What’s Your Beef?

PLUS: What does future candidate Trump have to say about The TikTok ban (according to ChatGPT?)

Warning: Contains Minor Spoilers about the Netflix show Beef.

It starts like this. You’re in the parking lot of a big box home improvement store. You’ve had a bad day. You’re having money troubles; your business is struggling. (Being in a big box home improvement store parking lot is synonymous with having a bad day for some of us, but I digress.)

You start to back out, not seeing the car that’s coming down the lane. Brakes are applied; horns honk. A faceless hand comes out of a window and flips you the bird. You get irritated. Angry. You might shout.

What do you do next? Most of us, most of the time, would go home, tell our partner or spouse about it, and then, hopefully, let it go. But what if you can’t let it go? What if, instead, you find yourself chasing that white Mercedes down, determined to show the arrogant son-of-a-bitch the error of their ways? 

Thus begins the new Netflix dark comedy/drama Beef. As you can imagine, things get worse from there. 

Steven Yeun plays Danny, a down-on-his-luck contractor with a series of family troubles. Ali Wong is Amy, a self-made entrepreneur who seems to have a perfect life but is in reality trapped in a brittle world of her own making. 

After the show’s first ill-fated chase, Danny writes the license plate of the SUV and tracks down where it’s registered. He uses the fact that he is a contractor to con entry into the house, and then urinates all over Amy’s bathroom. 

The feud intensifies, with neither Amy nor Danny able to resist the urge to escalate. While this leads to some funny moments, the result is anything but comic. 

As in real life, Amy and Dany’s grievance isn’t something that happens in a vacuum. Both have serious issues in their lives that have pushed them to a breaking point. The road rage incident is an incidental, convenient place to project their lifelong resentments.

Danny believes he’s been dealt a bad hand. His aging parents had to leave the U.S. and return to Korea after Danny’s cousin Isaac was busted for running a counterfeit baby formula business out of their hotel. He’s doing what he can to work hard and save enough money to bring them back but is thwarted at every turn. He’s unable to see how clinging to his feeling of injustice is only making things worse.

Amy, on the other hand, feels trapped in the bubble she has created for herself. She is on the verge of doing a deal to sell her business to a vain, narcissistic billionaire, only to realize that doing so won’t free her from the manic treadmill she’s on—and she’s not sure she wants it to. Her spoiled New Age husband is no help. 

For all their scheming, neither Danny nor Amy has an end-game. Revenge and retaliation exist for their own sake, even when we, the audience, can see from a hundred miles away no retribution will fill their aching needs or solve their problems.

One of the most moving scenes is in the third episode when a chastened Danny breaks down while attending church for the first time in years. Steven Yeun’s brilliant performance captures Danny’s fragile emotional state and points to his need for redemption, grace, and yes, forgiveness. But of course, he can’t forgive.

There’s something very of-the-moment about this story. 

A man crashes his car into six teenagers after a doorbell prank. A young woman is murdered after driving up the wrong driveway. A kid is shot after accidentally going into the wrong house. A family (including a child) is slaughtered after asking someone to stop shooting his gun on the porch. For the perpetrators, the victims are incidental, but the kind of rage you need to kill a stranger doesn’t come out of the blue. Rage like that comes from long-held grievances, grievances that have to be fed and cultivated, nurtured over time in the mind. 

In this supposedly-Christian nation, I wonder if there’s any way we can start to let go of our grievances—or at least indulge them a little less.

Bonus: Is Banning TikTok a Good Idea?

Reading this article got me thinking, so I decided to ask ChatGPT how future candidate Trump might respond to a TikTok Ban.

Well, I have to tell you, folks, the way the Biden administration is handling this TikTok ban, it’s a complete mess, a total disaster. They’re going after this app, which, by the way, is very popular with the young people, and they’re just crushing it. You know, I’ve always been a big supporter of innovation, entrepreneurship, and the tech industry, the best industry, really. We’ve got tremendous people working there. But what they’re doing here, with this ban, they’re stifling creativity, and free speech too, which is so important, believe me.

Now, if I were in charge, and I should be, we would have found a much better solution, a fantastic solution, actually. We could have ensured national security, which is very important, you know I’m very big on national security, but at the same time, we wouldn’t have hurt these young, creative people who just love this app. They’re doing amazing things on TikTok, fantastic things, really. So, it’s just another example, folks, of how the Biden administration is failing the American people, and it’s really a shame, it’s terrible.

But didn’t you want to ban TikTok when you were in office?

Well, let me tell you, folks, when I was president, I always put America first, and we went after TikTok very strongly. I wanted to protect our country, and I was looking out for the American people. You know, I'm a great negotiator, maybe the best negotiator, and I have a fantastic relationship with Xi, and we got along very well, better than anyone else ever has. He's a strong leader, very strong, and together we made great deals with China.

I had this terrific idea, an American company would take it over and make sure our people's data was safe, which is very important. I was going to make that deal happen, believe me. It would have been so beautiful, and everyone would have been so happy. But the way Biden is handling it, they're just giving up and shutting it down.

Remember when we made America great? Their approach is just terrible, so terrible. Biden is so weak, and it's an embarrassment, folks.

See you next week.

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