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Maybe it's better to educate all these Americans in diners, rather than just interview them [1]
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Date: 2023-10-31
It’s not at all clear whether the The Washington Post’s decision to dispatch one of their crack reporters to the “Strawn’s Eat Shop Too” diner in Shreveport, Louisiana, to take the proverbial pulse of voters in newly installed House Speaker Mike Johnson’s home district was intended as a piece of intentional irony. We can hope so, but there’s little evidence that the mostly fluffy article Molly Hennessy-Fiske wrote to memorialize her visit there, titled “House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana Hometown Guided by Faith and Family,” incorporates any awareness that she was performing what has become more than a tiresome cliche among this country’s news media, but fairly characterized as simple dereliction of responsibility.
In Hennessy-Fiske’s now-routine exercise of gauzy journalism, we are once again subjected to the homespun narrative that begins and ends with the assumption that people in diners are endowed with real, significant insight, particularly when they wear “gold-cross necklaces” and “flowered blouses,” and particularly when they assure us that they and their neighbors are “rugged individualists who want to make their own decisions.” We are once again left to insinuate that these qualities somehow differentiate them from people who live in downtown Los Angeles, Cleveland, or Philadelphia, for example. As for Mike Johnson, well he’s just a normal guy! Along the way we learn he did all his chores at age 12, once calmed a constituent who was angry at him, and (according to his mother, weirdly present at the Strawn’s diner on that very day) “began leading as a child.”
We are told that “[i]n northwest Louisiana, people navigate their lives by family and faith.” That Johnson’s elevation to the speakership has been met with “joyous surprise” in some Shreveport quarters, but “views are mixed” about whether “his ascension will benefit all residents,” whom, we are reminded, “remain divided, like much of the country, along ideological and racial lines.” Admittedly this is all intriguing stuff. But as Tom Nichols—a writer for The Atlantic who clearly has had more than enough of “diner” wisdom—points out, all of it pales in the incandescent glow cast by these (mostly Republican) diner patrons’ cumulative store of knowledge about our nation’s policy of distributing foreign aid.
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Nichols proceeds to fairly eviscerate not only the inherent blandness of this type of reporting but the apparent conceit that accompanies it. That the vast majority of American voters—in diners or elsewhere—have any real, valid concept or understanding of our nation’s policies on foreign aid, or why foreign aid exists at all, let alone the actual percentage of our nation’s budget that it occupies.
Nichols zeros in on one of Hennessy-Fiske’s subjects, a 45-year-old woman named Celeste Gauthier who now helps to run her family’s diner chain, including the Strawn’s Eat Shop Too in Shreveport.
Gauthier is quoted in Hennessy-Fiske’s article:
“Politics here is personal. People really do look at the funding we’re sending to Israel and Ukraine and say, ‘I can’t afford to go to Kroger,’” Gauthier said as she sat amid the lunchtime crowd, some of whom she said had stopped buying beverages because of the cost. “A lot of these customers know Mike Johnson and think we often get overlooked and maybe we won’t anymore,” she said.
As Nichols notes, it’s difficult to fathom how Gauthier’s expectations of no longer being “overlooked” in her solidly Republican district will be changed in any way by Johnson’s assumption of the speakership. But what truly sets Nichols off is her comment relating aid to Ukraine and Israel to her Kroger budget. As Nichols notes, hers is “a classic expression of how little people understand about the subject.” Not to worry, though, because, as Nichols acknowledges, we’re in diner territory now, where the salt of the earth congregate to share vital information and form consequential opinions.
Nichols believes it’s time for the nation’s “diner” population, wherever they may gather, to get a grip on reality. He writes:
Perspective, of course, is key. And perspective requires a minimum base level of knowledge to begin with. But as Nichols (who lets his exasperation bubble over in his Atlantic piece) reminds us, this isn’t really rocket science:
We pay taxes so that the federal government can do things that no other level of government can achieve, and national security is one of them. Right now, the Russian army—the greatest threat to NATO in Europe—is taking immense losses on a foreign battlefield for a total investment that (as of this moment) is less than one-tenth of the amount we spend on defense in a single year. This is the spending Mike Johnson is so worried about?
And he notes that opinions such as Gauthier’s don’t arise in a vacuum, but are the considered “views” of those whose understanding of “foreign aid” begins and ends with Fox News and other purveyors of right-wing propaganda, who regularly conjure vivid images of American diplomats gleefully handing over immense bags of U.S. taxpayer cash for their grateful foreign recipients to use as they please.
Nichols is understandably fed up with (largely ignorant) “diner wisdom” and the journalistic mentality that tends to accept and exalt it, even as journalists continue to sidestep or ignore the glaring inaccuracies in the assumptions that feed it.
We need to stop asking people in diners about foreign aid. (Populists who demand that we rely on guidance from The People should remember that most Americans think foreign aid should be about 10 percent of the budget—a percentage those voters think would be a reduction but would actually be a massive increase.) Instead, put our national leaders on the spot to explain what they think foreign aid is, where it goes, and what it does, and then call them out, every time, when they spin fantasies about it.
To be fair, Hennessy-Fiske is far from the only journalist who treats the expression of utter ignorance by Americans about foreign aid—in diners or elsewhere—as somehow quaint and newsworthy, even as those Americans’ attitudes ultimately reflect the failure of journalism and the U.S. media to properly inform them in the first place. And it must be particularly galling for Nichols—a vehemently anti-Trump conservative—to have to reconcile himself to a Republican electorate dumbed down so much that they can’t see the inestimable value of thwarting Vladimir Putin’s aims in Ukraine.
Still, Nichols expresses a viewpoint most of us can relate to: With foreign aid such a critical issue at a critical time, it would far more useful for the media in this country to educate those diners rather than writing the same article endlessly.
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