Feast of the Seven Fishes and Eight Abs

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Santa delivered my entire Christmas wish list with the premiere of Jersey Shore on December 3, 2009. The MTV show’s trailer promised an anthropological study into what could have been my life as a “guido,” to use the reappropriated ethnic slur that the cast wore with their gold chains. 

I was a 23-year-old congressional reporter covering tax policy on Capitol Hill, a limestone- and marble-encased world closed off to outsiders who didn’t dress up their hallowed cultural traditions — gym, tan, laundry — in Brooks Brothers suits. “Representative democracy” was starting to set off my bullshit detector that blue collar white people of Italian descent, especially blue collar white people of Italian descent along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, love to say they are born with, baby. 

President Obama was wrapping up his first year of illusory post-racial politics. The Affordable Care Act careened toward a make-or-break party-line vote in the Senate on Christmas Eve.

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