My wife’s birthday was Saturday. So we did whatever she wanted. Starting with breakfast at the Cherry Pit Cafe in Deerfield. She placed her traditional order — oatmeal pancakes with blueberries. And I placed mine — spinach, onion and mozzarella omelet, well-done.
We chatting amiably while waiting for our meal. Matthew brought two large blue plastic glasses of water and two drinking straws.
You don’t need a straw to drink a glass of water, unless you’re in a hospital bed. But straws have been in the news, literally a federal issue. On Feb. 25, President Donald Trump issued an executive order, “Ending Procurement and Forced Use of Paper Straws,” which begins: “An irrational campaign against plastic straws has resulted in major cities, States, and businesses banning the use or automatic inclusion of plastic straws with beverages. Plastic straws are often replaced by paper straws, which are nonfunctional …”
You could debate the word “irrational.” Plastic straws foul the environment, and even leach microplastics into your body. In 2019, California banned them in full-service restaurants, unless requested by customers, and other states and cities followed suit. Both the European Union and Canada banned plastic straws in 2021. The next year, Chicago passed its own Single-Use Foodware Ordinance, but in classical City Council style, there were so many loopholes and exceptions — O’Hare and Midway eateries are off the hook, for instance — that critics called it “greenwashing,” aka, a measure that looks environment-friendly but doesn’t do much.
I idly picked up the straw, ran my finger over the paper sheath and felt a telltale bump. This wasn’t just any straw. It was a bendy straw. Flexible straws were cool when I was a child and they’re cool now. I tore off the paper, felt that deeply satisfying scrunch of expanding the little accordion section by bending the straw, popped it into my water and took a long pull.
You could also argue about that “nonfunctional” slur at paper straws. As much as I admire flexible plastic straws, I also have fond memories of paper straws. The kind with red stripes. Yes, they could crush in a lunch bag, or collapse while drinking, and you would have to carefully squeeze them back into shape so your milk could flow. They could get soggy. Sometimes you would try to poke them through the little foil hole into the sealed container of milk — for a while we had these pyramid milk containers you could only drink from with a straw — and the straw would get crushed. But in general, I got through 13 years of public school without feeling lingering ill will toward paper straws.
Not so the president. Somehow, a technology that any 6-year-old can master eluded our nation’s leader, who clearly has had some bad, almost unbelievable, experiences with paper straws.
“These things don’t work,” he said, signing the bill. “I’ve had them many times. On occasions, they break. They explode. If something’s hot, they don’t last very long.”
They explode? And who but a moron drinks a hot beverage through a straw of any kind?
You know what also explodes? Authoritarianism. At first it creeps, extending its power beyond the stated goal — we see that when measures against “criminal illegal aliens” end up snaring outspoken legal residents and, quickly, law-abiding citizens.
Then it blows up, like Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy coming, “gradually, then suddenly.”
The title of the straw order refers to “forced use of paper straws.” But by the time the first section ends, the notion of “forced” is dropped:
“It is therefore the policy of the United States to end the use of paper straws.”
Period.
I’m torn when it comes to this sort of thing. One one hand, every second the president spends inveighing against paper straws, or denouncing Bruce Springsteen, or messing with the Kennedy Center, is time not spent tearing down our government and freedoms.
On the other hand, controlling every aspect of life is a hallmark of authoritarianism. First Mussolini’s Fascist Party banned cats in Rome, blaming the feral packs prowling the Eternal City on “the persistent effort of foreigners.” Then on March 30, 1928, Mussolini ordered all Italians to wear straw hats between April 1 and Oct. 1, dictating the acceptable official styles, conceived by the Unione Industriale Fascista.
Such measures can be seen as trivial. Or practice. On the same day Mussolini’s hat order came down, Catholic youth organizations were also abolished. Authoritarian leaders don’t like competition — from cities deciding what kind of straws their restaurants can use, from religion pointing to actual morality, from courts reminding us there are still laws, from the press holding a mirror to the ongoing carnival of idiocy. From anybody.