John Singer Sargent Goes to War

From Madame X to Mustard Gas

John Singer Sargent made his fortune painting people who possessed titles, country houses, substantial bank accounts, and enough wall space to hang a portrait the size of a garage door.  If you were an Anglo-American aristocrat and wanted your descendants to believe that you had better posture, finer clothes, and more character than you actually possessed, Sargent was your man.

He painted Madame X, the Wyndham sisters, the daughters of Edward Darley Boit, and a considerable portion of the English-speaking upper crust.  He could make silk shimmer, jewelry sparkle, and could make an otherwise ordinary duke look as though he had been entrusted with the future of Western civilization.  Sometimes all this required was a good suit, dramatic lighting, and a very large canvas.

Yet late in his career, this painter of wealth and refinement produced one of the most haunting images of the First World War.  Instead of duchesses in satin, he painted British soldiers in muddy uniforms.  Instead of confident faces, he showed eyes covered with bandages.  Instead of portraying people who owned half of Yorkshire, he painted men who could not see well enough to walk without placing a hand on the shoulder of the man ahead of them.

The painting was Gassed, and it remains one of the most powerful pictures of modern war ever made.

Sargent was American, at least technically.  He had been born in Florence, in 1856, to American parents, and he grew up wandering around Europe.  Sargent trained in Paris and eventually settled in London.  He spoke several languages and lived the sort of international existence that makes filling out the nationality box on government forms needlessly complicated.  By the beginning of the twentieth century, he was probably the most successful society portraitist in the English-speaking world.

Around 1907, however, he tried to escape the portrait business.  Painting the affluent had made him wealthy, but it had also required him to spend decades listening politely while rich people explained how they wished to be painted.  He increasingly preferred landscapes, watercolors, and his enormous mural projects for the Boston Public Library and the Museum of Fine Arts.  He never entirely abandoned portraiture, but he tried to replace lengthy oil commissions with quicker charcoal drawings.  Even a genius eventually discovers the advantages of getting the customer out of the studio before lunch. 

The First World War made his retreat into pleasant watercolor landscapes rather difficult.

The conflict struck Sargent’s family directly.  His niece Rose-Marie Ormond had married the French art historian Robert André-Michel, who was killed while serving in the French Army in 1914.  Rose-Marie then worked as a nurse caring for blinded soldiers.  On Good Friday, March 29, 1918, she attended services at the Church of Saint-Gervais in Paris.  A shell fired by the German Paris Gun struck the church, collapsing part of the roof and killing her, along with scores of other worshippers.

Thus, by 1918, the war was not merely something Sargent read about in the newspaper.  It had reached into his own family, as the war had reached into nearly every family in Europe.

That May, the British War Memorials Committee, working under the Ministry of Information, asked Sargent to produce a monumental painting for a proposed Hall of Remembrance.  The government envisioned a grand national collection filled with enormous works commemorating the war.  It was an ambitious project (which is another way of saying that a government committee had conceived something expensive without being entirely certain where it would go or how it would be paid for).

The proposed painting was to be about twenty feet wide and show British and American troops cooperating in the war.  Sargent was a logical choice.  He was an American who had lived for decades in Britain, and he was already famous on both sides of the Atlantic.  Prime Minister David Lloyd George personally urged him to accept, telling him that he would be performing “a work of great and lasting service to the nation.”

This was a little more persuasive than the usual request to paint somebody’s wife beside a decorative column, so Sargent agreed.

In July 1918, at the age of sixty-two, he crossed to France with Henry Tonks, a painter, physician, and former surgeon.  They spent time with the Guards Division near Arras and later visited American forces near Ypres.  Sargent began looking for his great scene of Anglo-American cooperation.

Unfortunately, modern warfare refused to pose for him.

