Lunch Recipe

I’ve nothing against politicians you understand. They’re useful on the whole. We vote them in to do a job and it must be very frustrating when they get voted out soon after. But I do feel that if we heard as little as possible about their activities between one election and the next, life would be hugely improved. A page or so every few months should be enough: perhaps an annual report might do. Bills passed. Wars fought. Assassinations. Who’s in bed with whom. The usual thing. What I can’t understand is why anyone would invite a politician to lunch, or want to discuss politics on such an occasion.

I had thought I was completely alone in this, but Joseph Epstein—probably America’s deepest thinker since Mark Twain—convinces me that at least one other man feels the same way. He doesn’t say much mind you, but when he does, he expresses himself with unmistakable severity. Not just politics, but the very name of a politician is incompatible with good conversation. Plainly, here is a man who has suffered many noonday ordeals. Thinking aloud in the Winter 2005 issue of The American Interest, and setting out his own lunchtime ideas, he writes as follows:

My own prescription for the perfect lunch would call for three people in any male-female combination, one of whom I already know (for familiarity), the other hitherto a stranger to me (to lend a note of the unpredictable).

The name of no politician would be mentioned. At least two excellent jokes previously unknown to two of the three people at the table would be told. Everyone would be a good listener; there would be no competitive edge to the conversation, no retelling of old anecdotes. The possibility would hover over the meal that one of us will say something that could alter the way everyone views the world.

For background, the restaurant would supply a clientele there solely for the vittles and not the status or any other non-gastronomic motive. Everyone would depart with a feeling of having been well fed and entertained, with lots more still to be said at a future lunch. “Let’s not let too much time pass before we do this again”, one of us would say, and genuinely mean it.

June 2006