School Lunches and Hulk Hogan

I was reading about the book recently published by David Sirota, Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now. I heard him being interviewed on the radio and a lot of what he said rang true. My sad realization was that while a lot of this cultural programming was going on, I was busy (as I put it) working nights and washing diapers.

Recent events have started to solidify a perception in my mind, much in the manner of David Brooks’s pieces in the New York Times and his books (which take brilliant insights on his part – at least he thinks they’re brilliant insights - and attempt to turn them into universal truths, when it’s really just kind of his opinion). So I express this so-called brilliant insight with the caveat that it’s just my perception. So take it with a grain of salt.

What got me started was reading a story in today’s Chicago Tribune about a principal at a Chicago public school who made a rule that children may not bring their own lunches (unless they pass nutritional muster, but it wasn’t clear exactly how willing the principal would be to allow that). Instead, the children would eat the lunches provided by the school, which are provided by a company called Chartwells-Thompson. It mentioned that the school has more lunches provided by the Federal government because it does not allow the children to bring lunches. The section that caught my eye was:

“Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district's food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch.”

Hmm.

The comments section following the story was filled with the usual right-wing rants about “big government” and the “nanny state” telling people what to eat. Instead of reacting, I Googled Chartwells-Thompson and found that they are part of the biggest foodservice conglomerate in the country (Compass Group). They popped up in another story in which healthy produce grown in the gardens tended by Chicago Public School students could not be served in the lunchrooms because of the contract with Chartwells- Thompson. So is this about stopping kids from bringing unhealthy lunches, or is it a food service monopoly issue?

Turns out that the purveyors of school lunches, such as Chartwells-Thompson, are heavy users of government-subsidized foods (what we used to call “government surplus.”) This means that farmers are paid by the government to grow and produce these foods, which are promptly bought by the USDA in order to keep from driving the market prices of these commodities downward. This was originally set up as a way to help the small family farmer stay in business when commodity markets became so institutionalized. But nowadays, these farm subsidies go overwhelmingly to support large agribusiness. So the school lunch businesses buy this cheap food and serve it to kids while pocketing the profits, while the people who produce the food are being paid by the government to produce it. By my reckoning, the taxpayers are paying for these “free” school lunches three times: First, in farm subsidies, second, in “surplus” food discounts to the purveyors, and third, in tax money to pay for preparing and serving the actual lunches. And where does most of this money wind up? In the pockets of business. And what do the kids get? Menus based on whatever food is available and cheap, rather than on nutritional guidelines. Lots of ground beef and cheese. Lots of cholesterol. And (allegedly) a few dozen cases of food poisoning thrown in for good measure.

So how does a reader of the original story get “big government” out of this, and feel entitled to vent rage against the Democrats? Well, I’ll tell you how. By being trained by the WWF. No, not the World Wildlife Fund. The World Wrestling Federation. Now known as the “WWE.” Let’s go back to those 1980’s that spawned Gordon Gekko and Top Gun. Remember Hulk Hogan and Stone Cold Steve Austin? (Actually, I guess they spilled over into the 1990’s as well). But one hallmark of being a watcher of WWF television was that you learned to get really emotionally worked up about rivalries and narratives that were completely phony. Everyone knew that the whole thing was phony, from the issue of who were good guys and who were bad guys to the issue of where Hulk Hogan got those pecs. Everything was phony. Crowds learned to yell and scream while wrestlers hit each other with chairs and threw each other onto folding tables. We all knew it was fake, even the kids. But the kids learned to get all worked up and yell and scream as well. Sometimes we had to tell the kids not to try it at home (“…all you little Hulkamaniacs.”) But mostly the kids were able to hold these two opposing beliefs in mind at the same time: (1) Someone set this up for their own reasons and controls the whole story. (2) In spite of point 1, you have permission to get really worked up about it and scream and yell at anyone who disagrees with you.

Fast forward to 2011. A group of Dodger fans beat a Giants fan into a coma outside the ballpark. Or was it a group of Giants fans who beat a Dodger fan into a coma? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have been trained and conditioned to react to manufactured loyalties and manufactured threats as if they were real loyalties and threats. Our fight or flight instincts, developed when human beings lived in tribes and had to defend their tribe against the one down the road, are ready to kick in and drive us to passionately defend our own position (or the one that we’ve identified with) and to attack anyone who doesn’t take our own position.

David Brooks actually addressed this in his recent book about emotion. He came up with the conclusion that emotional reactions are necessary to keep us from getting perpetually stuck at top dead center and therefore to get anything accomplished. At least that’s what I gather from hearing him talk about his book. I haven’t read it, and I don’t think I want to. Because it sounds like he’s weaving in a strand of the same narrative that allows the Tea Partiers to control our national dialogue. People like what they hear, label themselves as being on board with it, and denounce anyone who doesn’t swallow the same narrative hook, line, and sinker. Emotion rules over reason and pragmatic solutions are swept aside. The best that someone like Obama can do is act as if he’s not engaging in the same game, which renders him completely helpless in the face of the onslaught of demands that we rig the system to favor those who control the narrative.