Traditional battle paintings required massed soldiers, charging cavalry, fluttering flags, heroic commanders, and preferably someone pointing dramatically toward the enemy.  The Western Front provided concealed machine guns, scattered artillery positions, men hiding in holes, and long stretches of apparently empty landscape.  The closer one approached the fighting, the fewer people one could actually see.  Anyone who stood around in a picturesque group was likely to attract artillery fire, which generally discourages picturesque posing.

Sargent complained that the Ministry wanted an epic, but the front would not supply the necessary crowds.  British and American troops were not conveniently assembling together on hilltops so that a visiting artist could arrange them into a twenty-foot composition.  General Pershing also resisted placing American soldiers under permanent British command, apparently without considering how much this inconvenienced Sargent.

The painter nevertheless produced a remarkable group of watercolors and sketches: ruined streets, damaged buildings, soldiers bathing, troops resting, crashed aircraft, and the devastated landscape around Arras.  What he still lacked was the single great subject that could support a canvas of the enormous size demanded by the committee.

He found it on August 21, 1918.

Sargent and Tonks learned that large numbers of gas casualties were arriving at a corps dressing station at Le Bac-du-Sud, on the road between Arras and Doullens.  When they reached the station, they saw hundreds of British soldiers suffering from mustard-gas exposure.  The men arrived in small processions, their eyes covered with lint and bandages.  Because they could not see, each placed a hand on the shoulder of the man ahead while an orderly led them toward treatment.

They sat or collapsed on the grass while still more casualties arrived.

It was a beautiful evening.  The sun was setting.

The combination was almost unbearable: golden light, green grass, exhausted men, and a weapon designed to burn the eyes, skin, and lungs.  Sargent began sketching immediately. 

Mustard gas had first appeared on the Western Front in 1917.  Despite the name, it had nothing to do with mustard, hot dogs, or anything else likely to improve a picnic.  It was a persistent chemical agent that could remain on the ground, clothing, and equipment.  Symptoms might not appear immediately.  Then came blistered skin, damaged lungs, vomiting, and temporary or permanent blindness.  It did not have to kill a man to remove him from battle.  It could also contaminate the soldiers who carried him and overwhelm the medical system responsible for treating him.

The scene at Le Bac-du-Sud gave Sargent his subject.  The committee allowed him to abandon the original plan for a cheerful Anglo-American tableau, which was fortunate because nothing says bureaucratic desperation quite like trying to turn an international command dispute into decorative art.

Back in his Fulham studio, Sargent spent the winter of 1918–1919 transforming his sketches into Gassed.  The finished canvas measures a little over seven and a half feet high and twenty feet wide.  It is not so much a painting as a section of wall with an opinion.

Across its center, a procession of nearly life-size soldiers moves from left to right along a duckboard path.  Their eyes are bandaged.  Each man reaches for the shoulder or equipment of the soldier ahead.  One raises his foot d awkwardly, unable to see where the board lies beneath him.  Orderlies guide the procession while other casualties sit, sprawl, or retch on the ground.

The arrangement resembles a classical frieze or a religious procession.  It also recalls Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Parable of the Blind, although Sargent’s soldiers are not foolish men tumbling into a ditch.  They are capable men rendered helpless by an invisible weapon.  Their dependence upon one another is both practical and symbolic.  Let go of the man ahead, and you are lost.

Then, in the background, Sargent painted a football match.

Apparently, the British Army could stage a football game within sight of the Apocalypse, provided someone produced a ball.

The game is not a joke, however.  It is one of the picture’s most disturbing details.  In the foreground, blinded men stumble toward medical treatment.  In the distance, other soldiers continue playing.  War does not stop and arrange itself into a single emotion.  Agony, boredom, recreation, death, paperwork, tea, and football can all occur within the same field of vision.

For decades, viewers also interpreted the painting’s yellow-green cast as Sargent’s deliberate attempt to suggest poison hanging in the air.  That was a reasonable interpretation, but it turned out to be partly wrong.  During a major restoration completed in 2023, conservators removed thick, yellowed varnish applied during the 1970s.  Beneath it they discovered a brighter palette of pinks, mauves, and greens.  The poisonous haze owed rather more to old varnish than to Sargent.  The 1970s had managed to make the First World War even browner than it already was.  

