Anti-Bourdain
Why I hate Anthony Bourdain and his stupid food philosophy
Anthony Bourdain. The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski never knew of him, I’d guess, but he understood his type well. Bourdain was an oversocialised leftist. A man who, to avoid a deep sense of guilt and worthlessness, overidentifies with the system and presents conformity with its values as a kind of rebellion. That might sound complicated, but it’s really not.
“Generally speaking,” Kaczynski writes, “the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society… for a long time… Leftists, especially those of oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming… that society is not living up to these principles.”
Everything Bourdain sold as edgy and punk, the mark of a free thinker and a free spirit—travelling the world, drinking a pint at 4pm in an empty bar, eating an oyster, having that extra slice of French toast, mass immigration as a way of brightening up our pale, stale, male countries—was indistinguishable from the spirit of our age.
In many respects, he reminds me of Henry Rollins, an oversocialised Gen Xer who also sells conformist rebellion to the masses. Rollins was once a tough-guy, a “hardcore” Orange County punk who rhapsodised on the harsh discipline of the barbell and the weight room. Then he started doing “spoken-word” tours. Although he still does that thousand-yard-stare thing and crosses his tattooed arms like he’s about to cave your head in, Rollins now, in his mid-60s, looks like a middle-aged lesbian— with the politics to match. In truth, though, nothing has changed about Henry Rollins. He was always a spiritual lesbian. But the music was loud and aggressive enough, and perhaps we all were innocent enough, not to notice.
