On the Monday evening following the Paris attacks, somewhere midway through the can of sardines and glass of Malbec that I was calling a meal on the heels of a weekend-long news binge -- my sons came home.
While indexing the legacy of my snacking smeared on the sweatpants I'd been living in since Friday, the children, being goodhearted, did their best to mask fear and revulsion when they inquired on dinner, which, normally by this hour, was either wafting its proximity from the stove or at least well on its delivery route.
I stood, dusting crumbs off my lap, and sailed into a lecture on The Virtue of Canned Sardines as Superfood (amino acids! brain-building! low mercury!) to my 9- and 11-year-old audience, before recognizing the speech patterns of a traumatized me: the acute self that rushes in after breakups or professional blows (or terrorist attacks that alter the zeitgeist over night,) to stage compensatory poise.
My oldest son suggests we grab a bite around the corner.
"Mama, you might want to fix your hair first."
Unlike the eternally-coiffed CNN anchors reporting 24-hours from harrowing raid scenes on the streets of France, my ponytail did not hold up so well on the couch.
I turn off the news, clean myself up, and venture back into the outside world, hungry brood in tow and alive to the unbearable fragility of life.
When we arrived at our local joint, we were not greeted at the front of the house with the usual crayons and kisses, but with a glacial glare, leveled from the new manager, whose clipped gate broadcast her aspirational propriety.
She scans our party of three -- eyes darting from me to my sons, their kinky-hair framed faces offering two browner neotonous versions of my own, ringing on either side of me and confessing our revision of the American Family Cannon, the latter of which was normally welcome exotica in this mostly progressive, if not predominantly white and well-heeled neighborhood we called home on Chicago's North Shore.
She then eyefucks us before signalling to a table crammed in the back corner by the bathroom in the nearly empty restaurant.
I point to the wealth of more desirable empty four-tops, to which she responds are simply "not available," on this Monday pre-dinner hour in a sleepy residential neighborhood.
I search her eyes for decorous regret or at least wit, find not a stitch of either, at which point I take my sons' hands and leave in a huff -- feeling hurt, angry and vowing red-in-the-face that we'd get our revenge on Yelp.
I spend the rest of the evening plotting my online attack from over a hot stove, grudgingly preparing the most convenient contents of my cabinets -- a box of linguini and jarred artichoke hearts.
This banal little tale of restaurant spurn, although bourgeois and hardly tragic, offers an important psychological clue into what drives and proliferates a global jihad recruiting movement that pulls its thousands of disaffected youth from France, Belgium and the Western world at large.
When Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the unfortunately coined "Mastermind" behind the Paris attacks (whose more fitting moniker might be The Mediocre Unemployed Thug Turned ISIS Executive,) filmed a recruiting video, he used food to lure other marginalized youth to follow him to Syria and join his death cult, which, (although entailed the task of waging armed jihad against oneself and other Muslims and the world at large) did come with the breakfast buffet they'd been left out of at home.
"While living in Europe, I never ate food like I have eaten here," Abaaoud said, ducking behind sandbags while addressing his prospective brethren to a soundtrack of gunfire.
His pitch extrapolates on the motif of young Muslims absent at the feast.
"I have entered into villas and palaces that, praise be to God, have, through the will of God, been provided for us here... Are you satisfied with this life, with this life of humiliation?"
Only violent jihad, he insisted, could restore their honor and deliver them a place at the table.
And deliver they do.
In a recent interview with The New Yorker, an underground Syrian journalist reports that food, along with sex, is principal bait used to retain young foreign IS recruits: "When you are on the street you see them everywhere...They love Nutella and they've got cans of Red Bull. Chocolates! Cheesecake! People are poor and see these expensive things! But ISIS wants to keep these Western recruits happy."