Sargent completed Gassed in March 1919.  It appeared at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition and was voted the picture of the year.  Winston Churchill praised its “brilliant genius and painful significance.” Other viewers considered it too heroic, too sentimental, or too patriotic.  Virginia Woolf, who was not easily impressed by large patriotic gestures (or possibly tended to be unimpressed by anything that attracted an enthusiastic crowd), disliked it.

The Hall of Remembrance for which the painting had been commissioned was never built.  The project disappeared into the familiar postwar mixture of financial trouble, changed plans, and administrative rearrangement.  This may have been the first time—but it was certainly not the last—that a government commissioned the contents before deciding whether it could afford the building.

The painting eventually was placed in the Imperial War Museum, where it became one of the museum’s best-known works.

Sargent later painted General Officers of World War I, completed in 1922, which presents twenty-two senior British and Imperial commanders standing together in solemn formality.  They look rather like the faculty of a very expensive military college, assembling for a meeting at which everyone believes he should be department chairman.

The contrast with Gassed could hardly be greater.  One painting gives us famous men, polished boots, decorations, rank, and authority.  The other gives us anonymous soldiers who cannot see.  One shows those who directed the war.  The other shows what the war did to the men who fought it.

Yet Gassed is not a simple attack upon generals, governments, or war.  Sargent was not producing an anti-war manifesto and he did not turn the casualties into grotesque symbols.  He gave them dignity, but he did not make them triumphant.  Their courage consists largely of continuing to place one foot in front of the other.

That restraint is part of the painting’s strength.

Sargent remained what he had always been: a painter of observed people, physical presence, atmosphere, fabric, light, and gesture.  He used the traditional language of monumental figure painting because it was the language he knew.

The surprise is how well that language accommodated something so thoroughly modern and horrible.

Sargent had spent much of his career painting privilege.  He understood how clothing, posture, setting, and scale could give importance to a human figure.  In Gassed, he applied those same abilities to ordinary soldiers whose names we do not know.  He gave them the scale once reserved for monarchs, aristocrats, and conquering heroes.

But these men have conquered nothing.  They cannot even see the next step.

John Singer Sargent died in 1925.  The Hall of Remembrance vanished before it was built, the generals in his later portrait passed into history, and the drawing rooms that made him famous became museum exhibits and tourist attractions.  Gassed survived them all and today it is a central part of the Great War exhibit of the Imperial War Museum.

Its power comes from the collision between beauty and horror.  The sunset is beautiful.  The arrangement of figures is beautiful.  The handling of light is beautiful.  What is happening to the men is not.

That tension keeps the painting from becoming mere propaganda or being merely an illustration of suffering.  It records a moment when civilization’s crowning achievements—chemistry, industry, organization, transportation, medicine, and art—were met on the same patch of ground.  Some of those talents had been used to blind the soldiers.  Others were being used to lead them to safety.  Sargent used his to make certain that we would still see them after they could no longer see for themselves.

Oh, Shenandoah: Why Doesn’t the Navy Have One Today?

The United States Navy has a perfectly good ship’s name that is just gathering dust.

Shenandoah is musical, historic, unmistakably American, and considerably easier to pronounce than Antietam.  It summons up a river, a valley, blue mountains, Jimmy Stewart, a national park, a famous folk song, and several million tourists trapped behind recreational vehicles on Skyline Drive.  It has also been carried by four vessels commissioned as USS Shenandoah—one of which did not even float—and by the Confederate commerce raider CSS Shenandoah.

The Navy itself sometimes describes the most recent Shenandoah as the fifth naval vessel to bear the name because it includes the Confederate ship in the lineage.  Strict bookkeeping therefore gives us four USS Shenandoahs, plus one CSS Shenandoah.  Evidently, the Navy regards its Confederate cousin as part of the family, although presumably, she is seated at a separate table during reunions.

