Someday this War is Going to End

The seven words from Lt. Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now have been used and even been abused to comment on the state of gentrification in New york as it pertains to the sales of luxury condos.

My father really liked Robert Duvall's character. Mostly, I think, because of that one short sentence. Kilgore's realization on the beach of the Mekong Delta summed up in a few words what my father had been trying to come to terms with since he boarded a plane and left Vietnam for good in 1971: War was fucked up but it was also kind of awesome... for certain kind of guy.

Kilgore and my father were those guys. They thrived on chaos because it was also freedom. How does anyone make sense out of track homes and EZ Bake ovens after spending years not knowing which breath would be your last?

Tying this profound and brutal truth to the kind of dooshy lifestyle-porn that me and thousands of others, online and in print, create is so ridiculous it hurts my heart's colon. However it is how I felt this morning when I woke up and started thinking about what stories I was going to try to pitch to who and in what order. Suddenly it didn't matter. Suddenly I realized that this wave of food-dork-chef-worship-foie-gras-ramp-sandwich-bullshitfest had to end somewhere, had to end sometime.

Why am I thinking this way? I guess it has to do with a few relatively minor and seemingly unrelated things happening in the last little while:

One: Gael Greene gets canned from NY Magazine


Jesus fucking Christ! Look, I don't even like Gael Greene. I tried to read one of her goofy memoirs where she fucks a bunch of chefs and couldn't even pretend that I was going to make it through the thing. But I mean, shit dude, it's like firing Dan Rather from CBS or, oh wait, that did happen. Anyway, she wasn't even making that much money (word on the street is under $50k) from what can be gleaned from the rumor-mill and she'd worked there since 1968. Which brings me to..

Two: Sarah Vowell publicly eviscerated in the NY Times.

Sure, I know, I'm being a little naive here. People get slaughtered by the Times or the NYRoB all the time. Right. I get it. I just never thought Sarah Vowell would get it. I mean for years I've been secretly whispering to people at parties "um, can I ask you a personal question? Do you actually like Sarah Vowell or do you just pretend to so you can have sex with girls that look like they were exported from 1996?"

I guess I just thought that everyone had agreed to say nothing about Sarah Vowell until after she was dead, you know, like everyone knowing that Liberace was queer as the day was long (including my grandparents who used to sell him dogs) but not really saying anything until 1987.

What does Sarah Vowell have to do with food writing? Nothing at all. But it does mean that in the rapidly contracting world of publishing and journalism (as we used to recognize it) is so fucked up and freaked out that it is eating it's own young. Look, if people start telling the truth now what's next?

Is Alton Brown finally going to freak out and go into an hour and twenty minute monologue about all the ways in which all the people involved in the Kabuki-turd-circus known as the Food Network are without any value, integrity or worth?

Lets be honest: Lying is the sub-prime, leveraged mortgage backed security, credit default swap of the media world. If everyone started telling the truth about how most people are totally full of shit where would it end? I mean, the only person left standing in food would be, I don't know, Paul Bertolli and Harold McGee maybe? Not really that bad of vision of the future in my opinion but still.

Three: My Best Friend, who doesn't give a shit about food, Sends me an email recommendation from the iTunes podcast store about a show about foie gras

This is when I knew it was really over.

How does one see a crash coming? It's easy. Whenever people who wouldn't normally care one way or the other about anything (your parents for instance) are suddenly doing stuff like:

A) Getting an E-Trade account (crash 1999-style)

or

B) Watching Flip-That-House (crash 2007-style)

and now

C) Sending you quasi-esoteric-foodie-bullshit (cultural backlash it-can't-be-long-now-style)

Anyway you slice it, the end draweth nigh for us my twerpy little shit bags. You can't argue with the facts or the signs. I hope we're all capable of becoming some real hard, pipe-hitting food journalists within the next few years because the days of getting floated on a cloud of web 2.0 titties is about to end.

Am I saying that food journalism, if that's what you call food blogging in it's typical form, is going to dry up and blow away? No! Of course not... I think.

I guess it could but more than likely it's just going to contract back to the ghetto from whence it came. Irritating rich people talking bullshit about lame places that serve crap food on nice China to other irritating rich people with a small trickle of really good, classic shit sneaking out the door along with it. Maybe they'll stop giving away book deals to every swinging dick and make the rest of us get back to the hard work of trying to say something real and lasting about the food we eat, how we prepare it and why we eat it. If you need a fucking book to tell you how to make food from a combination of canned goods (A Man, a Can, a Plan, etc.) or need to buy another extreme food, beaver testicle cookbook (here I'm thinking of the Nuge's Kill It and Grill It and on and on) then, well, actually, now that I think of it, those books might come in handy when the revolution (apocalypse, blood-barfing zombie attack, peak oil, whatever.) comes and the only things you can eat are either in cans or found skulking around Central Park and you have to shoot them with a bow and arrow like a painted Montagnard in the service of Col. Kurtz.

Yes. Someday this war is going to end.

I could think of worse things.