Last week, in Part CX, there was a use of song parody to explore the relationship between Xi Jinping and Joe Biden (though hopefully, the comparison of Joe Biden to Frank Booth in “Blue Velvet” will not do to Pabst Blue Ribbon what Dylan Mulvaney did for Bud Light). This week, there will be one more thing to give thanks for in that we will step away from song parody briefly in order to explore a particular idiom frequently used, particularly by the left. Given the relationship of the words to the preparation and consumption of food, it seems appropriate to ruminate about this as we give thanks for the bounties with which we are blessed.
I was listening on my commute to the satellite rfadio version of “Fox & Friends” when Lawrence Jones had each a democrat and republican economics expert debating “Bidenomics”. The leftist was complaining that since unemployment was low, inflation was not as high as it was at its peak, only the messaging on Biden’s policy was wrong. When his counterpart pointed out the high price of consumer goods and negative wage growth, the democrat gave the Stalinist reply “If you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to break some eggs”.
There are so many reasons to despise this saying (and many of those who choose to utter it) that I will not be able to cover them all here. I am also not the first to do so, as even a leftist publication such as Slate called for a moratorium on the expression a decade ago. Though hardly an important reason, that it brings one to the point where some people feel the need to spell the egg dish as an omelette instead of an omelet without any good reason to do so (many of those same people use the affected defence instead of defense, and colour instead of color).
Another trivial reason is that the expression is unnecessarily exclusionary. Almost every egg dish requires the breaking of eggs*, be they scrambled, poached, fried, Eggs Benedict, etc. , and even the hard boiling of an egg requires the breaking and removal of its shell in order to properly consume it. To single out an omelet as the only egg dish requiring egg shell breakage is to award that method of preparation unearned privilege.
Of course, logic and pedantry aside, a more substantial reason to dislike the expression is who uses it and the context in which they use it. As was noted previously, it has been credited to Stalin and his administration in 1932, though he did not originate the aphorism. Mike Vuolo, who authored the Slate article referenced above, claims it was actually quoted as “Why wail over broken eggs when we are trying to make an omelette” from Stalin’s communist party henchman Lazar Kaganovitch in a 1932 Time magazine article. Stalin’s international socialist/ communist predecessor Lenin was also thought to have expressed similar sentiments regarding the bloodshed in the Russian revolution that led to the birth of the unholy Soviet Union that the reds brought forth.
Research indicates the first time it was known to have been used in the context of dismissing a large volume of deaths was in the late 18th century, during the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror that followed. Though Robespierre has also reportedly downplayed the murderous fervor that characterized his revolt in similar terms, the royalist counter revolutionary Francois de Charette is listed as having responded to questions of his own bloodletting with “On ne saurait faire d’omelette sans casser des œufs”. That the origin can be traced to France may help explain how omelette has not completely faded from English language usage, given the eccentricities of French language. Whether one believes or not that the callous disregard of human suffering is also endemic to the French culture likely depends on how one reacts to the expression “they offend those canons of decency and fairness which express the notions of justice of English-speaking peoples even toward those charged with the most heinous offenses”.**
As one travels farther east across Europe, there seems to be an even greater propensity to exercise and display the sentiments expressed in the utterance. While some have attributed Hermann Goering as having used this quotation, the sourcing was less than credible. One reason to challenge this is not that dicker Hermann would not be partial to omelets; indeed, given his propensity for the good life and excess, had the drug-addicted Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe actually made an utterance of this type, it would more likely translate to If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs, get some sausage, bread, a good breakfast wine, schnapps and whatever opioid the good doctors can fix up for me. While the national socialists, like their international socialist counterparts, had a fondness for employing their euphemisms to dress up their brutality, they were quite clear about their eugenic goals and destroying their enemies, and (prior to the Nuremberg tribunals anyway) were more explicit than any cover given to them by a food preparation analogy.
Rather, it is in communist dictatorships and with those who emulate them that one is most likely to find casualty counts redecorated as broken eggshells. Unlike the national socialists who proclaimed If you want to have a master race, you have to eliminate the inferiors, those more inclined to the Marxist-Leninist (or even Maoist school) expect you to thank them, even if you’re one of the broken eggs, because through your destruction you enabled the omelet that the Party is going to consume.
Had the interview with Time Magazine in 1932 been more accurate, what the Stalin administration would have said would have sounded more like If you want to have a centralized five year agriculture plan, you must be willing to starve to death several million Ukrainians. Chairman Mao would have said If you want to have A Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution, you have to be willing to starve millions of your own people, have children turn in their parents for lack of party loyalty and butcher those who oppose you.
Just as accurately, when a Biden campaign surrogate makes the asinine ovine remark, what he really means is If you want to have Bidenomics, you should be prepared for massive increases in inflation and consumer goods while real wages go down, so that we can indulge our party base’s socialist instincts at the expense of real people.
Those who like omelets got a taste of that earlier this year with the price of eggs. No one is ever likely to call Joe Biden a good egg, but there seems to be great agreement that he is cracked.
*This includes the pinhole method, which is still a break.
** This phrase was used in the 1940s by Justice Felix Frankfurter in a US Supreme Court decision in a concurring opinion in Malinski v. New York and again in a majority opinion in Rochin v. California the following decade. Some thought his choice of words betrayed a certain ethnocentric bigotry, while others (including Frankfurter, apparently) sought to compare and contrast the rights of individuals under legal systems where the foundations of the Magna Carta and English common law were enshrined, as opposed to other systems such as Napoleonic Code, sharia, etc.
#Parody #Ridicule #Alinsky
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