Outrage and Apathy I

Trey Smith

All my posts today -- with the exception of the ongoing TTC Line by Line series -- will be focused on a superb column, Five Lessons from Chick-fil-A, by David Sirota. In this post, I simply will share his introductory remarks. Each subsequent post will focus on one of his five bullet points.

There are so many reasons to both uncontrollably laugh at and be intensely disgusted by last week’s brouhaha over Chick-fil-A. With droves of American eaters rewarding the company with record sales for its CEO’s public rant against gay marriage, you can let out that same chuckle you release when you watch Coen Brothers characters — you guffaw at the paranoia, the sheer stupidity and the irrational animus of a bewildered herd. You can also feel that intestinal-tract pang of nausea you experience during food poisoning — the feeling that no matter what you look at to try to calm your gut, the image is going to make you simultaneously defecate and puke all over yourself.

This laugh/retch impulse has become an understandable reaction in an country obsessed with the Culture War. But, then, as much as the back-and-forth over Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy’s declaration seems like just a run-of-the-mill skirmish in that war, it’s not. It is a genuinely iconic grotesquerie, and not just because it involves a company that has faced repeated accusations of illegal discrimination. In five distinct ways, the episode sums up so much of what’s wrong with American society today.