Creeping Meatballism: A Warning from Brother Shepherd:

—Filed by Arthur Phärtze, Aesthetic Interpreter

Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists Bulletin – Aesthetic Interventions Division

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We regret to inform the American public that the meatball has metastasized.

This is not a culinary bulletin.

This is an aesthetic CODE ORANGE issued in loving memory of Jean Shepherd—radio mystic, soda jerk philosopher, and Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists Amarius Emeritus (Class of ’74, honorary, post-midnight induction via AM broadcast, confirmed by Reynard Pierre-DeWitt in a fogged diner mirror off Route 22).

Shepherd saw it coming before the rest of us were even microwaved.

He called it Creeping Meatballism:

“The slow, sticky rise of the bland, the bulbous, and the banally round.”

To Shepherd, the meatball wasn’t Italian. It was Amerikan and it is now globalism.

A once-noble sphere of flavor reduced to cafeteria-grade sameness, ladled without care over everything that once had edge, shape, meaning.

And yet—ironically, perfectly—he admired the Italians.

Not the Alka-Seltzer “that’s a spicy meatball”commercial stereotype, but the real ones:

The guys with loud shirts and louder opinions, carving pork in back-room butchershops.

The nonnas—as they were the role model for Mario Puzo’s Godfather—rolling dough with authority.

The barbers, bakers, and bocce players of Brooklyn and Jersey of Shepherd’s time who resisted flattening by being fully themselves—specific, unrepentant, rooted.

“You knew when you walked into an Italian bakery that you weren’t in a mall,” Shepherd once said (possibly, if not aloud then in spirit).

“That was civilization. Not a strip of it—but the whole loaf.”

Shepherd vs. Globalism: The Meatball Grows Tentacles

If Jean were alive today—and perhaps he is, drifting across frequencies and cheap motel TVs—he’d spot the next mutation of Meatballism instantly:

Globalism, rebranded as cosmopolitan convenience.

Shepherd, an open-minded wanderer of bus depots and Woolworths, didn’t fear the foreign. He feared the fake.

He embraced flavor, dialect, specificity—but only when rooted in real soil, not flyover food courts.

What would he make of today’s global monoculture?

A falafel joint in Des Moines called Planet Wrapz.

An “authentic Irish pub” in a Dubai airport with a glowing QR menu.

TikTok shepherds in Albania lip-syncing to Korean ballads in Yankees hats made in Vietnam.

Soulless “world fusion” restaurants that manage to insult four continents in one dish.

He’d weep, and then he’d laugh, and then he’d dial into WOR Radio at 10:15 pm and deliver a 40-minute sermon titled:

“You Know, I Saw a Guy Eating Sushi in a Denny’s Parking Lot, and I Knew We Were Done For.”

Shepherd understood the core irony:

Globalism promises variety but delivers monotony.

Not true cosmopolitanism—but cargo-cult mimicry.

Not exchange—but export.

Not culture—but content.

“It’s not that we’re becoming one big family—it’s that we’re all ordering from the same laminated menu.” —Shepherd, possibly.

The Council Responds

The Council now formally enters Jean Shepherd into the C-of-C-C Hall of Preemptive Aesthetic Saints.

His sacrifice?

He warned us.

On the radio.

In diners.

In shaggy stories about leg lamps, decoder rings, and the slow dissolve of the real into the ready-made.

He told us:

“Beware of the Meatball. It rolls. It sticks. It smothers.”

“Shepherd, bless him, understood what too many forget: the real resistance isn’t ideological—it’s familial, it’s culinary, it’s stubbornly regional. My uncle once said the only true rebellion left in America was a Barese grandfather refusing to buy jarred sauce. Jean saw that. He knew the neighborhood pork store butcher was closer to God than the bureaucrat or brand manager. He knew that resilience came with garlic on the breath and an unbroken chain of gestures passed down like rosary beads. Call it defiant particularism. Or just Sunday dinner.”

— John St. Evola, Editor-in-Mischief, C-of-C-C Newsletter

Council Recommendations:

If it rolls downhill, don’t eat it. If it’s microwavable, don’t believe it. If it rhymes too neatly, burn the jingle.

Instead:

Cultivate sharp corners. Season irregularly. Love the thing that doesn’t fit on the plate.

Official Council Motto

(as approved by Brother Shepherd, via shortwave séance):

“Decline with Dignity. And Always Salt to Taste.”

Filed under: Aesthetic Interventions, Amarius Echoes, Culinary Warnings

See also: Blobitecture, Nostalgia as Nutrient Paste, IKEA Brutalism

ALTDEF entry:

MEATBALL (n.) – A once-regional delight now weaponized mystery meat, as the preferred shape of spiritual flattening.