Her name is Madeline Carroll. She lives in Arizona and, like all Trump supporters, isn’t a fan of CNN. A few days ago, CNN filmed her eating breakfast at Nana Dee’s Diner, located in a suburb of the suburb of Phoenix. On her wide and white plate, we see a fried egg, which, by all appearances, was prepared exactly to my liking (edges with a rustic crispiness, built whites, a yellow lake). When she applies the edge of her fork to the egg, it wriggles, ruptures, and its yoke spreads across the plate, which also holds a bowl of fruit. She eats like a person who has never doubted the universe and her place in it. And when she chews, we can see what she feels: beams from every conceivable point in her cosmos converging to this satisfaction in her mouth.
But the Arizonan’s masticating moment was not brought to her directly from the universe, but through the changing medium of empire. Carroll is savoring American Empire as her over-represented power as a white voter in a Red State sends it deeper and deeper into the twilight. Of course, I’m here referring to that recent and very informative book, The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World, by British historian Lizzie Collingham. She describes the modes of globally networked food distribution systems that fed the Queen’s subjects and subjugated. For example, sheep raised and slaughtered by ex-convicts in New Zealand were canned (a French innovation), and, by steam-powered ships, sent all the way to money-mad prospectors in British Columbia. A whole century is between that lamb in a metal can and the fried egg on the Arizona diner table. But the eating is just the same. One is tasting their empire.
And her fork. The one she uses to rupture the yolk. There is a history in it, too, and also the knife that’s next to her plate. According to the Swiss sociologist Norbert Elias, the dinner knife is rounded at the end for a good reason (look at the video, look at Carroll’s knife). It is, according Elias (who had to flee the barbarism of Nazi Germany), about removing violence from the table. This made eating civilized, which in medieval times meant one thing: defanging the greatest threat to the king, the warrior class. And the transformation of this class into courtiers participated in the foundation and consolidation of the nation state, which has this as its cornerstone: the monopolization of violence. Elias’ table theory points directly to the theory of the modern nation state presented by the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani in the book The Structure of World History. According to him, this form of social organization originated in 16th century Europe and has three elements: the king (the castle), the merchants (the city), and the peasant (the village); the state, the market, the people; war, capitalism, xenophobia.
The fork and knife were not about hygiene—a concern that only really appears at the end of the 19th century (hospitals did not mean shit until the microbial world was connected with illnesses), but about the promotion of table manners. Elias wrote in Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (On the Civilizing Process), which was published in 1939, the year Europe (which considered itself to be the zenith of civilization) plunged into a war whose scale of barbarism had no match even in the Dark Continent, that manners “percolated down from aristocrats dealing with the court to the elite bourgeoisie dealing with the aristocrats, and from them to the rest of the middle class.” This is his theory of the civilizing process. This Trump voter is eating with a court fork at the Nana Dee’s Diner table.
But when Carroll, who appears to have the kind of access to wealth that’s described as middle class, is asked by CNN if she supported Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, a part of which involves throwing brown children into cages (and Trump’s recent reversal on the policy of separation has not brought the child abuse crisis to an end), Carroll, looking up at the reporter, says: “Quit trying to make us feel teary-eyed for the children. Yes, I love children a great deal, but to me, it’s up to the parents to do things rightfully and legally.” I’m sure she said this with pieces of her fading empire stuck in her teeth.