The first USS Shenandoah was a wooden screw sloop launched at the Philadelphia Navy Yard in December 1862 and commissioned in June 1863.  A “screw sloop” sounds like either an obscure sailor’s knot or something the Navy might court-martial you for attempting.  In fact, she was a steam-powered warship that also carried sails, displaced about 1,375 tons, and mounted some very serious guns.

During the Civil War, she joined the blockade off Wilmington, North Carolina, chasing ships trying to carry supplies into the Confederacy and carry cotton out of it.  In 1864 and 1865, she participated in the attacks on Fort Fisher, the formidable installation guarding the entrance to Wilmington.  Federal sailors and Marines from Shenandoah went ashore during the successful second assault, armed with cutlasses and revolvers and apparently unaware that Hollywood had not yet been invented to film them.

The first Shenandoah remained useful long after the war.  She served in South America, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific.  She visited ports in Japan and China, surveyed unfamiliar harbors, searched unsuccessfully for possible survivors of the American merchant schooner General Sherman in Korea, and protected American interests during disturbances in Panama.  After several cycles of commissioning, decommissioning, and being brought back because the Navy had once again discovered that it needed ships, she was finally sold in 1887.  Her career had lasted nearly a quarter-century, which is quite respectable for a wooden vessel built while Abraham Lincoln was still explaining to generals that he wanted them to fight.

Then there was the troublesome relative: CSS Shenandoah.   Despite the name, this ship never actually sailed anywhere close to Virginia—she never sailed within sight of the American mainland.   And sadly, the USS Shenandoah never fought the CSS Shenandoah.

She began life in Britain as the merchant vessel Sea King.  Confederate agents acquired her in 1864 and converted her into a commerce raider under Commander James Iredell Waddell.  Her job was not to engage the much larger United States Navy.  Her job was to find American merchant ships in distant waters and ruin their owners’ day.

She was remarkably good at it.

CSS Shenandoah sailed around the world and captured, burned, or bonded 38 American merchant vessels, most of them whalers.  She took nearly 1,000 prisoners without suffering a combat death among her own crew.  In June 1865, while operating in the Bering Sea, she attacked the American whaling fleet and fired what is generally described as the last shot of the Civil War.

There was one slight problem: the Civil War had already ended.

Robert E.  Lee had surrendered at Appomattox in April.  Joseph Johnston had surrendered later that month.  Jefferson Davis had been captured in May.  The Confederacy was rapidly becoming a historical research topic, but Waddell was still burning Yankee whalers near Alaska because news traveled slowly before radio, satellite communications, and sailors checking their telephones every eleven seconds.

When Waddell finally received reliable confirmation that the Confederacy had collapsed, he disarmed the ship and sailed roughly 9,000 miles around Cape Horn to Liverpool.  On November 6, 1865—almost seven months after Appomattox—CSS Shenandoah surrendered to British authorities.  The Confederate flag was lowered for the final time.  This gave Shenandoah the distinction of being both one of the Confederacy’s most successful ships and the military unit that most seriously needed a newspaper subscription.

The next USS Shenandoah was not a ship at all.  It was ZR-1, the Navy’s first American-built rigid airship.

Commissioned in 1923, the silver giant was 680 feet long—more than twice the length of a football field.  It was the first rigid airship to fly using helium rather than highly flammable hydrogen.  This was an improvement because helium does not explode, although being inside a 680-foot aluminum framework during a thunderstorm remained a lifestyle choice.

The airship was intended to scout ahead of the fleet, locating enemy ships far beyond the horizon.  It also served as an enormous flying advertisement for naval aviation.  In 1924, it completed the first crossing of North America by an airship, attracting crowds wherever it appeared.  People looked up and saw the future. 

The future looked like a tremendous silver cucumber.

