useful idiot — 1 supermarket and a lowered bar

the term useful idiot has political weight i refuse to lift. so i will lower it instead. i may be a useful idiot to myself, occasionally, on a tuesday, when i convince me that grocery shopping at 11 PM counts as cardio. nobody benefits except the receipt printer. that is the arrangement.

so. the search box, this morning, suggested that useful idiot is what someone, somewhere, is typing while drinking a coffee they did not pay full price for. fine. they will get, instead of a thinkpiece, an inventory of the useful kind of idiot i am, in produce, on a friday at 9:47am, between an inbox i have not refreshed and the rolling sound of a beverage cart in the hallway that does not stop at this floor.

9:47am. the floor’s quiet because most of the team filed downstairs ten minutes ago for a vendor demo on a procurement tool nobody asked for. i was not invited. that is the day’s first piece of useful information.

useful idiot is a phrase, originally from cold-war commentary, that names a person who does damage on someone else’s behalf without realising it. lowered to ordinary life, a useful idiot is a person whose efforts mostly serve themselves, badly, while pretending to serve a larger plan. example: me, in produce, at 11 PM.

USEFUL. TO. NOBODY. INCLUDING. ME.

i am not the right person to write this. that is a credential.

what useful idiot refers to, neutrally and from a distance

before we lower the term: useful idiot, in its native habitat, names a person who advances an agenda they do not understand, while believing they are doing something else — usually a good thing, sometimes a clever thing, occasionally a “i thought we were getting brunch” thing. the phrase belongs, originally, to a hot war of small print, and has since wandered into newspapers and the kind of dinner party i have managed not to be invited to in three years. for the wider case that confident opinions can survive on zero inputs, see the karl pilkington case for a man so thoroughly unbroadened by travel that the show became a public service.

i am refusing the political route, on principle. there are people whose desks are arranged for that. mine is arranged for spreadsheets and crumbs. i am taking the term, with a polite cough, away from the news desk and into produce. it will live there now.

the supermarket case, a useful idiot among the bagged spinach

friday night, 11 PM, last month. i stood in the supermarket with a small green plastic basket, a list written on the back of a receipt for batteries, and a silent agreement with myself that this trip was somehow a wholesome activity. it was not. wholesome activities do not happen under that lighting. that lighting was designed to interrogate fish.

the list said: chicken, rice, two onions, garlic, parsley, lemon, tomatoes, milk. eight things. i bought sixteen. the eight surplus included a small jar of capers because the jar was attractive, a microwaveable rice that i would not need if i bought regular rice (which i also bought, on the next aisle), biscuits with a face on them, a yoga-shaped object now under the couch (possibly evolving alongside the third yoga mat from 2023, its silent older sibling), and a tube of sauce in a flavour i cannot identify, on the grounds that the label looked European.

i thought, while paying, that i was being efficient. i was being the opposite. i was being a useful idiot — useful, specifically, to the supermarket’s quarterly. somebody in a meeting i will never attend looked at a graph, and the graph went up by the price of one yoga-shaped object and one tube of European sauce. i contributed to that graph.

nobody benefits except the receipt printer. mike, at the bar where mike has been working since the year karl pilkington filmed the second batch of episodes, listened to this on a monday and said “11 PM is when supermarkets eat people.” mike said this with the calm of a man who has not filed his taxes since 2019, which is, on its own scale, a different shape of useful idiot.

why parsley can be skipped, applied to the question at hand

the parsley on that list is the unit of analysis. if a recipe calls for parsley, you can skip it. i did not write that. i adopted it. it has, in my private filing, the status of a small constitutional amendment. parsley, on the day it is bought, is not eaten. parsley, on the day after, has gone the colour of a post-it note from 2019. parsley is, in the home-cooking economy, a transaction conducted entirely between you and your guilt.

the parsley pivot is not, by the way, original to me. i borrowed it from a man named stefan, at a dinner i should not have been at in 2019, who poured a wine i could not afford and explained that “the only honest cooks skip the parsley.” stefan said this with the conviction of a man who has, on three separate occasions, asked a waiter to bring him a different fork. i nodded along. i was being useful — to stefan, to his theory, to the dinner party’s polite arithmetic. nobody, including stefan, was being useful to me. that is the stefan effect.

examples of usefulness gone sideways, from a private spreadsheet

since this post is about being useful to nobody including yourself, three short examples, drawn from a spreadsheet i do not let anybody see.

• the seventh microwave. bought at a sale, on a saturday, because the sticker suggested it could “double as an oven.” it cannot. it is a microwave. it is currently dead, on the counter, where it has been since the third week of march. i was useful, briefly, to the appliance store’s quarterly. the apartment now has a small altar to optimism, which beeps on tuesdays for reasons no service technician has been able to explain.
• the tie i own. one tie. navy. bought, in a hurry, for tom’s wedding in 2018, on the assumption that there would be other weddings. there were not. fourteen quarters in the closet. the haberdasher’s daily total was, briefly, served. the tie is now a museum piece in a museum nobody visits.
• the supermarket bulk membership. i live alone. the bulk place charges a yearly fee for the privilege of buying mayonnaise in a vat. i pay it. mike, on hearing this, said “you should split the membership.” i said i didn’t have anyone to split it with. mike said “that’s the membership.”

verdict, the receipt is too long

the broader pattern is the dunning shape. the more useful i feel, in any given grocery aisle, the worse the receipt looks at the till. there is, on this point, an entire body of writing, none of which i have read, in the popular case that confidence and competence often run in inversely-proportional traffic. confidence, on a friday at 11 PM, in a grocery store with overhead lighting, is the most expensive thing in the store. confidence costs more than the parsley.

this is, in spirit, the same question that the mexico episode of karl’s show poses every time karl gets on a bus — except karl has a camera crew documenting the absurdity. i have only a receipt. for the man behind the camera, see karl pilkington’s filmography on the database the rest of us pretend not to scroll late at night.

so here is what i landed on, with eleven minutes left before the bagels finish. the term useful idiot, in its political use, belongs to people whose desks are arranged for that. mine is arranged for the slow accounting of small, fluorescent-lit failures of judgement that all add up, on a friday night, to a receipt longer than the meal it was meant to feed. i am, in that ordinary sense, a useful idiot — to the supermarket, to the appliance store, to the haberdasher, possibly to the company that makes parsley. useful to nobody, in the political sense. nobody is running a campaign through my basket. that is the lower bar, and the lower bar is the verdict.

the bagels are out. somebody has put one of those brown lids on the platter, which is the corporate signal that anyone who didn’t get one is too late. i did not get one. i was, instead, useful to this paragraph.

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