Hotdog 7 Hell Let Loose
Roselee Kruppa
The title of this recipe is loaded, and everything about it screams awesomeness. This past week I was experimenting with some hot dog creations. My son and I are the hot dog eaters in the family, and really no one else. Personally, I like a really good all-beef hot dog, and I typically pay for the higher quality hot dogs at the store, and the point of the story is that I was really craving a really good hot dog, but not just any old hot dog. See, this one is different.
To assemble, take your lightly toasted pretzel hot dog bun and spread the pimento cheese on the bottom. Lay the cooked hot dog on top of the cheese to warm that up, then top the hot dog with the warm caramelized onions.
When you first grab a hold of this hot dog, you are first encountered by that wonderful smell of the pretzel roll (I love that smell), and when bitten into, well, all hell breaks loose in terms of flavor. You get that great texture from the roll, then the snap of the hot dog, and wow, the pimento cheese. I was already sold on the pimento cheese that in fact I thought of just making a pimento cheese roll, but then that balance of the caramelized onions. All I can say, this hot dog is really tough to beat. I do not even think I put it down, and I immediately thought of making another one it was that great, but I did not have another pretzel roll. Probably best!
This post will conclude with some compliments and positive examples. A happy ending, if you will. But we\u2019ll build to that from more troubled realms. Items #1 and #2 will be cautionary, and after that the skies will brighten.
\u2014When reporters ask How will this play? they are putting themselves in the place of campaign consultants. What will a decision or statement mean for the midterms? In which districts will it help or hurt?
\u2014But when they ask How will this work? they are putting themselves in the place of citizens\u2014as taxpayers, as employers or employees, as parents of young children or children of old parents, as people affected by war and peace. It\u2019s harder but more important.
How does this difference show up, in practice? Three days ago there was an amazingly stark real-world illustration. This was on the Friday news-roundup section of the PBS Newshour. It featured Jonathan Capehart, a regular in this role, and Matt Lewis, a fill-in for this slot\u2019s regular, David Brooks. Their questioner was the Newshour host Amna Nawaz.1 You can see the whole thing, video and transcript, here.
\u2014Capehart understood the question to be about how this would work: What it would mean for Israel, for people in Gaza, for the US, for strife in the region. He went in detail into longer-term goals for US policy, into cease-fire prospects, and so on. His first words were, \u201Cwith all of these things, we cannot look at them in isolation,\u201D which he used to set up the context.
\u2014Lewis apparently understood the question to be purely about how this would play. His answer was entirely about what the decision would mean for Biden politically: \u201CI think Biden has a problem right now, and it is a political problem. It is axiomatic in politics that if you try to please everybody, you will end up pleasing nobody.\u201D He made clear that he meant \u201Cpleasing nobody\u201D in terms of election-year politics, not in terms of the differing parties to the war-and-peace dispute. He went on for several paragraphs, every bit of it about how this would play for Biden between now and November 5.
Politics, and policy, both matter. But what\u2019s the value of reporters sharing their guesses on how things will play? \u201CThere are people out there who were open to voting for Joe Biden,\u201D Lewis concluded. \u201CAnd I think they're less likely today than they were a week ago.\u201D Fine. But we could hear this from some guy in a bar.
Among Donald Trump\u2019s virtues is that he does not drink. That is useful to remember in considering his current speaking style. On Saturday night Deb and I sat through the nearly two-hour entirety of his rally performance at Wildwood, on the Jersey shore, as televised by Fox. The whole thing is archived here, courtesy of Right Side Broadcasting.
To me this version of Trump sounded genuinely different from the crowd-pleasing showman who rode televised rallies to success (and big audiences for the cable outlets) in 2015 and 2016. Maybe it\u2019s just that his material is now so familiar and tired. Maybe it\u2019s that Trump has nearly exhausted the \u201Cwhat will he say next??\u201D Evel Knievel-style suspense and excitement of his live shows. Maybe it\u2019s that he goes on at such length. Whatever: the result is less \u201Coutrageous\u201D than \u2026 boring.
It could also be that there is something more visibly wrong with him. In his interview last month with Eric Cortellessa of Time, Trump came across as extreme and under-informed, but more or less coherent sentence-by-sentence. In New Jersey two nights ago, he came across as the kind of person you\u2019d move away from in an airport or at a bar. The kind of person you\u2019d assume to be drunk if you didn\u2019t know he teetotaled, or you\u2019d think was in other ways disturbed.