On September 3, 1925, USS Shenandoah encountered a violent storm over Ohio.  Powerful updrafts carried it beyond its structural limits, and the airship broke into several sections.  Fourteen crewmen died, including its commander, Zachary Lansdowne, while 29 survived by riding portions of the wreckage to the ground.  The disaster helped expose the dangers of using fragile rigid airships in severe weather, although it took the losses of the Akron and Macon before the Navy was finally convinced that the risks outweighed the benefits of rigid-frame airships.

The name returned during World War II.  USS Shenandoah (AD-26) was a destroyer tender: essentially a floating repair shop, warehouse, machine plant, hospital, supply depot, and hardware store.  Destroyers could tie up alongside her and receive repairs without returning to a major naval base.  She carried the men, tools, spare parts, and mysterious Navy paperwork necessary to keep fighting ships at sea.

Commissioned on August 13, 1945, AD-26 arrived just as World War II was ending.  That was unfortunate timing if one wanted battle stars, but excellent timing if one wanted to avoid being sunk.  She spent much of her 35-year career supporting the Atlantic Fleet and made numerous deployments to the Mediterranean.  In 1964, her crew helped rescue everyone aboard the Dutch freighter Doris after the ship broke loose during a storm at Naples.  The tender was finally decommissioned in 1980.

Three years later came USS Shenandoah (AD-44), another destroyer tender and the largest member of the family.  At 642 feet and more than 20,000 tons, she carried roughly 1,500 officers and sailors.  She supported destroyers, cruisers, and frigates wherever the Navy needed a mobile repair facility.  She served until 1996 and was eventually scrapped in 2012.

That means the Navy has gone 30 years without a Shenandoah.   It’s time the Navy rectified this mistake.   I guess I should be slightly mollified by the presence of another Shenandoah.

Outside of the US Navy, civilians have continued using the name.  The most extravagant example is Shenandoah of Sark, a magnificent 178-foot, three-masted schooner built near Staten Island in 1902.  She has survived two world wars and now accommodates about ten guests in the comfort expected by people who use “summer” as a verb.  One charter company advertises her for approximately €110,000 to €125,000 per week, while another lists a price exceeding $150,000.

That is only the base rate.  Food, drinks, fuel, port charges, taxes, and tips may be additional.  At those prices, I would expect the crew not only to raise the sails but also to address me as Admiral, fire a seventeen-gun salute whenever I came on deck, and pretend to laugh at all my jokes.

Since most of us are unlikely to find that much spare money in our sock drawer, that brings us back to my original question:  So why is there no USS Shenandoah today?

The Navy has plenty of ships named for politicians, admirals, states, cities, battles, Native American peoples, and abstract concepts.  Some deserve the honor.  Some undoubtedly resulted from a committee meeting that went on much too long.  But Shenandoah has everything a naval name should possess.  It is dignified without being pompous.  It is rooted in American geography.  It has accumulated a remarkable history involving the Civil War, Arctic whalers, Korea, Japan, rigid airships, destroyer tenders, and a schooner affordable only to people who regard a Gulfstream jet as carry-on luggage.

Surely the name deserves another assignment.  A submarine would be appropriate: quiet, formidable, and moving beneath the water as smoothly as the song.  A new repair ship would honor the two tenders.  Even a future airship would complete the circle, although perhaps we should keep that one away from Ohio thunderstorms.

After four USS vessels, one Confederate raider, and more than a century of extraordinary adventures, the name should not end in a scrapyard—or belong exclusively to a yacht that costs more for one week than most Americans paid for their first house.

“Oh, Shenandoah, I long to see you.”

Preferably painted gray, flying the Stars and Stripes, and paid for by somebody else.

The Seven Deadly Sins of a Bad Mexican Restaurant

Let me begin with an important distinction: “Mexican food” comes in two varieties.  There is the food of Mexico, which is one of the world’s great cuisines, and then, there is what too many American “Mexican” restaurants serve, which is the same six ingredients rearranged into forty-seven allegedly different entrées, each of which, someone will inevitably claim, has a name that is Spanish slang for a penis.

