On selectively enforced taboos

Fine, I will write about the chicken shaming

As death follows life: first there was Soup Discourse, and now there is Sandwich Discourse. 

If you missed it, here's the gist: Adam Rubenstein, formerly of the New York Times, wrote an article for The Atlantic about the goings-on at the Gray Lady circa 2020 (Rubenstein was one of the casualties of the now-infamous meltdown over an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton, which is rightly seen as a sort of microcosm for the across-the-board madness in media at the time.) His essay opened with an anecdote from his first days at the NYT office, in which an ice-breaker question about his favorite sandwich took an unexpectedly fraught turn:

Russ & Daughters’ Super Heebster came to mind, but I figured mentioning a $19 sandwich wasn’t a great way to win new friends. So I blurted out, “The spicy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-A,” and considered the ice broken.

The HR representative leading the orientation chided me: “We don’t do that here. They hate gay people.” People started snapping their fingers in acclamation. I hadn’t been thinking about the fact that Chick-fil-A was transgressive in liberal circles for its chairman’s opposition to gay marriage. “Not the politics, the chicken,” I quickly said, but it was too late. I sat down, ashamed.

So: Some journalists insisted this story was fake and condemned the Atlantic for failing to fact check it, then other journalists stepped forward to confirm that Rubenstein had told them the story at the time (sidenote: this is what is called contemporaneous corroboration and was a key practice by journalists when it came to assessing the credibility of old sexual assault allegations during #MeToo, which is kind of funny), and then Jesse Singal and Megan McArdle (who, full disclosure, are friends of mine) announced that they'd independently verified additional facts and considered the matter settled. For a more thorough summary you can read Jesse's post, but the tl;dr is the chicken-shaming is real, and it's spectacular. 

Personally, I never found the sandwich story that interesting precisely because it did seem so believable. I'm old enough to remember people in my peer group icing each other out over John Roberts's confirmation to the Supreme Court circa 2004, and it was pretty obvious that this same brand of political conformism had since crystallized into official policy at various institutions including the NYT.

But this is also why it was so fascinating to watch the takes on this evolve in real time: once it became pretty clear that yes, the chicken-shaming was real, he’s a liar because this would never happen immediately transformed into of course this would happen and only a liar would pretend to be surprised by it. One guy even took the extraordinary step of claiming that Rubenstein not only knew he would be chicken-shamed, but that he had orchestrated the whole thing on purpose. This was the longest of long games, a five-dimensional chess match which begins with getting yourself reprimanded by HR on your first day of work, and ends… um. Well, listen, the details aren't important, do you want in on this investment opportunity or not?

Anyway, the idea that a young editor would go to the trouble of getting hired by the most prestigious newspaper in the country only to immediately, intentionally put his career at risk by provoking this sort of conflict during an HR training is hilariously insane. But what I'm intrigued by is the less-conspiratorial notion that Chik-Fil-A was such an obvious taboo that Rubenstein could have, or should have, known not to mention it. I think there's something to this theory, but it's not its proponents think it is. I do not think Rubenstein, when he professed his love for hate chicken, knew he was putting blood in the water.

But I do think he may have correctly intuited the presence of the sharks. 

There's this scene in Titanic where Jack Dawson, an impoverished artist played by Leonardo DiCaprio at the height of his powers, is invited to dine on the first class deck — ostensibly as a thank-you for saving the life of heiress Rose Bukater, but what the invitation actually represents is an attempt to briefly elevate Jack out of his lowly station for the express purpose of putting him back into it, good and hard. That Jack will eventually fuck up at this dinner is a foregone conclusion: he'll wear the wrong jacket, or he'll say the wrong thing, or (horrors!) he'll eat a piece of fruit with his fish fork. And when he does, they'll humiliate him so badly that he never tries to co-mingle with the fancy people again.

Here, Jack gets lucky: he has an ally at the table who ensures that things work out alright for him on the using-the-right-fork front, if not in general (his class conflicts with the snobs of Titanic are only, shall we say, the tip of the iceberg? Hahahahaa okay no I'm sorry please come back I promise not to make anymore iceberg jokes.) But when he shows up to this dinner, he knows that the people around him are on tenterhooks waiting for him to make a mistake so that they can rub his face in it — in a way which, and this is crucial, they would never do if he was actually upper class. If Rose's terrible rich-guy fiancé used the wrong fork at dinner, you know what would happen? Nothing! Not only would people not care, they wouldn't even notice. 

Which brings me back to the sandwich, and the shaming. Because unlike the vast majority of NYT employees, Adam Rubenstein had previously worked at conservative media outlets — which meant that, at the time of the chicken-shaming incident, he was one of the few people at the paper who could be readily identified as not sharing the politics of the progressive folks around him. Everyone in the room that day would have been aware of this, and there's little doubt that Rubenstein was aware of it, too. And when he made his fatal error, and said his favorite sandwich was Chik-Fil-A, remember the response?

“We don’t do that here.”

I am obsessed, obsessed, with "We don't do that here." What does this actually mean? What, exactly, is the that which we don't do? Does the New York Times have an official policy of policing its employees' expressed taste in chicken? If you walked into the building with a Chik-Fil-A sandwich, would security wrest it from your hands? 

And now, I'm going to float my own little conspiracy theory: I think the chiding Rubenstein received had nothing to do with company policy and everything to do with sending a message to the outsider in the room. And not only do I think Rubenstein had no idea when he mentioned Chik-Fil-A that he had chosen the Wrong Sandwich, I think that if it had been anyone else answering this question, there would have been no such thing as a Wrong Sandwich.