On the Alleged Tragedy of Being Unable to Feed Oneself Without a Coupon

I read, this week, that the United States Senate — an institution I am given to understand employs a hundred separate people specifically so that no single one of them has to make a decision alone — could not agree on a farm bill because of something called SNAP. I had to have this explained to me twice, and even then only in the spirit one explains a foreign currency: quaintly, and with the clear expectation that I will never personally need to use it.

It appears that a great many people in this country receive a sort of stipend — modest, I am assured, almost insultingly so — that permits them to purchase food. Not caviar. Not the little quail eggs one has at Cannes with the smoked salmon blini, which, incidentally, I have never once had to *request* — they simply arrive, the way weather arrives, the way Tuesday arrives. No, this stipend appears to cover things like rice, and bread, and I am told "produce," which I take to mean fruit that has not been arranged into a fan shape by somebody named Henri. And the Senate — Republican senators, specifically, and one does admire the specificity, the naming of names, the *ownership* of the impasse — declined to pass an entire agricultural package rather than sort this out. An entire bill. About farms. Blocked. Over the coupon.

One simply cannot get over it. Not the substance — I have no view on the substance, substance is for people who read footnotes — but the *scale*. A hundred grown adults, several of whom I am told have security details and dining rooms named after them, sat in a marble building and could not resolve a disagreement about whether the poors should be allowed slightly more rice, and so nothing happened. Nothing! Not the farm bill, not the resolution, not even, apparently, a decent lunch, because I understand these sessions run long and everyone eats out of a paper bag from the cafeteria, which — well. There it is again. The whole system, top to bottom, structured around people simply *not having* things, and then being surprised when the not-having causes a scene.

Do you know what one does, when one cannot agree with someone about money? One does not hold an entire *legislature* hostage over it. One rings up father.

I want to be extremely clear that I am not unsympathetic. I am, if anything, the most sympathetic person in this entire scenario, because I am the only one who can actually picture a solution. Father solves problems. That is, structurally, his whole function, in the way that a lighthouse's function is to be tall and stand near water. When Sotheby's called about a small discrepancy in the provenance of a Twombly last spring, nobody in our house held a six-week floor debate about it. Father made a call. The discrepancy evaporated, the way discrepancies do, the way a cloud simply isn't there anymore and you don't ask where it went. I do not understand — I have tried, I have really tried, sitting very still with my eyes closed — why the Senate does not simply identify whichever senator is closest to a workable checkbook and have that senator ring *his* father, and have it be done by lunch. Instead we are told this may drag on. Weeks, possibly. Over rice.

The truly baffling part — and I say this with nothing but affection for the poors, who I am sure are doing their best within the very narrow parameters of their situation — is that the entire dispute seems to be about *benefits*, which is to say, about how much of this stipend people are owed to buy the food in the first place, rather than about the food simply being handled the way food is handled in a normal household, which is that it appears. It is in the kitchen. Bruno procures it, or the second Bruno if the first Bruno is at his mother's, and one is never, at any point, required to prove to a form that one is sufficiently in need of a lamb chop. Nobody has ever asked me to fill out paperwork demonstrating my hunger is real. The very idea — that hunger must be *demonstrated*, in triplicate, to a stranger, before rice is released — strikes me as the single most exhausting piece of bureaucratic theater I have encountered since the Aspen house made me sign for a delivery myself because the staff had the flu. I signed it. It took four seconds and I have never fully recovered.

And yet here is Congress, festering over the exact dollar figure of this stipend as though dollar figures were scarce, as though there were a shortage of the *concept* of money rather than — and I cannot stress this enough — a shortage of anyone in that room simply picking up a telephone. It is, I think, the defining flaw of the whole poors' arrangement: they keep waiting for permission. For a bill to pass. For a vote to be counted, and then recounted, and then blocked by the very people meant to be passing it. Whereas in my experience the correct response to being told "no" is to ask a different, richer person, and I have simply never had to go further than that before the "no" became a "yes" became a car being sent.

I don't say this to be cruel. I want that understood, sincerely — one does try, in one's small way, to be helpful, to point out the door that is standing right there, wide open, in every room I have ever stood in. It is not my fault the poors keep electing people to guard a door that, from where I'm sitting, was never locked to begin with. One simply walks through it. One simply asks. And if the senators genuinely cannot find a single father among the hundred of them willing to make the whole unpleasantness disappear before the next farm subsidy is due — well, then I really don't know what to tell you, except that it does sound, from all the way over here, like a very long and very grubby way to spend a summer, arguing about rice, when there are so many more interesting things to be disappointed by.

Two stars. And that's me being generous, you know?

— C.