New political platform saves ailing country

Here’s an idea: vote only for someone who has worked in a restaurant.

One of my favorite things about restaurants is their simultaneous concentration on the universal and the particular. Think for a moment about a worldview that encompasses oil pipelines through the Siberian taiga at one end, and a grilled cheese sandwich at the other, and understands the relationship between them.

This schizoid perspective is a necessity when you have your doors open to the world, as most restaurants do. Anyone can come into your dining room, and each brings a complete, unique personal history that includes the circumstances which led him to your table. Restaurateurs spend a great deal of time examining these particularities to try to abstract general truths from them, in much the same way that a fly fisherman will generalize patterns from the behavior of individual fish: you are both looking for the most efficient way to bait the hook.

It applies well beyond the dining room, though. The price of oil affects the price of corn, which affects the price of the cheese in that sandwich. The rhetoric of candidates affects attitudes towards immigrants, which affects enforcement, which is likely to raise the stock values of vending machine companies once our kitchen help vanishes.

This, I think, is why I am looking for someone running on the Universal Restaurant Experience platform. Too many people in power look at the world as something that they stride across like Caesar, Alexander or (more often) Attila, changing the grand sweep of history with a wave of their mighty hands. Too many of the rest of us don’t look beyond our own little piece of the world until that grand sweep swoops on us. And restaurants tend to offer a pretty fair sample of the swept.

In through the back door come the people trying to make a better life. Some come in with a master’s degree in French literature, no health insurance and crippling student loans; some have just finished a walk across the Sonoran desert and are looking for abundant water and a regular check. Some come with a passion for the business, some use the business to support their passions.

And in through the front walk those propelled by gastronomic rather than economic necessity. Whether they come—and how often—can depend on things as whimsical as the weather, the curtains in the front window, the state of the local job market, or which way they’re driving down the street. Once the winds of the world have blown them inside, you have to make them want to come back. Now the focus is on things the size of a French fry.

So first and foremost, I am not voting for anyone who has never worked in a restaurant. I want them to have been yelled at by supervisors for not controlling their hair. I want them to have apologized to a dishwasher for making his job harder. I want them to have mopped a floor. I want them to have been patient with a completely unreasonable customer. And most of all, I want them to have heard the stories of their coworkers.

There is more to the URE platform, however; and this might require ratifying an amendment: Elective office is hereby deemed to be a day job. Three nights a week, you’re working in a restaurant.

Now, try to picture immigration policy formed by someone working side-by-side with an “illegal” who has risked his life to get $10 an hour to send home to his kids. Imagine employer health-care mandates being made by someone who will lose her night job when those mandates put her restaurant out of business. I really think it’s an idea with some promise—policymakers will get to live the results of their policies, and to hear them evaluated in clear, unambiguous prose. And perhaps they will learn from our own approach to the universal and the particular: we too want to make the whole world happy, but we can only do it one meal at a time.