Welcome to Angus Take House – a weekly column in which I will be pitting two of the wildest takes the world's great thinkers have rustled up against each other. This is your one-stop shop for the meatiest verdicts and saltiest angles on the world's happenings. Go and grab a napkin – these juicy hot takes are fresh from the griddle.TAKE #1:
What's the story? Okay, time somebody said it. Why do millennials HATE mayonnaise?! Reasonable Take: …………………do they? Mayo Crazy, Aioli Mad: Yo millennials: what's wrong with a little egg in your condiment y'all?
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The last few weeks have seen a regular procession of bad takes inspired by the same depressing topics: the free speech debate, Labour's anti-semitism row, Brexit. Which is why it's nice that, this week, a slice of madness has come in completely disconnected from geopolitics, political infighting and government failure. Lads: why are millennials hellbent on destroying mayonnaise?This week, the Philadelphia Magazine ran an op-ed by Mayo-Ultra Sandy Hingston, espousing her theory that 25 to 35-year-olds HATE mayonnaise. Oddly, she doesn't offer any numbers to back her claim up – in fact, the only study quoted suggests millennials are actually buying a lot of mayonnaise. Rather, she refers to a hunch that mayonnaise's whiteness makes it utterly unappealing to a generation who want to reject their boring white heritage. A hunch based on the fact that people have stopped eating potato salad at family barbecues. Genuinely. That's what the article's about.As she puts it, "The inexorable rise of identity condiments has led to hard times for the most American of foodstuffs." (Business Insider have since crunched the numbers and found that while sales have dipped a little, there's nothing to suggest mayonnaise is "dead".)Anyway, here's the best paragraph in it:
"MY SON JAKE, who's 25, eats mayo. He’s a practical young man who works in computers and adores macaroni salad. He's a good son. I also have a daughter. She was a women's and gender studies major in college. Naturally, she loathes mayonnaise. And she's not alone. Ask the young people you know their opinion of mayo, and you'll be shocked by the depths of their emotion. Oh, there's the occasional outlier, like Jake. But for the most part, today's youth would sooner get their news from an actual paper newspaper than ingest mayonnaise."
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Sandy loves Jake. Good honest Jake. A man of method and machine. A man of mayonnaise. A man who adores nothing more than gorging on a bowl of mom's macaroni salad while he replaces the hard-drive in an old Dell laptop, the whirr of the computer fan wafting the scent of emulsified egg yolks into every corner of his tiny dark bedroom. Her daughter, on the other hand, who remains nameless throughout the piece? Well, let's just say she wouldn't know a decent blob of Hellmann's best if it landed on her head!Truly, the joy in this take is how completely baseless but wholeheartedly committed it is. After a potted-history of mayo's place in American food culture, Hingston concludes that woke millennials are far more interested in kefir, ajvar and chimichurri, or vegan alternatives. The "you'll never guess what millennials have killed now" format is well established at this stage – last year saw a generation blamed for the death of marmalade, marriage and motorcycles – but this one feels like a finest hour of sorts, a perfect storm of identity politics and arbitrary analysis of foodstuffs. And I say all this as a millennial who, yes, loves mayonnaise – but when the takes are this spicy, can you blame me?TAKE #2:
What's the story? An Australian senator this week made a speech calling for immigration restrictions based on race, invoking the phrase "final solution" during it. Reasonable Take: That sinking feeling when you realise you no longer find this sort of shit surprising. It's Bob Katter, Bitches: Solid Gold.
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Remember Bob Katter? The Australian MP who dismissed the gay marriage debate as distracting from the real issues, like crocodiles eating people in North Queensland? I do. I think about him always. I wake up at two-hour intervals every night in a cold sweat mumbling about sexual proclivities. Well, he's back.This week, Katter held a press conference where he defended an Australian senator called Fraser Anning, following a speech Anning delivered which called for a return to the White Australia Policy, which restricted non-European immigrants from 1901 until the 1960s.The senator in question belongs to Bob Katter's Australian Party, so naturally he was under pressure to respond to the dangerous notions suggested in the speech. Which he did, describing it as a "magnificent speech" and "solid gold". On Anning's use of the phrase "final solution", Katter defended him, saying that while he's a really smart guy, he hasn't read all the history books. "He wouldn't know what any of this means," he chuckled with a signature smile (that you sense will probably turn into spitting anger at any second).Things took a slightly surreal turn, however, when a reporter pointed out that Katter's grandfather was Lebanese, and he was sent into a tailspin. "No he's not, he's Australian, and I resent strongly you describing him as Lebanese. That is a racist comment." It's a well-established trick of the far-right to respond to accusations of racism by labelling the accuser racist for drawing those differences out in the first place. But Bob, mate, please. That you consider the term "Lebanese" a racial slur says more about you than the poor journalist you just pivoted your stetson towards.Katter was then asked bluntly if his party was racist, a question to which he would only respond that they were Australians. When a reporter challenged him on this he erupted again, "Yes it is an answer to your question, and if it's not, I feel sorry for you." Which is where things start to sour. As funny as it is watching the fruity-voiced old git flare up over someone calling his Lebanese grandad Lebanese, there's a real and inescapable darkness in this video. At no point does Katter deny being racist. At no point does he distant himself or his party from white supremacy. He barely even dodges the insinuation, howling at one point, "Get out of this country, you’re not wanted here" – supposedly towards extremists, but the language is broad enough to do the trick.None of this will be news to Australians, who have been aware of Katter’s wacky brand of bigotry for a long time, but for everyone else who knows him from "that funny video", you'll be wishing he'd stuck to the crocodiles.PRIME CUT: Hold the mayo!@a_n_g_u_s
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