffles, they’ll notice. The waffles will become more and more rarified, more underground. One day people will wake up and say, “Where have all the waffles gone?” But by then it’ll be too late.
Jesus Angel Garcia: Since 2001? It’s not French toast!
Marcy Dermansky: Waffle eating is a subversive act. For years when I lived in the South, I went to Waffle House, usually not for breakfast, often in the middle of the night. I rarely ate a waffle or saw others eating waffles. I would order the hash browns, smothered and covered. I don’t think that has changed. In the war against terror, it is best not to eat tagines, delicious as they are.
Megan Abbott: Honestly, I’m surprised to be asked. These questions are rarely posed to those of us who have been placed firmly in the toaster oven category of waffle eating. I’m not sure why that is, precisely, but I try not to think about any of these things when I eat. Maybe those placed in the “artisan” or “slow waffles” categories do. Or maybe it’s just a quality that emerges in the eating, or doesn’t, without a plan or intention. Maybe at its best it is truly organic. Even for us Eggos.
Alex Shephard and Eric Jett: The passionate responses to Michelle Obama’s efforts to restructure the food pyramid, as well as her stance against cereal mascots, are, I think, emblematic of the situation in American breakfast. Yes, many of us take breakfast for granted, but it takes only the slightest change to remind us how much is at stake. Personally, I’m of the mind that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and if it’s that important, then it should probably be the best meal of the day as well. And, for me, the best is always homemade. Just ask my mom.
Jacob Silverman: To paraphrase Gore Vidal, it’s quite clear that the Bush junta sapped the political life from waffle eating. Its condition is much like blintzes after the Harding administration, and I fear that it faces a similar path towards irrelevance.
* * *
Over the past ten years, America has been in a state of constant war with its breakfast. This war has extended to fronts throughout the world. Have you considered the question of your opinion on an unending war on breakfast? What do you think the responsibilities of waffle eaters are in general are, in the midst of unending war?
Marcy Dermansky: I think waffle eaters have to realize that they have lost the war. Waffles take too long to make and waffle irons are too expensive for the working class. I would like to start a movement to increase the consumption of New York bagels around the world.
J. Robert Lennon: Look, man, my responsibility is to three things: the waffle, the butter, and the syrup. People who want to repurpose breakfast for their petty political aims should just sleep in and dump their burdens on cheese sandwiches and reheated coffee.
Sarah Weinman; I haven’t considered that question, to be frank. But if I did consider it I’d implore regular waffle eaters to be kinder and gentler to their pancake-eating brethren. The conflict may continue but there’s no need for bloodshed. Not even bloody steaks to go along with the eggs alongside the pancakes and/or waffles!
Laurel Snyder: Just to remember, to value, to continue to engage, to continue to both produce and consume. I want to be part of the dialogue, whatever it is. I’ve promised myself I’m going to try harder this year, do more. But then — I think I said that last year. I don’t know. I just don’t know.
Jesus Angel Garcia: As I understand it, America has been at war for 99 out of the last 100 years. This war on breakfast is nothing new to anyone with a basic grasp of history. Now that Obama and the Congress have passed the NDAA, which legalizes indefinite detention for American citizens on American soil for “breakfast transgression,” the definition of which is subject to the whimsical palate of any administration that happens to occupy the White House, no one is safe. The bottom line? If you want to eat — waffles, pancakes, even oatmeal for God’s sake! — if you want your children to be able to choose their own breakfast foods, you need to take a stand now before it’s too late.
Megan Abbott: Well, in the end, the world spins on, but what we need to remember is that we each have a personal relationship with breakfast, one that is primitive and essential. That goes back to our first moments in the world, as babies, as children. We need breakfast because it’s how we’ve always understood the world. Because it reminds us we are not alone because we all need it. And that’s true whether we like our breakfast in pancake form, or waffles, toaster or otherwise. Or any form at all. We need it. It feeds us. Call me old-fashioned, call me a throwback, call me a hopelessly romantic but I really do believe it is the most important meal of the day.
Michael Schaub: “Keep Calm and Carry On” has become a cliche ever since the British poster was made popular again earlier this century. Nevertheless, the sentiment is no less true. We have been through other wars on breakfast. We have sent our troops thousands of miles away, to Antwerp and Brussels, when the Belgian waffle was threatened by the German strudel and the Italian frittata. We have won these wars, and we have become better and stronger because of it. Our responsibility as waffle eaters? Keep the faith. Whether you top your waffles with fried chicken, whipped cream, syrup, butter, whatever — we are all in this together. And it is only through togetherness we can win. In the words of the great American statesman Benjamin Franklin, “This waffle is delicious! Now to find a buxom French whore.” And that’s as true today as it was then.
Alex Shephard and Eric Jett: Breakfast is over when the plate is clean and not a second before. Every crumb of waffle, every drop of syrup. The effects of an incomplete breakfast may not be immediately apparent, but eventually, some time before lunch, that hunger pang is going to strike, and it is going to strike with a vengeance. To ensure the productivity of our work (no trips to the vending machines) and the satisfaction of our lives, it is the responsibility of every man, regardless of what he eats, to clear his plate.
Adrienne Davich: I think waffle eaters have a responsibility to the truth.
Jacob Silverman: As is the American tendency, the war on breakfast is unlikely to end; it will only assume new forms. We can only bide our time, raise our meek, syrup-slathered fists in protest, and wait for a Predator drone to pick us off as we cram our faces with so many doughy cakes.
Correspondent: I should point out that, as an ambivert, I’m one of those types who swings both ways. I go ahead and ingratiate myself with all forms of version. I’m wondering if it’s entirely productive to divide the world into these two austere bipolar categories. As you point out in the book, David Sloan Wilson applied these labels to the fruit fly. And I’m wondering if, say, a Kinsey scale of 1 to 6 — to pound the metaphor in here further — is probably more applicable for this kind of thing. I mean, why should introverts of all stripes be lumped together?
