Friday, August 19, 2022

Diasporic Dining: The Impossible Whopper

Lawrence O'Donnell (photo: Er-nay)

Usually, you need to go to a prescribed place, a particular restaurant to order a dish that you like, but The Impossible Whopper is everywhere. All you have to do is pull into a Burger King. The phenomenon is like the advent of the cell phone. Land lines were just that. If you called that Rhinelander 4 exchange you were dialing up a place. Cell phones make it very easy for errant spouses to cheat since they have a quantum alibi. You're no longer your coordinates. But let’s deconstruct the nomenclature. “Impossible” and “Whopper” are oxymorons.  “Impossible” is closer to “failure” and “Whopper” to “homerun.” People who go for Impossible Whoppers are generally dreamers who are prone to throw a Hail Mary. Anecdotally, The Impossible Whopper is the food of choice for listeners to Lawrence O’Donnell’s l0 PM show on MSNBC, which they enjoy as they quaff down their meal in a local Burger King parking lot. Great solace is the emotion that’s produced by the combination of the pickle on the popular plant-based substitute and the mixture of certainty and moral authority in O’Donnell’s voice. LO is a walking Kantian categorical imperative spewing out synthetic a priori knowledge that’s as delicious as it’s unverifiable. Wittgenstein's 7th proposition from the Tractatus reads: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Lawrence O’Donnell is not the silent type which may be why his show is called "The Last Word." He's not usually brought up in the same sentence as Wittgenstein. However scientists are continually unearthing new properties of space and time such as the fact that Dark Energy is responsible for the expansion of the universe. When you come down to it, just the fact that you can listen to Lawrence O’Donnell at any place in the 50 states, in an identical eating establishment in which you're able to procure exactly the same food, is a triumph of modernity, a mixture of string theory, quantum mechanics, black holes and wormholes all rolled into one and O'Donnell's apercus are genuine whoppers.

read "Diasporic Dining: Fast Food Inc." by Francis Levy, HuffPost

listen to "The Humpty Dance" by Digital Underground

 

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