Do you remember when it started? Neither does anyone I know, and I have been to four dinner parties since the lights flickered back on at the Department of Agriculture.
The longest government shutdown in American history ended on Thursday — forty-five days, give or take, depending on whether you count the Tuesday when the Senate technically convened to read the prayer and then went home. I have been keeping rough track, mostly because Judy, my sister-in-law at the National Archives, was furloughed for the duration and developed an unsettling new interest in sourdough. By week three she was naming her starters. By week five she was photographing them.
And yet at Eliza’s on Friday, around a table of nine — including a bipartisan lobbyist I will continue not to name, and a former undersecretary of something who has been a former undersecretary of something for going on twelve years — the shutdown came up exactly once, between the salad and a dry remark about Aspen rentals. Someone said, “Well, thank God that’s over.” Someone else said, “Was that still going on?” And then we talked about the brine.
The brine, in case you have not been invited to the right Thanksgiving rehearsals this month, is the new lamb. It is the safe topic. It is the thing about which nine people of varying ideological commitments can hold strong opinions without anyone reaching for their coat. Eliza is brining wet this year. The lobbyist is brining dry. The undersecretary had brought a printed spreadsheet comparing salt-to-sugar ratios across four New York Times recipes since 2009. He had highlighted his favorite in yellow.
I do not begrudge anyone the brine. I begrudge the absence of everything the brine displaced. Eight hundred thousand federal workers went without paychecks for a month and a half. Air traffic controllers were calling in sick because they were driving Uber on weekends. SNAP hit a wall in the second week, and a food bank in Prince George’s County ran out of canned tomatoes by Halloween. None of this came up. The salt-to-sugar ratio came up. Twice.
I asked, mildly — I am told I am never mild, but I was trying — whether anyone at the table actually knew a furloughed worker. The bipartisan lobbyist examined his cufflink. Eliza said, “Margaret, please.” The undersecretary said his cleaning lady’s husband was TSA, and then, after a pause, said he wasn’t sure if TSA had been furloughed or just unpaid, and was there a difference, really? I said there was. He said, “Hm.” And then he asked if anyone wanted to talk about the brine.
This is the part where I am supposed to write that a country which shuts itself down for forty-five days and reopens to a dinner party arguing about salt is not a country at all. I will not write it, because the sentence does not actually scare anyone the way the dinner does. The dinner is the warning. The dinner is what it looks like when an entire professional class has trained itself, over thirty years of practice, to file forty-five days of mass civic harm under “things that happened, briefly, to other people.”
The deal, by the way, was bad. It was the same deal that had been on the table in week two, which was the same deal that had been on the table in week one, with two cosmetic adjustments and a face-saving paragraph about a working group. Nobody got anything. Nobody won. The only people who suffered were the people we had not invited. We will not invite them next time either.
Judy texted me Friday night, while I was in Eliza’s powder room. The Archives had reopened. She was back at her desk Monday. She wanted to know if I’d save her the recipe.
We called it the brine course. We asked for the spreadsheet.