Outside Counsel

This is a lunch from a lost world, when grown men drank milk and fallout-shelter fare like a scoop of cottage cheese girdled by a pineapple ring (straight out of a can, no doubt) was still on lunch menus. The official White House emblem on the plate stirs unsettling memories of Hitler's dinner service, pilfered from Berchtesgaden by American G.I.'s. Did Nixon dine alone that day? (I imagine him eating alone in a pin-drop silence broken only by the clink of cutlery and the sound of swallowing, a Nixonian version of the aging astronaut eating his last supper in 2001.) Why the White House photographer, Robert Knudsen, captured this melancholy repast on film, we don't know, but in a better America the Resignation Lunch would, by an act of congress, be a fixture on the White House menu—a memento mori in cottage cheese and pineapple, designed to remind all who would be King of America that even presidential power must pass.

This is a lunch from a lost world, when grown men drank milk and fallout-shelter fare like a scoop of cottage cheese girdled by a pineapple ring (straight out of a can, no doubt) was still on lunch menus. The official White House emblem on the plate stirs unsettling memories of Hitler's dinner service, pilfered from Berchtesgaden by American G.I.'s. Did Nixon dine alone that day? (I imagine him eating alone in a pin-drop silence broken only by the clink of cutlery and the sound of swallowing, a Nixonian version of the aging astronaut eating his last supper in 2001.) Why the White House photographer, Robert Knudsen, captured this melancholy repast on film, we don't know, but in a better America the Resignation Lunch would, by an act of congress, be a fixture on the White House menu—a memento mori in cottage cheese and pineapple, designed to remind all who would be King of America that even presidential power must pass.

// posted by Bill @ 8:45 AM