CSotD: Of macaroni and morons
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Notice in today's Blondie that, in this carpool of four white folks ticking off their favorite part of the Thanksgiving meal, not one of them said, "macaroni and cheese."
I'm highlighting the venerable old strip not because today's installment cracked me up but because it segues neatly into an infuriating example of rampant online stupidity.
In case you've missed the brouhaha, there was an interview last week on the 700 Club in which cohost Kristi Watts, who grew up in suburban Chicago, interviewed Condoleezza Rice, an Alabaman who is currently out promoting her new book. Watts asked Rice about her favorite part of the Thanksgiving meal, and Rice named macaroni and cheese, Watts agreed and they both laughed about it.
After watching the taped segment, Robertson — a bright enough man to have noticed something that the Northerner and the Southerner had in common besides their sex — asked Watts if macaroni and cheese at Thanksgiving was "a black thing" and Watts said it was, adding that it's also a favorite at Christmas.
And the universe exploded.
I'm 20 years younger than, I suspect a little hipper than, and no more or less white than Pat Robertson and I'd never heard of serving mac and cheese as a side dish at all, much less reserving it for special occasions, until I bought a copy of "The Black Family Reunion Cookbook," which was published by the National Council of Negro Women, and contains both favorite recipes and comments from African-American contributors around the country.
In that book, there are three recipes for macaroni and cheese, all in the chapter called "Vegetables and Side Dishes." That was enough of a surprise, since mac and cheese was always a main dish in my experience. But a comment in the margin put it in a whole other perspective:
"While I was growing up, we only had macaroni and cheese on special occasions. … For holidays, my sisters and I return to Milwaukee to visit our parents … for a festive meal of greens, stringbeans, turkey and stuffing, and, my favorite, macaroni and cheese."
Which explains why, in the interview, Condoleezza Rice added that she eats it "only once, once a year."
In other words, serving macaroni and cheese as a special side dish at Thanksgiving is, indeed, "a black thing."
Now the blogosphere has exploded with screaming, laughing outrage at Robertson's perfectly reasonable question.
If you Google "robertson macaroni cheese" you get 3.8 million hits, and, despite most entries quoting the interview as (apparently) cribbed from HuffPost, and several posting the video, only a very, very few of the comments are from people who read (or watched) and understood what Watts and Rice said, and what Robertson asked.
It is as if someone from another country, told that American kids leave a glass of milk out for Santa, said, "I'd never heard of that!" and then was attacked by people for having never heard of milk.
Pat Robertson has said some pretty stupid, even reprehensible, things over the years, and I'm certainly no fan, but a perusal of the comments following this edition of the 700 Club shows that he's not the most ignorant person in the world nor is he the only fool who walks amongst us.
I don't know which is more appalling: The sheer number of potential voters who are so stupid that they can't understand what they see or read, or that even the alleged "good guys" have descended to this level of automatically attacking their opponents over nothing.
Thank god de Tocqueville isn't alive to see this.
Here's the video. If you've figured out how to scroll down this far, I'm betting you're bright enough to follow the conversation therein:
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