Earlier on tipping: Tired Of Transportation in the Back Of A Hack

When Lenin, soon followed by Trotsky and Stalin, coined the phrase "Who, whom?" a hundred years ago, he lit such a candle as may never be put out.

Our present-day Cultural Revolution—perhaps all such upheavals in all times and places—is flagrant who-whomery. My VDARE colleague Steve Sailer has been telling us this for years. Steve actually declares his preferred pronouns to be "who" and "whom."

The who-whom nature of our Cultural Revolution would probably be more widely recognized than it is if our educational system had not degenerated in recent decades. No-one under the age of forty who was raised in Britain or the U.S.A. can distinguish between the nominative and accusative cases (like "who" and "whom") of nouns and pronouns. Heaven forfend our children should be subjected to the white-supremacist indignities of English grammar!

These melancholy—and, yes, I'll allow—somewhat geezerish thoughts came to mind while I was reading my New York Post the other day. The actual article I was reading was about tipping. That's "tipping" as in "gratuities"; the extra few dollars you add to a restaurant or other bill in acknowledgment of good service.

The writer here is veteran culture critic Steve Cuozzo, writing in the Post.He's mainly writing about the decline in New York City restaurant service. He doesn't pull his punches.

It's infuriating when we’re forced or urged to gift “hard-working” service workers when the service sometimes stinks.

Make that stinks, blows and sucks. In my long career of writing about the New York City dining scene, I’ve never seen so many waiters, “food runners” and other floor functionaries who are either untrained, stoned or both as I have in the past year.

Nor “managers” who, rather than actually manage anything, pace back-and-forth like scared wildebeests and occasionally stop by to ask if everything’s “delicious.”

 Diners are being forced to tip more — but service has never been worse , by Steve Cuozzo, NYPost, October 25, 2023

Diners are being forced to tip more — but service has never been worse https://t.co/xJ1I8SgSjE pic.twitter.com/1nbuzw0Z1v

— New York Post (@nypost) October 25, 2023

Go get 'em, Steve! I bet you know the difference between nominative and accusative, right?

The heart of Steve's complaint, though, is compulsory tipping. Instead of leaving it up to the diner to decide what gratuity, if any, to add when paying our bill, we now see either mandatory tips added to the total or "suggested tips" urged upon us, usually either 20 or 25 percent.

The tipping rule I learned as a young adult, and which I still cleave to when not coerced otherwise, is fifteen percent for standard service, modified down or up for less-than or better-than standard.

(To be honest, and to simplify the arithmetic, I just divide the bottom line by seven for a standard tip. That works out to a tad more than fourteen percent. Yes, I'm cheap; so sue me.)

Where is the who-whom in all this? Well, Steve Cuozzo, after venting on the issue for several paragraphs, tells us this:

Most infuriating is the attitude of James Mallios, the owner of Amali on 60th Street and Calissa in Water Mill, which are now adding 18 percent to all checks.

“When [customers] act upset, it’s really about loss of the power dynamic,” Mallios told The Post. “They want to be able to determine a person’s wage, and this is the only industry where you can do that.”

But eaters don’t determine a person’s wage, the restaurant does! Mallios could pay his servers more and simply charge more for his food. Instead he bullies customers with an automatic tip whether it’s deserved or not.

Did you catch that? "Loss of the power dynamic": that phrase is right out of the Critical Theory concocted by the Frankfurt School and other mid-20th-century malcontents. Oppressors—in this case restaurant customers—are oppressing oppressed people—i.e. the wait staff.

Critical Theory has now escaped from the philosophers to infect the general population, in this case a midwit restaurant proprietor. Phrases like "loss of the power dynamic" are no longer scholarly theorizing, they are the common currency of ordinary citizens, or at any rate of college graduates in undemanding subjects. They are midwit metaphysics.

I doubt James Mallios could tell you which is which of nominative and accusative, but I'm sure he can discourse at length on who is the "who" and who is the "whom" in every aspect of our … what is it called? … oh, right: "power dynamic."