What does it tell you about a country when the one ritual we still observe in unison begins at five in the morning and ends when the last 65-inch in aisle seven has been wheeled into a Subaru?
I am asking because I spent Thanksgiving evening at Eliza’s table, where the lamb had been swapped for a brined heritage bird at the insistence of someone’s adult son, and where a man I will describe only as a bipartisan lobbyist — a man who has worked for both parties and considers this his great moral accomplishment — was discreetly toggling between two browser tabs while passing the cranberry. One tab was a Senate procedural memo. The other was a Best Buy cart.
He had already added the television. He was waiting, he explained, for what he called the doorbuster moment. He used the phrase without irony. He used it twice.
Judy, my sister-in-law, who has now spent six weeks at the National Archives wondering whether she still works there, mentioned in passing that the back pay had cleared Wednesday. Six weeks of wages, deposited the day before the deals went live. A coincidence, she said, that several people in her building had described as engineered, although Judy, who is constitutionally incapable of editorializing, immediately apologized for using the word.
The lobbyist nodded approvingly. “Velocity of money,” he said. He said it the way a man says something he believes he has personally invented, which, given the firms he has consulted for, he may.
Eliza, who runs a family foundation and works very hard not to be political at her own table, said “Margaret, please.” She always says this. It is the closest thing she has to grace.
I asked the lobbyist what it said about the country that we shut down the federal government for six weeks, paid the workers on a Wednesday, and then spent a national holiday celebrating the markdowns at Lowe’s. He said he thought it said the system worked. He said this while refreshing the cart.
I will tell you what I notice, because nobody else at that table was going to. Somewhere in the Caribbean the Navy is doing whatever it is the Navy is doing this week, a sentence I am increasingly tired of writing. Somewhere in Albany a man is staffing a transition that half my dinner companions have agreed, in advance, to be appalled by. And somewhere in a Best Buy parking lot in Manassas, three men in folding chairs were waiting under a propane heater for the doors to open at five so they could buy a soundbar that would, by Easter, be cheaper.
This is the part where I am supposed to say something measured. I am not going to. There is a particular kind of civic cowardice that dresses itself up as practicality, and it lives in the gap between the Wednesday deposit and the Friday purchase. It is the small, agreeable shrug of a country that has decided the workers are fine because the television is on sale. It is the lobbyist refreshing the cart while Judy describes a building she is not sure she still has keys to.
The lobbyist got the television. He showed us the confirmation email between the pie and the coffee, holding the phone up over the candles like a man displaying a sonogram. Eliza asked what he was going to do with the old one. He had not thought about it. He examined his cufflink instead.
I asked Judy if she was going shopping in the morning. She said she might pick up a coffee maker. She said the old one had been making a noise since September, and she had been waiting, she said, to know.
We called it the leftover course. We asked for the gravy.