Here is a masterpiece of sarcasm directed at a well deserving object of sarcasm.

Sally Quinn Forced to Dine With Non-Fake Friends by Jonathan Chait

Quinn, a Washington Post writer and wife of Post editor Ben Bradlee, is the reigning queen of Washington dinner party culture. Her essay broadly belongs to a particular genre that I think of as a cargo cult of bipartisanship focused on dinner parties. Cargo cults are a phenomenon of tribal societies that came into contact with advanced societies, coveted the advanced industrial goods they shipped in (cargo), and failed to understand why the cargo stopped appearing when the Westerners left. They often attempt to summon it back by constructing crude, wood-and-straw imitations of landing strips, radios, or imitating other rituals they observed.

The bipartisanship cargo cult in Washington is a rather sad tribe of people that laments the decline of bipartisanship, fails to grasp the larger historic forces that made bipartisanship appear and then disappear, and concludes that the problem is the lack of dinner parties. This is, believe it or not, an extremely common belief in our capital city. Seriously. Hardly a week goes by without somebody blaming partisan polarization on the lack of proper dinner parties or, in an occasional twist, lunch.

Quinn’s essay follows the general contours of this genre, but she adds her own uniquely mortifying touches. Her mourning of the decline of the Georgetown dinner party sweeps together such disparate trends as the appearance of a Kardashian at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Citizens United, hard times at newspapers, and the appearance on the scene of “25-year-old bloggers.” The result of all these baffling developments is that Quinn now has to have dinner with actual friends and not just people using each other for access to power:

In the past, we might have attended five-course dinners a couple of nights a week, with a different wine for each course, served in a power-filled room of politicians, diplomats, White House officials and well-known journalists. Those gatherings don’t exist anymore. Now, we host and go to small dinners with close friends, dinners with some meaning to them, dinners that are celebrations of something.

Poignant!