It’s not an overstatement to say that the decimation of the hospitality industry will usher in the destruction of the American way of life. For many, the local bar/restaurant is the last place to escape the clutches of neoliberal sterility that has infected daily life. /1

To destroy the bar is to destroy the refuge of the “common man,” a venue where kinship and camaraderie springs up organically, away from the watchful eye of the bureaucrats who seek to flatten and degrade human experience. To enter the bar is to be free of their scolding. /2

The way the bar hatred is framed exposes the elite distaste for the working class and anyone who doesn’t want to submit to some hellish life devoid of the possibility of magic or mystery, which is what the bar offers. It is not a place of “progress,” but of possibility. /3

The bar is the anti-office, the antithesis of the HR spirit that couches itself under the guise of “expertise.” To be a regular at a bar is to be part of a family of misfits from all walks of life—it is beautiful American alchemy in action. The bar, at its finest, is America. /4