It is Saturday and not much news is happening. Many people are lazing around, napping off last night's drinking or meticulously planning tonight's. But some people are probably eating brunch—that unholy marriage of breakfast and lunch. Fuck brunch.That said, I feel compelled to note a few less productive arguments here, specifically Chen's distracting comments about "brunch" being a garbage word ("In fact,"Brunch" might have been the original seed from which sprung a long, sad strain of American portmanteaus that reached its terrible climax with "frenemies") and some impugning of the motives of whole swaths of brunch goers/victims ("Like these people's lives, brunch is simultaneously overstuffed and empty").
Look, I appreciate the passion and yes, the anger, here as much as anyone. But petty charges and blanket accusations are just going to inspire the usual tut-tutting from the brunch cops about "brunch derangement syndrome" and "spittle flecked anti-brunch mobs." Yes, our grievances are just, and the generalizations are unfair. But why give them the satisfaction? Our cause deserves better.
But that bit of friendly advice aside, Chen closes with a tour de force:
There is an excellent dystopian sci-fi novel to be written about a society so overflowing with wealth and so obsessed with consuming it that the only meal anyone ever eats is brunch. Breakfast lunch and dinner: All brunch. They walk around in a constant post-brunch haze until the hero finally realizes the importance of segregating meals and leads a rebel group armed only with bowls of cold cereal and apples.This, my friends, is the kind of lucid, thoughtful writing that really opens people's eyes about brunch. Bravo.
