Sean C. Dunn became a protest icon this month when he flung a submarine sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer who was on patrol in Washington, D.C. Mr. Dunn had been verbally objecting to the presence of federal agents, who had been ordered there by President Trump. His anger apparently got the better of both him and his appetite, and he let fly with what presumably was meant to be his dinner and not a weapon of resistance.
“Sandwich Guy,” as Mr. Dunn is now known, achieved further renown last week when a local grand jury refused to indict him on the felony assault charge that Jeanine Pirro had wanted to hang on him — which just goes to show that grand juries aren’t in fact willing to indict ham sandwiches if that’s what a prosecutor asks. (Mr. Dunn is now charged with a misdemeanor.)
A ham sandwich works well for that joke because it’s about as generic and inert as things get, one step up from (and a good deal less potentially damaging to a Customs and Border Protection officer than) a rock. Mr. Dunn’s sandwich is interesting because it was a specific, real, entirely nonthreatening sandwich. For the record, according to a Washington Post report, it was salami and came from Subway, which was last in the news 10 years ago when its longtime spokesperson, Jared Fogle, (a.k.a. the “Subway Guy”) pleaded guilty to sex crimes involving minors — a coincidence that some writers would seize upon to note that the Trump administration has still not released the Epstein files.
Submarine sandwiches are now being held aloft at protests and deployed on posters and in memes, perhaps on their way to becoming a universal symbol of Trump resistance — the pussy hat of his second term? But where the pussy hat was designed to make a political statement, the submarine sandwich has been appropriated for its new role, a found object with a prior apolitical status as only a popular and tasty meal. That innocuousness may be part of the appeal. Note that Mr. Dunn didn’t fling a pita sandwich or a torta, which might have been too cringe and on the nose as a token of resistance, though not as cringe as pussy hats, at least in retrospect.
But a submarine sandwich does have symbolic valence on its own terms. Looked at from a Freudian perspective, it is suggestively phallic, a foot long and full of meat, but it is also soft, floppy and ridden with salad. Is it a symbol of potency or impotency? As an actual weapon, it is the latter: Mr. Dunn’s missile bounced harmlessly off its target’s chest, though the wrapping came undone as it fell to the sidewalk. One could argue that, as an emblem of resistance to Trump administration policies, the ineffectualness of such a weapon is distressingly apt.
Furthermore, as parents of toddlers will remind you, throwing things at people is not nice; so is wasting food. There’s also something funny about seeing a sandwich collide with an authority figure. One is reminded of pies thrown in the faces of silent movie stuffed shirts and of Rupert Murdoch back in 2011 — activists call that “pieing” — not to mention the rotten tomatoes once hurled as a form of theater criticism. The submarine sandwich’s previously mentioned phallic yet floppy nature can also be seen in this context as a mocking reflection of the administration’s strutting, performative, hollow machismo. Think of a jester’s ludicrously exaggerated codpiece. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio may remember from the 2016 primaries, this is a sensitive area for the boss.
I may be reading into this. Mockery was perhaps not Mr. Dunn’s intent in choosing his missile. More likely, he just genuinely likes subs and thus one was what was at hand when he got fed up and wanted a projectile. Whether he intended it or not as satire, his arguably childish, albeit amusing, outburst has much in common with the California governor, Gavin Newsom, and “South Park” when it comes to gleeful, even puerile ridicule of the president. Like those two, both subjects of hyperbolically splenetic pushback from the White House, Mr. Dunn seems to have struck a nerve.
“He thought it was funny. Well, he doesn’t think it’s funny today,” declared Ms. Pirro, playing the nation’s sputtering high school vice principal sick of all these disrespectful kids, in a video announcing that Mr. Dunn would be charged with felony assault. The F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, also chimed in on the case. Attorney General Pam Bondi, in a statement announcing Mr. Dunn’s firing from the Justice Department, condemned him as “an example of the Deep State we have been up against for seven months.”
That seems like a lot of firepower brought to bear on a single sandwich-throwing paralegal, but the overkill is a tribute to the latent and lasting potency of the gesture — after all, who understands the power of dumb symbolism and silly political theater better than this president?
Bruce Handy is the author of “Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies.”
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