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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Cynthia Gorney and Stephen Harrigan

the breakfast table
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from: Cynthia Gorney

You Can Lead a Kid to Bacon ...

Posted Thursday, July 22, 1999, at 6:21 PM ET

Dear Steve,

You're right, we began somber and became silly, which is a fair representation of my breakfast table--I'm thinking of the morning trajectory from stumbling glumly downstairs to fighting over the comics, except that around my table the only audible dialogue is generally, "You done with those yet?" punctuated by the clank of spoon against cereal bowl. There was a phase a while back when I filled with resolve, for reasons then unclear to myself but transparent to any female who has ever cracked the pages of a McCall's or Family Circle, to cook hot meals at breakfast. I had in mind the sort that appeared in magazines, with the little wisps of steam visible as the plates were lowered to the table. I made muffins, or scrambled eggs with green chiles and cheddar cheese, or crepes rolled around blackberry jam, or whole-wheat pancakes with peanut-butter chips (I know, this sort of fits into the category of manteca en su bolsillo, but they're actually pretty good). There was a lot of bacon, too. Something elemental about bacon: the smell, I think. Also good sound effects. My kids looked startled at first, large plates of steaming food at 7 a.m.--What is going on around here? Is Mom OK? Maybe better not ask. Then there was a Mom's Cafe phase: "Oh, look, it's breakfast at the Mom's Cafe."

Then my daughter got up the nerve to say: Um, this is nice but you know I really like Crispix. My son, who had rattled both of his deeply secular parents a few years earlier by requesting a bar mitzvah (for which, to our astonishment, he studied intently for two years, delivering himself of a whomping cantor-led performance and bar mitzvah speech in which he discussed in serious 13-year-old voice his intense feeling about carrying on a tradition his father's family had let lapse), told me kindly one day that he had stopped eating pork so maybe I could cut back on the bacon. My husband, in the interests of middle-aged guy health, dropped eggs and muffins from his diet. So that was that for the wisps of steam at our breakfast table. The Crispix came back in force; in fact, the last time I was at the supermarket, the checker gazed at my overflowing cart and said: "Lot of cereal eaters in your house, are there?"

I do have one more somber thought, though, because I really am troubled about this, even though I can see no way to let off even a tiny rant without personally contributing to the very problem of which I speak: I do believe the press, and in particular the broadcast press, took leave of its collective senses last weekend when that little plane disappeared--surely not the first time such a thing has happened, but I am afraid that the net result, following day after day of relentless, nonstop, overblown, breathless, self-referential, nearly entirely content-free coverage, has been the transformation of a single publicly shared tragedy into something venomous. I think people are just furious at the coverage. I think fury at the coverage has in some measure replaced what might have been a brief period of honorable, modestly-proportioned mourning for some famous people who died. I think we'll be hearing about this for quite a while, and that the demonstrably low public regard for reporters and commentators will dip still lower in the wake of this past week. I know, we do this all the time, we did it when Diana died, and we will surely do it again--but it seems mysterious to me that in the first year post-Monica, when so many reporters looked back in embarrassment and agreed that events and group-think had sucked us into dreadful vacuous coverage from which we felt unable to extricate ourselves, the same blind terror of losing audience share could have overtaken assignment editors again.

So that is my closing rant. I'm afraid the only journal in our house that for interest factor can be rated anywhere near your Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption is our full-color glossy monthly called Lowrider, which was given to my son--no, not himself a lowrider, his only available vehicle is the denuded Toyota van--as a Christmas present last year. I have actually become quite fascinated by this magazine and was going to dig out the latest issue to report on exactly which babes in bikini tops and pachuco pants were jutting their hips out beside which gleaming, curvaceous, cherried-out 20-ton American car. But it seems I was overcome by feminist bile one morning and tossed it. Pity. I bet Lowrider is a hit in Austin. And is now the time to say I can hardly wait for your impending new novel about the Alamo?

It's been swell, Steve, but do something about that lard in your pocket, OK?

Yr faithful correspondent,
CG

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Cynthia Gorney

You Can Lead a Kid to Bacon ...

Posted Thursday, July 22, 1999, at 6:21 PM ET
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Cynthia Gorney, a reporter for the Washington Post from 1975 to 1991, will join the faculty at U.C. Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism this fall. She is the author of Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars (click here to buy the book). Stephen Harrigan is an occasional columnist for Slate, as well as a screenwriter and novelist. His recent books include Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef (click here to buy the book).
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