After losing her restaurant, Desautel then exiles herself to New York. She throws a drink at Alan Richman, works for David Chang, and eventually feels the tug back to New Orleans. Make no mistake what the implication is here. It is not that she wanted to leave New Orleans; or start over. That happened and still happens with chefs, lawyers, plumbers, teachers, you name it. What Treme implies, with a heavy hand, is that Janette had to go to New York to be a better chef and businesswomen. That a chef in New Orleans just isn't skilled enough to be successful at running a "real" restaurant.
You see, she was just a hayseed. Just a Cajun-Creole girl who gosh darn it could cook well enough for New Orleans before Katrina, but not after. The Richman drink throwing scene was completely undone, by proving his point throughout the rest of Treme: that New Orleans isn't a good town for chefs or food. According to Treme, in order to be legitimized, Desautel needed the blessing of the New York Chef Mafia. She needed to learn about hydrocolloids or cooking with pork fat under the tutelage of the chefs Treme's writers think are important. This is such utter horseshit.
Of course it's horseshit but it's horseshit designed specifically to be pleasing horseshit for its target audience. Treme was never a show for New Orleanians. It was for the wealthy self-styled intellectuals who like to visit New Orleans for their fix of charming dysfunction stories to tell their friends and to purchase a little "cultural authenticity" along the way.
When I was ensnared within the deepening curse of our omnipotent hospitality industry I encountered these people often. I may have even thrown a drink or two at them. The memories are fuzzy now. It has been my observation that they don't care about us or our problems as they actually are. Rather they find it pleasing to believe that, in their self-indulgnet travels, they help to bring enlightenment and civilization to the natives whose rituals they co-opt.
Because if it doesn't cost at least $50, it ain't worth doing
In a recent interview with Bill Moyers, Matt Taibbi and Chrystia Freeland described (with a little sympathy, even) how the deluded American Plutocracy convinces itself that it keeps society afloat.
BILL MOYERS: Do you think they think they're really defending honest capitalism?
MATT TAIBBI: Oh, absolutely. I, you know, the one thing that's consistent in my exposure to the financial services industry is that the people who work within it, and particularly the people you know, at the very, very top, sincerely believe that they have not done anything wrong. And, you know, when you bring up things like the mass sale of fraudulent mortgage backed securities, it's just like you say.
It's always somebody else who made that mistake. You know, "We didn't know at the time that we were selling billions and billions of dollars of junk and we were dumping this on pension funds and foreign trade unions." It was always somebody else who was doing that. And they also have built up this very, very powerful insulating psychological justification for their lifestyles. They've adopted this sort of Randian point of view, where--
BILL MOYERS: Ayn Rand.
MATT TAIBBI: Yeah exactly, you know, they genuinely believe that they are the wealth creators and that they should get every advantage and break whereas everybody else is a parasite and they're living off of them. So when you bring up to them, for instance, how is it that nobody, despite this mass epidemic of fraud that appears to have happened before the 2008 crash, how come nobody of consequence has gone to jail after that?
They always, you know, they always argue against more regulation and more enforcement because they say, "We need room to, we need air to breathe, we need room to create jobs. And this is just counterproductive to put people in jail. It'll cast a pall over society.
CHRYSTIA FREELAND: If I may say so Bill, this very sincere, absolutely, absolutely sincere self-justification, I think, is one of the most dangerous things that's happening because in our society, and I would say this is particularly powerful in America. Really since the Reagan era, there has been this vision of the successful businessperson as really a leader for the whole society. And there has been a view that the businessperson, what he thinks, and, by the way, all of my plutocrats are men.
But, you know, what he thinks about how society should be ordered, we should all listen to because he, after all, is the hero of our time, is the hero of capitalist narrative. And I think it's so important for us to really understand that what is good for an individual business, particularly in this age of very high income inequality and the ways of thinking, the ideas that are no doubt absolutely the right ones for this particular business, may very well not be good for society as a whole.
I have no doubt the Treme audience believes it's doing something truly noble by consuming and internalizing the message of this premium cable TV product. It's a vicious circle of self-justifying wealth that will continue as long as there's still enough hip cache associated with New Orleans among the people who count... and, of course, as long as there are local writers, musicians, politicians, and consultants of various stripes willing to continue supplicating themselves and by extension the rest of us to the false narrative that pleases this audience.
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