I have not made a single political prediction since dismissing Trump\u2019s chances in 2015. But I find it hard to picture the voter who\u2014if not already a member of the MAGA minority\u2014will get a fresh look at today\u2019s Trump and think: Yeah, I\u2019d like the next few years of news to be all about this! Jerry Brown told me years ago that shrewd politicians know that the public doesn\u2019t always want to hear from them. Less is more. This is not Trump\u2019s approach.
A reader has suggested to me that news outlets would perform a crucial public service by archiving full, raw transcripts of how Trump talks now. I\u2019ve come to agree with writers like McKay Coppins and Susan Glasser who say that exposure to the New Trump is important, to see how different it is.
More than an hour into his talk, Trump said: \u201CYou guys! Not a single person has left.\u201D Photos from that time showed that most of the crowd had long since bailed. (The screenshot below is from a Xitter video by Zac Anderson, showing the thinning crowd.)
He riffed at length about hot dogs. Some parts of the speech included \u201Cpolicy points\u201D and details; these Trump was obviously reading, reluctant-schoolboy style, from a prompter. But whenever a point struck him as interesting he would light up and freewheel into an aside like this one.
The hotdog section was a fair sample of his improvisations. This is my best effort at a cleaned-up transcription. What\u2019s below was all part of the same continuous passage, with nothing cut out:
Hotdogs, let's talk about hotdogs. I just had one actually. I just had one. It was very good. I hope it was. You know it was very good.
Frank Sinatra told me a long time ago, never eat before you perform. I said I'm not performing. I'm a politician. If you can believe it, I hate to be called a politician. I like \u2018I'm a businessman\u2019 much better. But I guess I'm a politician.
Because we did great in 2016. We did much better in 2020 A lot better. We had millions more of votes. So I guess, and this time, and I will say this, this spirit that we have this time blows both of them away. You know why?
Because you still like me. But you saw what the alternative is. The alternative. It's just, the alternative is not a good thing.
But I just had the best hot dog, so I said, Frank, I'm sorry.
Now Pavarotti was a good friend. [Out of the blue,] He didn't have that same. He ate all the time. He didn't care.
But I just had a hot dog and it was very good. So the price of hot dogs is up 22%, chicken\u2019s up 32%. Hamburgers are up 37%. That's why I had the hot dog. It went up the least.
Eggs are up 50%, gasoline\u2019s up 50%. Bacon is up 79% Bacon! That's why I don't have bacon anymore. So expensive. Not one thing is cheaper.
There's not one thing anywhere, there's not one item that's cheaper. Energy is way up. That's what caused the problem.
The whole speech was like this. And I\u2019m not even getting into the parts about Hannibal Lecter. Again, think if you encountered a person like this on the street. Also, remember the front-page coverage Joe Biden got for saying \u201CPresident of Mexico\u201D rather than \u201CPresident of Egypt.\u201D
\u201CHe [Biden] doesn\u2019t know what the hell he is saying. Don't forget, he can't put two sentences together. He can't find the stairs off the stage. Let's see this stage when I'm finished. I got stairs there. I got stairs there. I got a nice ramp there. I got stairs. If it got really dangerous, I could jump off the front. You ever seen him when he's finished? He finishes the speech which usually lasts about a minute and a half. And he always goes like this [looking around] and then he doesn't know where he goes. But you know we have great people. Secret Service, they always run up on the stage and they lead him off the stage. But he wants to let our tax cuts expire. And I don't do that anyway. You know I don't imitate him anymore. Because I called my wife, our great First Lady, and I said: First Lady [he actually said this], we had a big speech. By the way, not as many people as this! This is like big record stuff on television. Even from the haters. They said this may be the biggest rally they've ever seen, a political rally.\u201D
We\u2019ve all heard things like this. In bars. In public parks. In institutional care. We move away from people talking this way. Bill Barr, Mitch McConnell, JD Vance, the GOP as a whole think this person should be back in charge.
This is, frankly, almost exactly the same as the Toronto dog, so consider this an entry for both, but ignore the things I say about New York dogs being hygienically questionable with regards to Toronto.
Hi everyone! It\u2019s been a few days of pop philosophising here, what with all the discussions of what is and isn\u2019t good art, and I wanted to do something a little lighter today. This is only an excerpt from a much, much better version of this that\u2019s for paying subscribers only. If you like what you\u2019re reading here please consider subscribing. It\u2019s cheap, y\u2019all!, and please tell someone about this here newsletter if you like it. Hell, even give em a subscription if you\u2019re so inclined, eh?
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