Considering the heightened psycho-symbolic realm, beginning with the raw milk rudiment in the mother's body and ending as Instagram restaurant porn, heaped-upon plates of well-lit sumptuousness that suggest diet more as bling, than fuel; it's no accident that ISIS chooses food establishments to stage its terror, whether the Kosher market in January's Charlie Hebdo attacks or the Paris cafes and restaurants few weeks back
In a way, these represent the softest of the soft targets.
Eating sustains a unique contradiction, in that it can confer either or both the most entrenched expression of our root identity and /or the most decorated display of a reinvented lifestyle -- the latter not simply exhibiting our financial means, but also our social and cultural capital, and most importantly, our allegiance to the mores that attend these choices.
In France, the above is elevated to near-religion in what is called "laicite," which could be understood as the outward secular act of being French -- food and fashion being the most visible players in this theater.
Elaine Sciolino, former Times Paris Bureau Chief and terrorist investigative correspondent, recently told NPR that the laicete ideal, as much as the colonial legacy and forever occupations, particularly in a time of high unemployment and a resurgence of a xenophobic right in France, is a chief variable fueling the culture war that drives second and third generations of outcast French Muslim youth into the arms of terror organizations.
Amidst growing contempt for "foreigners," the kebab eateries, or the headscarves or the hanging of laundry outside, are convenient targets for European politicians vowing to defend tradition.
But what we could call "food-nativism" is hardly new to Europe. In 2010, the Tuscan city of Lucca made headlines when its municipal government announced a ban on kebab shops opening inside the city walls. The motion passed with a large majority.
Even a Cambodian restaurant, such as that targeted in the November 13 attacks, is absorbed by the laicete imperative so long as it adheres to the outward style, service and tradition of dining out in Paris.
I have no interest in peddling a sympathetic portrait of terrorists, the most depraved and abhorrent of enemies.
What's more, France is not America, although we are hardly the post-racial, post-class multicultural Xanadu we like to think we are. Still, we've done a much better job integrating Muslim Americans, thanks largely to what we have learned from African Americans, who are still teaching these lessons with their lives, such as that of murdered teenager Laquan McDonald.
But that has changed since the Paris attacks, with anti-Muslim hate crimes targeting mosques and religiously-attired women, now, according to Washington-based Council on American Islamic Relations, at the highest since 9/11, thanks to public figures such as Donald Trump and Ben Carson stoking Islamaphobia.
Even more dangerous is that this trash talk of rabid dogs and Muslim registries has been formalized by the mounting number of misinformed governors, representatives, and senators demanding America shut its door in the face of the millions of Syrian refugees, half of whom are children, risking their lives to flee the hell of terror and torture in their homelands.
"Dangerous" given the sheer impossibility of winning the war against terror without both the enlistment of Sunni forces abroad on the battlefield, as well as the cooperation of Muslims at home supporting intelligence efforts, and reforming jihadist hermeneutics in mosques.
Islamic people comprise the lion's share of the so-called Islamic State's casualties. This mean-spiritedness coming mainly from the GOP plays perfectly into Daesh's Holy War with the West narrative, without which ISIS idealogues' cannot survive, let alone expand.
When we cast Muslims as Enemy, we corroborate the terrorists' apocalyptic fantasy, which requires "Rome" (Western powers) to behave like a devil nation, such as one that leaves hungry Muslim children to starve on its doorstep while it makes food porn.
Given the quagmire, old-fashioned hospitality, which includes not just food and clothing, but professional and educational resources that encourage a viable pathway to naturalization, may be among our most formidable civic weapons in the counter terrorism arsenal.
Consider the alternatives:
1) To win a ground war, you need Sunni forces on board and that won't happen as long as Assad, a monstrous despot, stays in power. Which means you need Russia to stop backing Assad. But Russia has long vested economic interests in its ties with Assad's regime. And Putin is an uncompromising megalomaniac.
2) Airstrikes are sloppy (oops there goes a Doctors Without Borders Hospital), ineffective, and given this last sky fiasco between Turkey and Russia, could very well start World War III.
