Eating alone in America

There's a beautiful scene between an American FBI agent working on a murder case in Bangkok and the story's narrator, who is the son of a successful Bangkok prostitute and an American service man he never knew.

The scene elaborately describes her eating a pint of ice cream right in front of him. He's so shocked by her rudeness, he is rendered speechless. (He also happens to be a Buddhist adept).

Not only is eating this freezer desert absurdly counter intuitive to his nature - the Thai respond to heat with hot foods, but far more inconceivable is that she is able to eat in front of another human being without offering and sharing. It's a beautiful scene.

Bangkok 8 is generally a fantastic written assessment of Western and Eastern values. Let it be known men in Thailand, despite being stupid, clumsy men like myself, do not go long without physical love - an act this Buddhist nation considers nothing more than "scratching an itch."

There is considerable pagination devoted to running parallels between insatiable Western consumption and it's ills, including the practice of Western adults shelving the actual practice of sex for the idea of sex. I'll get into my thoughts on Western masculinity when I'm feeling more controversial. Back to eating alone...

An acquaintance from Kosovo here in Minneapolis, when asked what he most missed about Europe, his response, not coincidentally I think: "I miss eating with neighbors. Every night someone would invite us over. Every night. Here no one shares."

I can corroborate. As a supplier of many a party and happy hour, you all - generally speaking - are a stingy bunch of human beings. This creates a certain lack of compassion among suppliers like myself - good heartedness turns sour. Then we all get jobs on Madison Avenue cynically making money on your gullibility when you could of bribed all us smart people with a little generosity please. A sad comment on our country, and more importantly you.

From what I understand, it's not the Thai or Europeans who are the exception in eating with their countrymen, it's us. I think it is a pitiful kind of existence that we can't share it on a basic level. I don't know if something was lost with the 'Get your own bag' Doritos campaign - maybe it was never there. Greed likely grew out of the (annoying as hell, completely dated mythology - god, how I hate Western American expansionist opensky, spread out industrialization, expansionist mythology) frontier days of super scrounging.

This doesn't mean There Will Be Blood wasn't a fantastic movie. It means I harbor serious antipathy for the main characters.

Whatever the reason, I find it a sad reminder that among the super abundance of the States, there's a poverty in our minds and imaginations on so low a level. It's pathetically juvenile for what is supposed to be an adult society. And this poverty manifests itself in the pettiness of our foreign policy, our Bushes and Hillarys.

Praise be to Obama: He appears to be the rare adult leader in a country of inexplicably successful children, many age 55 or more.

I find this lack of sharing lonely. We are one of the few places in the world where you will find truly lonely and isolated people in major population centers. It simply does not happen elsewhere. Canada doesn't count - and they're probably less lonely anyway. At least they found a way to share health care.

My guess is it's another melting pot hangover: Most countries are based on a shared ethnicity, implying a shared fate - what we call racism here in America - allowing a kind of participatory genealogy among the population. I think with all the possibility, prosperity and potential, America has sacrificed this type of human self-knowledge.

Eating alone, along with driving alone is a daily ritual exercise in self-alienation. What a waste of time and life. Now consider Americans eat 30% of their meals in the car. When do we stop paying to have our lives stolen from us?