Cheap Grace 8 comments

By Kelly Foster

I am an American with a moderate amount of credit card debt who watches cable TV, reads US magazine in the grocery store line, and drinks Starbucks coffee.

These proclivities do not make me cool in the terribly earnest circles I frequent. If I were more cool, I would not use plastic, eat anything conventionally grown, or ever shop at Wal-Mart. I would not eat fast food. I would not shop at Banana Republic. I would not watch TV, not even PBS. I would knit, perhaps. Make more lentils. Clean everything with vinegar. Write my congressmen or senator every day.

However, it depends on how you define cool. Perhaps I embody a much more troubling version of cool. Consider David Foster Wallace’s startling insight about the commercialization of hip ironic detachment: “In the same regard, see that in 1990, flatness, numbness, and cynicism in one’s demeanor are clear ways to transmit the televisual attitude of stand-out-transcendence—flatness and numbness transcend sentimentality, and cynicism announces that one knows the score, was last naïve about something at maybe like age 4.”

But I don’t find myself at home amongst the ranks of the perpetually earnest saviors of the earth nor living some twenty-first century version of Janeane Garofalo’s character in Reality Bites, vintage lunchbox in tow. So I inhabit, like most people these days, I suppose, a middle ground.

I am not unaware that small choices can have large consequences.

I think Wal-Mart is probably a bad thing for America, perhaps an evil thing. I think McDonald’s is probably a bad thing for America, perhaps an evil thing. It’s possible that Ryan’s Steakhouse makes the most mediocre food on the planet. I think corn subsidies have got us in bad shape. I think buying cheap eggs from chickens packed so tightly in mesh cages that they go insane and rub their chests against the wire until they bleed is an irresponsible, possibly immoral thing. I think feedlots are good for no one, and beef fed on antibiotics to counteract the fact that it spends its bleak life entire standing in the sludge of its own excrement is good for no one (also, not all cows in California are happy cows). I think buying local and in season is absolutely essential.

Consumerism in all its forms is a dangerous, headlong, soul-killing thing.

But I know the theme song from Dallas. That was the only part my parents would let me watch. When I was a kid, I dressed in a blue silk nightgown and pretended to sing along with the Mandrell sisters on their specials. The first time I watched Young Frankenstein on TV with my parents was also the first time I ever had an Enchirito from Taco Bell (I still remember those three black olives run along the top so enticingly—mmm). I ate Baskin-Robbins mint-chocolate chip with my granddad twice a week. I ate Krystal hamburgers with my mom. We bought cheap Taiwanese toys at Kmart and Wal-Mart.

From my earliest memories, chain restaurants, mass-produced media, and superstores are inextricably linked in my mind with comfort and nostalgia.

I didn’t notice what a significant role these kinds of places played until after I’d been removed from them for a few years moving around in big cities where stores like that are harder to come by than they are in Anytown, Middle America.

After several months in Boston, I went with some friends to a T.G.I. Friday’s and found myself giddy perusing the homogenous options available to me.

I was trying to decide why it felt so comforting. Was it simply the sameness? I mean, that’s the terrifying thing about chain restaurants, right? Their mom and pop killing, regional cuisine killing sameness? That’s why in my heightened moments of hipster self-righteousness I scoff at chain places and the people who eat at them. And YET every now and again, I love to go there. And it’s not to be ironic and sardonic. I REALLY love to go there.

I go to CVS when my mood needs lifting. I grocery shop when things feel chaotic. I watch Grey’s Anatomy on Hulu when I have trouble sleeping.

I do not live on Walden Pond.

I am not always the ideal me I might like to be, but I am what I am. I am an American with a moderate amount of credit card debt who watches cable TV, reads US magazine in the grocery store line, and drinks Starbucks coffee.

I live in the middle ground, and I’ll take the cheap graces as well as the costly ones. Three black olives, please. Thanks.