Let us also make one thing completely clear: if you do not serve beer, you are not really a Mexican restaurant.  As everyone who lives on the border knows, “La comida mexicana sin cerveza es como el sexo sin besos.”  For the gringos out there, that translates as, “Would you bring more tortilla chips?”

The indispensable ingredients are ground beef, chopped lettuce, chopped tomatoes, refried beans, a soggy tortilla, and a little melted cheese that is apparently descended from dried Elmer’s glue.  These materials are moved around the plate in different configurations and given different Spanish names, rather like rearranging the furniture and claiming you have built a new house.  Occasionally, there is also a green slime pretending to be guacamole, even though it contains only one avocado per gallon.

Put the beef inside a folded tortilla, and it is a taco.  Roll it inside the tortilla, and it is a burrito.  Roll it tightly and fry it, and it is a taquito.  Cover it with sauce, and it becomes an enchilada.  Fold the tortilla over and flatten it, and you have a quesadilla.  Deep-fry the burrito, and it becomes a chimichanga.  Leave the tortilla open and pile everything on top, and it is a tostada.  Break the tortilla into a pile of pieces, scatter the ingredients over the top, and you have nachos.

The menu may occupy twelve laminated pages, but the kitchen requires approximately one shelf.

This is the first sin of the bad Mexican restaurant: the illusion of choice.  The waiter gives you ten minutes to study the menu as though you were examining the wine list at Versailles.  In reality, you are deciding whether you want your ground beef wrapped, folded, rolled, fried, buried, or dropped from a modest height onto a tortilla chip.

The second sin is structural failure.  The taco arrives crisp, upright, and confident.  You pick it up, take one bite, and it immediately disintegrates along the bottom seam.  Ground beef falls into your lap.  Lettuce scatters across the table.  A tomato cube rolls under the saltshaker.  The shell splits into three pieces, each sharp enough to require a tetanus shot.

The burrito has the opposite problem.  It possesses the tensile strength of a fire hose.  The tortilla is thick, damp, and elastic, and it has been wrapped so tightly around its contents that opening it may violate federal regulations governing pressurized vessels.  When finally punctured, it releases a beige substance that may once have been beans.

The third sin is cheese abuse.  Cheese should have flavor, texture, and some identifiable connection to an animal.  Bad Mexican-restaurant cheese is a yellow industrial sealant.  It arrives molten but begins hardening when immediately upon contact with oxygen.  Within thirty seconds, it has formed a protective coating over the enchilada.  Within two minutes, it can be peeled off in a single sheet.  Within five minutes, it could be used to repair drywall.

The restaurant calls it queso.  Elmer’s would call it product development.

The fourth sin is the combination plate, although “combination” suggests greater variety than actually exists.  The waiter sets down a dangerously hot platter containing two enchiladas, one taco, one burrito, beans, rice, lettuce, tomatoes, and enough melted cheese to immobilize the entire arrangement.

“Careful,” he says.  “The plate is hot.”

The plate is always hot.  Nobody knows why.  The food is tepid, but the ceramic has recently reentered Earth’s atmosphere.  You must sit with your hands in your lap while everything congeals, because touching the plate would remove your fingerprints…from your fingers!

The rice is orange, dry, and abundant.  A note to the chef: food coloring does not count as a flavor ingredient.  The refried beans are the color and consistency of wet cement.  The rice is deposited in a perfectly rounded mound, while the beans spread across the plate in a dirty puddle.  Somewhere in the kitchen, there must be a man whose entire career consists of constructing rice domes.  He is probably the restaurant’s most highly trained employee.

The fifth sin is the salsa deception.  The waiter brings two bowls.

“This one is mild,” he explains, “and this one is hot.”