3) The "They have to be right once and we have to be right 100% of the time" homeland security rhetoric is both true, and a foolish and unsustainable conceit. No one, even the best intelligence operatives can be right 100% of the time.
4) Even if we were inhuman and could be right 100 percent of the time, we do not have anywhere near the resources needed for triage to follow every threat on every watch list, (25 officials required for every one gangster teetering on radicalization.) Salah Abdesalam lived with his brother, Mohamed, one of the Paris terrorists, and had no idea his own brother, whom he considered a close friend, had joined Isis or was on the verge of carrying out the deadliest attack on French soil since World War II.
5) Still, if we did have hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions more translators, forensics, psychologists and security officials following pre-crime leads, there would remain the intractable obstacles / absurdities such as: Interception-proof encrypted communication, soda can bombs that bring down planes, our own prison camps unwittingly serving as Jihad universities and terror incubators, a looming threat of nuclear proliferation out of Pakistan or North Korea or satellite wars in outter bleeping space...
How about we stop "moving forward" with impoverishing and unwinnable guerrilla wars.
How about we slow our roll and consider the phenomenon for what it is: young
"outsiders" who are are so hungry for belonging, that even an abhorrent mission which requires they betray their own families, their own people and commit suicide, figures a better option than the life they lead as social outcasts in blighted communities. And that this task does not require mastermindship or sophisticated coordination. Weapons are easily obtainable and shooting up a club or a restaurant does not exact of its perpetrators prodigious cleverness.
It does, however, demand a willingness to die for the cause.
The eye-fucking I got at my neighborhood watering hole last week ruined my mood for one night.
But if you have an Arab face and an address in a distressed suburb such as St. Denis or Molenbeek, it could ruin your mood permanently, reinforcing a drumbeat of shame and rage at every turn -- have you searching, even in the most deplorable corners, for your place at the table.
On the other hand, Western recruits using their language skills and knowledge of the region operating within the ISIS leadership rise quickly in the ranks. What's more, their notoriety reaches home, where the once-invisible nobody is now seen by the world, regarded as a "legitimate" threat and "highly sophisticated" actor, even "mastermind."
Not a bad gig for a broke small-time criminal who couldn't be seated at a respectable table at a local restaurant or cafe...
What is certain is somewhere on The World Wide Web or perhaps just across the Turkish border, the un-belonged will find their feast.
God forbid they find it in the allure of a jihadist mission glittering with community and purpose not to mention a wife and delicious food.
We now know that beyond airport security histrionics, homeland safety has to be a collective effort.
While reporting suspicious backpacks and kids donning dusters to school is critical, it's not enough.
There needs to be a public commitment to supplementing the external vigilance with an internal vigilance.
When the science of pre-crime is increasingly frustrated by the unpredictable and seemingly unpreventable acts of lone wolves and elusive cells, emotional warmth is not just the stuff of sweet postmodern fairytales, but when plied collectively, could be rendered an effective violence prevention tool.
I'm not advocating that an unmitigated employment of compassion will take down ISIS and stop terrorism. America already has that in excess. In the days following the Sandy Hook massacre, Newtown was flooded with so much charity, warehouses full of unused plush toys and millions of dollars pouring in to this already wealthy community, that officials actually requested the public redirect their gifts elsewhere.
Meanwhile, kids in Syria (not to mention the South Side of Chicago) were dying in droves and going to bed hungry.
It's not that the American people lack charity, it's that we have not learned to control the faculty -- to encase its gushing tissue inside the disciplined space of moral logic, where virtue does not require we bear likeness to the faces and customs of those we seat at our restaurants, indeed around our tables.
The Civil Rights movement changed America from lunch counters.
The simple bread and butter of good manners -- (such as a a welcoming vote cast for the terrorized lives of refugees,) and an extra table setting for that quiet Syrian kid who was one warm plate of linguini and jarred artichokes away from jihad.
Kindness may be among our most viable counter-terrorism strategies yet.