"Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise to a public meeting?"

A few days ago, I was talking about a problem that Kamala Harris has as she runs for President:

She's too much of a prosecutor to win the love of a minority group Democrats need to turn out if they're going to beat Mr. Criminal Justice Reform Donald Trump.

Shouting Thomas started off a comment with...

The job of a prosecutor is to put black guys in jail, as noted in "Bonfire of the Vanities."...

I said:

Thanks for reminding me of that book, which I've been meaning to read.

I just finished "Lake Success" and have been wondering what to listen to next.

I've never read any of Tom Wolfe's fictions. [ACTUALLY: I've read "I Am Charlotte Simmons."] Love his nonfiction and have read and reread much of it, but I went through a long nonfiction period before changing my ways about a year ago....

A lot of other comments began praising "Bonfire of the Vanities," and then I said:

Let's all read "Bonfire of the Vanities."

I'm going to read it and will put up posts with some quotes I like, so if you read along with me, I'll have a place where we can talk about it.

Laslo Spatula responded with:

Sounds great, but will there be damp snake underwear?

And I know exactly what that means. It's a reference to my old "Gatsby" project, where I took one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" out of context and we just talked about that sentence. On March 5, 2013, the sentence was:

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back.

So, I'm up for this. I won't jump around in the book as I did with "Gatsby," and I'm not going to limit myself to a single sentence, because I don't think Wolfe does challenging, weird sentences the way F. Scott Fitzgerald did. I'm going to read at my own pace (or listen, in my old pre-cataract-surgery style, which lets me walk all over town), and I'll pick something from the part I've read most recently, consecutive words in a string about the size of the one I will give you today. Unlike with the "Gatsby" project, you can bring in what you know from the context, but please concentrate on the quoted text and make as much of it as you can.

Here's the book, if you want to buy it at Amazon, using an Althouse-blog-supporting link. And here's the passage, from Kindle location 172:

Something hits the Mayor on the shoulder. It hurts like hell! There on the floor—a jar of mayonnaise, an eight-ounce jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Half full! Half consumed! Somebody has thrown a half-eaten jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise at him! In that instant the most insignificant thing takes over his mind. Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise to a public meeting?

A few stray thoughts.

1. There is no other appearance of mayonnaise in the book, but there is another jar in the book. It's "a jar of pickled peaches," and that jar isn't really there at all. Somebody is just twisting his hands as if he's "trying to open a jar of pickled peaches," which is funny, because if there is no jar of pickled peaches there's nothing about the twisting motion of the hands that could possibly be specific to peaches, pickled or no.

2. The first 4 letters of "mayonnaise" are the same as the first 4 letters of "Mayor."

3. Mayonnaise is white and so is the Mayor, and he's trying to show that he can do a public meeting in Harlem. It goes very badly as the thrown mayonnaise exemplifies. I infer that mayonnaise was chosen by a black person to express hostility to the Mayor's whiteness. That's half of the answer to the question "Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise to a public meeting?"

4. The other half of the answer to that question requires me to observe that the mayor assumes that the jar was half-eaten when it was brought in. It's possible that the jar was full or less than half-eaten and that someone was eating (or doing something else with) mayonnaise during the meeting, which would be disgusting.

5. The Mayor is under attack — physically and in terms of his political career — but his mind is taken over by wondering about the provenance of the mayonnaise. It might work as a calming technique to focus on a small, concrete detail in times of stress, but I think the Mayor is a man who can't easily get his priorities in order, and also that Wolfe is guessing — quite accurately, in my case — that the mayonnaise will distract the reader.

6. Distracted by the mayonnaise, the reader feels distanced. The Mayor's problems are not mine. Ha ha, mayonnaise. That's funny. Characters will suffer in this book, but it's a big comedy, and the reader is encouraged to laugh, even as the horrible difficulties of racial discord in NYC come flying at us, like a hurled jar of blackberry preserves.

7. "Hellmann's." Maybe it's mayonnaise to make it possible to say "Hellmann's." That's a hell of a brand name. The word "hell" appears 99 times in this book, including in the second sentence of the passage quoted above, "It hurts like hell!" We'll see how much hell there is to come and whether it hurts as much as a half-full 8-ounce jar to the shoulder.