him were, “You are of my flesh but you are not mine own. Fate is your father and you belong to the people, for you shall lead the army of the free.” We know that’s a joke. And yet people scream along. They chant, “Jo-ey, Jo-ey, Jo-ey.” As the announcer continues to rile the crowd, they began to chant: “U-S-A, U-S-A!” The energy on the street changes. We know that Shea isn’t speaking in earnest. And yet . . . his words have power.
Beginning in 2001, a Japanese man named Takeru Kobayashi won the hot dog eating contest for six consecutive years. Kobayashi totally revolutionized the approach to the competition—before him, no one had ever eaten more than twenty-five hot dogs. Kobayashi ate fifty in 2001, more than double what the third-place eater that year managed. His strategies—including breaking each dog in half and dipping the bun in warm water—are now ubiquitous at the contest.
Kobayashi was long beloved as the greatest eater of all time, although he now no longer participates in the contest because he refuses to sign an exclusive contract with Shea’s company. But he competed in the 2007 event, and when the Japanese Kobayashi was beaten by the American Chestnut, Shea shouted into the microphone, “We have our confidence back! The dark days of the past six years are behind us!” And that seemed to give the crowd permission to fall into bigotry. You can hear people shout at Kobayashi as he walks over to congratulate Chestnut. They tell him to go home. They call him Kamikaze and Shanghai Boy. Recalling this in a documentary more than a decade later, Kobayashi wept as he said, “They used to cheer for me.”
When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you’re just kidding. It’s so easy to take refuge in the “just” of just kidding. It’s just a joke. We’re just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruel.
I love humans. We really would eat our way out of sixty cubic feet of popcorn to survive. And I’m grateful to anyone who helps us to see the grotesque absurdity of our situation. But the carnival barkers of the world must be careful which preposterous stories they tell us, because we will believe them.
I give the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest two stars.
CNN
AMERICA’S FIRST twenty-four-hour, nonstop news network was launched by cable magnate Ted Turner on June 1, 1980. The inaugural broadcast began with Turner standing behind a podium speaking to a large crowd outside CNN’s new headquarters in Atlanta.
Turner said, “You’ll notice out in front of me that we’ve raised three flags—one, the state of Georgia; second, the United States flag of course, which represents our country and the way we intend to serve it with the Cable News Network; and over on the other side we have the flag of the United Nations, because we hope that the Cable News Network with its international coverage and greater depth coverage will bring a better understanding of how people from different nations live and work together, so that we can perhaps hopefully bring together in brotherhood and kindness and friendship and peace the people of this nation and this world.”
After Turner spoke, CNN began covering the news—its first stories were about the attempted assassination of a Black civil rights leader in Indiana and a shooting spree in Connecticut. That first hour of CNN looks dated. Its anchors wear broad lapelled suits and sit in a flimsy studio. But it sounds very much like contemporary CNN on a Sunday afternoon. The broadcast careens from breaking news story to breaking news story, from fires to shootings to emergency plane landings. Even in that first hour, you can hear the rhythm of the news, the ceaseless pulse of it. Also, the 1980 cable news sets, like most news sets today, had no windows, for the same reason casinos have no windows.
These days, there’s usually crisp, blue light in the background as the news anchors talk. You don’t know whether it’s morning or night, and it doesn’t matter, because the news beats on. It’s always live—which feels, and maybe is, close to being alive.
Of course, it’s hard to argue that CNN has brought the world together in brotherhood and kindness. There’s something nauseating about Ted Turner’s capitalist idealism, the notion that we can change the world for the better and make billions