The mild salsa is chopped tomatoes floating in pink water.  The hot salsa is also chopped tomatoes floating in pink water, but someone has waved a jalapeño over it.  Both are served with tortilla chips possessing two remarkable characteristics: they are simultaneously stale and greasy.

Nevertheless, you eat three baskets of them while waiting for dinner, thereby consuming the caloric equivalent of a replacement meal.  When your entrée arrives, you announce that you are already full and then proceed to eat it anyway, because surrendering before the cheese solidifies would be cowardice.

The sixth sin is compulsory festivity.  A Mexican restaurant cannot merely feed you, it must persuade you that you are attending a fiesta.  The walls are painted in colors normally visible only from orbit.  Sombreros hang from the ceiling.  A ceramic burro stands near the cash register.  The chairs look as though they were decorated by a man who was paid according to the number of colors he used.

Suddenly…Somewhere…a trumpet starts playing “La Cucaracha.”

Why is a Mexican restaurant the only place where it is considered festive to sing a song about a cockroach?  Nobody enters an Italian restaurant expecting the staff to sing about silverfish.  At a French restaurant, the inevitable accordion player rarely performs a jaunty number about bedbugs.  Yet in a Mexican restaurant, a jaunty song about a crippled cockroach is apparently essential to the atmosphere.

And then we reach the seventh and gravest sin: the mariachis.

I realize that I am supposed to insert a diplomatic qualification here.  I am expected to say that I admire authentic mariachi music when it is performed well, at the proper time, by skilled musicians.

Nope.  I don’t.  I hate mariachis.

Before anyone accuses me of cultural insensitivity, I should present my credentials.  I live on the Mexican border.  I have traveled extensively throughout Mexico and Central America.  I regularly teach the history of the region.  I even possess a degree in Latin American Studies.  I have spent a substantial portion of my life studying, visiting, discussing, defending, and explaining Latin America.

But cultural appreciation is not a suicide pact.  You cannot be required to like everything produced by a civilization merely because you admire much of it.  The Italians produced Michelangelo, Dante, and the Renaissance, but that does not obligate us to admire Mussolini driving a Fiat.  Mexico gave the world extraordinary art, architecture, literature, history, and food.  It also gave us overweight men in embroidered trousers firing trumpets directly into the human nervous system.

Restaurant mariachis do not perform at a distance ordinarily associated with musical entertainment.  They surround your table.  The trumpeter stands eighteen inches from your left ear.  The guitarist is close enough to perform minor surgery.  Conversation becomes impossible unless conducted through written notes, semaphore, or artillery signals.

The musicians proceed from table to table, leaving stunned diners and overturned water glasses in their wake.  Everyone smiles because no one wants to be identified as the gringo who does not appreciate the culture.  Meanwhile, fillings loosen, hearing aids squeal, and elderly patrons attempt to remember whether Medicare covers trumpet-related injuries.

Tom Lehrer understood the problem.  In his song “In Old Mexico,” he observed that the mariachis “would not shut up till they were paid.”

I once tested this theory.  An especially off-key group was circulating through a restaurant, destroying conversation one table at a time.  When they approached me, I offered them twenty dollars to go outside and play in the parking lot.  Everyone within earshot pretended to be insulted while privately hoping the musicians would accept the offer.

This created a brief ethical crisis.  They had presumably never before been paid specifically to increase their distance from an audience.  Nevertheless, capitalism prevailed.  They accepted the money and departed.

It was the best twenty dollars I ever spent on music I did not hear.

And yet, despite all seven sins, we return.

We return for the chips.  We return for the cold beer.  We return for the margaritas (which contain enough fluorescent syrup to illuminate the table).  We return because the portions are enormous, because the prices are usually reasonable, and because even a mediocre enchilada buried beneath industrial cheese possesses a certain comforting appeal.

Most of all, we return because there are at least forty-seven things on the menu.

Admittedly, they are all made from the same six familiar, comfortable ingredients.  But tonight I may be adventurous.

I may have mine folded.