How a highchair fight at the Golden Corral is a mirror for our souls (which aren’t pretty)
Now that we are living through our late-stage Idiocracy, it is often tempting to laugh at people rather than with them. In my ongoing self-betterment project – a renovation that is running way over-budget and behind schedule with frequent work stoppages – I frequently vow that I will do more to suppress this uncharitable, un-Christian urge. This is just a lie I tell myself, of course. Though it’s one I forgive myself for, since charity, they say, begins at home.
The latest decline-and-fall news that put me off my resolution comes from an unlikely place, or maybe an all-too likely one: a Golden Corral restaurant in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. I’ve never been a fan of Golden Corral or its Endless Buffet™. I’m not a culinary snob, or anything. An establishment doesn’t need Michelin stars for me to grace it with my presence. I just generally don’t care to see my food through a sneeze guard. Or to witness Mama June three knuckles-deep into the sweet corn pudding right before I get a crack at it. Or to be reassured, front and center on the company’s website, of the restaurant’s “sanitation commitment.” (Good hygiene is to be commended, mind you. But some things are supposed to be a given. And I’d rather not be prompted to visualize Gus the line cook washing his hands after dropping the kids off at the pool or blowing a snot rocket near the pot-pie station.)
