MONDAY, JULY 25, 2022—CNN: “The Choco Taco is gone for good.”
The Choco Taco just got discontinued? Wow! I didn’t know that. You’re telling me now for the first time. It led an amazing life. What else can you say? Whether you found it tasty or not, it was an amazing confection that had an amazing life. I am actually sad to hear that.
Living a life that is getting progressively more salty and anhedonic and aggrieved is invariably a deranging thing; the people around you treat you differently, but also there are fewer and fewer of them around you. It doesn’t help that America is full of millions of griping malcontents just like this, especially as they are priced out or tuned out and reality falls away from them. It especially doesn’t help that America is lorded over by an owner class that has created a political and economic system that more or less guarantees there are healthy profits to be made in managing a nation that runs lean and cynical while losing much more often than it wins.
America isn’t a democracy, it’s a business. But a business that is run by sacrificing the overall quality of its product and its own long-term viability for cheap short-term profit will eventually suffer for it, and sooner than later.
We have now lost JUULs and Choco Tacos in the same year. It is simply de facto reality that a US politican’s job is to mainly serve as an undeserved grandiose figure on a payroll ledger, so it’s not like they would ever intervene in this situation that would yield a positive result, even if they had the will to. But the true dealmakers of this country essentially can be thought of as a long continuum of huffily self-actualized landlord types. Despite its consistently soggy shell and soft texture, the Choco Taco was genuinely one of this nation’s finest treats, a true symbol of American and capitalist innovation. And in the bleaching heat and inconsequence of highest summer, it was struck down suddenly on a sunny Monday morning.
This is obviously not what a U-S-A!! fan would want, although fans are good at finding some way to care even and especially when it’s something of a challenge to their self-respect. The cruelty really is the point.
“My condolences to Mexico on the loss of their great, great ‘taco,’” former president Barack Obama wrote in a Medium post this week. “So many fellow Americans had some fond memories of the Choco Taco. We’re seeing it more and more, and you love to see it. But this is deeply saddening, folks.”
Like with any other mundane topic du jour, this solemn event was met with the daily invasion of elite nerdlingers who asserted the Choco Tacos were “overrated” with the smugnorant confidence of a compulsive shitposter. As I was struck with the visual hazards of homemade cosplay hostility, I then realized the true rallying cry of our generation is, It sucked and I’m furious it’s gone!
Not to be inscrutable or obnoxious but, capitalism is an unfeeling demiurgic algorithm. Somewhere, a TikTok influencer is planning a DIY Choco Taco video that will get 10 million views. It is probably asking too much of any poster these days to show the deadpan equanimity necessary to get through these bland and ominous times, so I will go ahead and note that the way we just let the chocolate ravioli from Little Caesar’s die silently only reaffirms America’s powerful and pernicious anti-Italian bias.