Hypocrisy: It’s not just my temperature that’s normal

I sat down in a restaurant last night for only the second time since establishments were allowed to open again and was instantly annoyed with myself for agreeing to tag along for this meal.

I started thinking about the “return to normal” and “open up the economy” drive that seems so prevalent. The only thing normal about the arrival and seating was my temperature which a diminutive and friendly maître d’ scanned with a thermometer that was under-reading by half a degree and who invited me to scan something with my phone which seamlessly captured my details. Nobody had touched me but an Orwellian magic ensured that I was asymptomatic and anyone who might be interested could find out my name and two ways of contacting me.

Then we all took off our masks and the normality kicked in.

The first normal thing I did was order a 60 rand bottle of beer which I have to report was so delicious that I had another one soon after. Then our waiter Trevor, dapper in a jet black mask, arrived with the first course, a deconstructed samoosa with a salmon whip for dipping and a warmed roti with a fruity chutney for wrapping.

This set the tone for the food – exotic meats and vegetables, shredded and rearranged out of their usual forms and combined in dainty mouthfuls that allowed us switch continents and cultures from one mouthful to the next.

All quite normal.

I imagined my four companions, all women, as Romans in togas, eating grapes from Gaul and pearls in aspic from Egypt.

I half listened to a conversation about car guards and different approaches to them and an image of the gaunt face of the skinny boy man in the dirty and outsized lumo jacket who had ineffectually guided me into the parking bay, succeeding only in activating the parking assist on the car I’m about to pay the last installment on, replaced my Asterisk and Obelisk inspired imaginings of my companions.

My discomfort built as the courses wore on and I started to think about how much denial was needed to participate in this normal and how the presence of the virus was necessitating even stronger barriers to block awareness of the normal absurdities. The desperation in the eyes of the homeless on the pavement outside the restaurant seems stronger than ever, their bodies coat hanger frames for NGO blankets and a glaring contrast with the pureed mango (it’s late winter) and the three thousand rand dinner bill.

So far so normal.

The conversation, if it could be called that, was in effect a monologue conducted by one of my fellow diners and covered her four star performance review at work, a complaint about a male superior at work who was clearly “embedded in the patriarchy”, a story about a doomed love affair decorated with ironic contrivances meant to show self-awareness but which served only to reinforce everyone else’s role as audience and, in what for me was a personal highlight of the evening, the statement “I find men completely superfluous”.

This last was delivered directly to me as the only man at the table while leaning forward and making eye contact for the first and only time.

I allowed myself to wonder about the politics that might be provoked if we switched the genders in this scenario and had a domineering man decreed that women were irrelevant directly at the only woman at a table of 5 but dismissed this idea as it invoked a sense of victimization and offense that I didn’t feel.

Besides, it’s women’s month.

But the way in which this utterance faded away without comment or ire into the white noise of the restaurant seemed to me to be part of the bizarre that we call normal. It appears possible in one breath to bemoan one’s powerlessness in the face of an institutionalized system of oppression called the patriarchy, in the next to congratulate oneself on the deftness with which one outmaneuvers this system and with the next to declare slightly less than half the world’s population superfluous in a piece of communication so violent that it can’t be shoe-horned into the frame of micro-aggressions that the patriarchy, unreconstructed racists and other members of the oppressive structures employ.

I considered telling her that she should write for women24 but reminded myself that this was a context of hypocrisy and that all of the food we were putting into our mouths was spiced with it and most of the words that were coming out of them were too.

So I did something normal and ordered myself a 40 rand cup of decaf cappuccino and continued my meandering thoughts about normality, violence and hypocrisy.

I noticed that one of the chefs who plated our food allowed his mask to slip below his chin and was leaning over the food as he ensured that the scallops of butterfish were precisely arranged in the same teardrop shape that the mousse had been in the previous course. As Trevor placed my coffee at my elbow I quietly asked him to remind the chef that he must wear his mask while working.

Talk about bare-faced hypocrisy.

The restaurant staff were wearing a uniform of beige shirts, black trousers or skirts and black masks.

Not one of the diners was wearing a mask, not while eating nor speaking.

We were all getting back to normal.

We were safe from coronavirus infection by virtue of their masks. The money that changed hands at the conclusion of the meal, in addition to stimulating the economy and providing jobs and all of those good things that we are told will help us heal from the current (and past) traumas, allowed us to abrogate the cost of our denial to these waiters and cooks. This cost is denominated in the currency of exposure to contagion – our return to a normality of delicacies and expensive alcohol adds to their burden. It always has.

All very normal.

I drove away from the dinner feeling drained and frustrated. I wondered if it reveals a profound lack of imagination that we long for a normal that had so much wrong with it.

The meal that we ate, with it’s out-of-season ingredients and epidemiological challenges, is laughable in it’s expense. A complement of 11 staff focussed hours of sustained effort on the production of 4 small portions of exotic food for a room of well-heeled urbanites while emaciated street people stood as token guards for our expensive cars.

The conversation at our royal table was laced with left leaning political sensibilities about how the design of the city should be guided by the principle of “well being” for the citizenry, a polemic that was interrupted only by the need to send a plate of calamari back to the kitchen because of a food allergy.

Enough for now. I’ll end by reaffirming my commitment to at least attempt to exercise more consciousness in my choices.