If you're hosting the dinner party, apart from napkin selection, the most pressing issue will be deciding whether you should hold it on an actual bandwagon. Actual bandwagons are difficult to find these days because they're mostly in museums and not in good working order. Even if you do find a bandwagon that's in good order to use as the venue for your dinner party, the food and drink will spill everywhere and it'll make a mess. Also, there's a chance some of the guests will have weak stomachs and throw up all over the place. You see, bandwagons use a rudimentary suspension system whereby 'leaves' of spring steel are stacked on top of each other and while this makes the carriage mitigate 'hard hits', it's a trade off because then it becomes 'bouncy bouncy'. Therefore, my first hint for a successful dinner party is to instead opt for a metaphorical bandwagon that won't have either 'hard hits' nor 'bouncy bouncy'. But don't worry, this metaphorical bandwagon will happen organically and you won't have to do anything. This is because the defining miracle of the dinner party is that everybody will identify precisely the same bandwagon to jump on during the first few minutes of the gathering. That this happens every time is amazing, but unfortunately doesn't get the same attention as other equally amazing things like those food delivery guys in India who pick up lunches, deliver them and then pick up the tins the lunches were in to reuse the next day. These delivery guys are called Dabbawallas and they deliver nearly 200,000 hot lunches to workers every day. They do this without phones, computers or even GPS, they just color code the tins, jump on their bikes and do their rounds. They deliver to homes, office blocks, factories, railway stations and educational institutions. Many of these places have multiple orders in huge office blocks and all on different levels (and all with slightly different food preferences). Around five and a half thousand Dabbawallas do between thirty and forty deliveries a day, they're self managed, mostly illiterate and have an error rate of one in sixteen million. Sometimes they deliver the lunches late because of flash flooding and typhoons and if they did that with me, I'd immediately complain and threaten to use UberEats instead.
That's amazing and it's equally amazing how every time there's a dinner party, the invitees, whether they know each other or not, will all hold the same opinions about politics, society, economics and history. If I've left anything out of that list, it doesn't matter, because whatever it is, you can rest assured all the invitees will form the same opinion about it in the same time it takes for a Dabbawalla to deliver a lovely rice, curry and dal lunch to an accountant called Mr Singh who works with great efficiency on the twentieth floor of an office block in downtown Mumbai. But it gets even more amazing, because when you consider how many opinions there can be about all those topics, these people all happen to have opinions that exist in a very narrow band of limited options. For example, if you ask them if big companies should pay more tax because they don't pay their 'fair share', they'll all agree! What are the chances of that? This is far more impressive than one mistake for every sixteen million curry deliveries.
The second most important consideration for your dinner party is to make sure the opinions are the most current and thereby the most engendered with tedium, predictability and an air of smug elitism. After all, it's important to make the right impression and to gain that kudos everybody craves like pregnant women crave tomato ketchup on broccoli. Now, if you're struggling to kick things off, you just need to say something like this: "Well, I just watched the series The Handmaid's Tale and I can honestly say that it's a terrifying portrait of what life will be like if we elect Donald Trump again." It's important to deliver this line with maximum impact by using the correct choreography. You should have fluttering eyes while you slowly bring your dominant hand to rest on the middle portion of your upper chest and then you should roll your eyes to cover up the fact that you're scanning the table for indications of acquiescence from your captive audience. Now, there will be a few moments of heart-stopping anxiety as some of the loneliest brain cells in your skull consider the possibility that not everybody present will agree with you. But when that passes, you can safely look once more over your audience and wait for all those replies that will inject a crucial shot of serotonin because it's been at least three hours since you snorted a line of confirmation bias.
The third important aspect of your preparations is to immediately shoot down anybody who disagrees. The most overused tactic for this horrifying scenario is calling the person 'a racist'. However, if you suggest their comment 'seems a little racist' or 'could be misconstrued as racist' then you're on the right track. But why stop there? The best approach goes even further, by saying something like this: "Your comment could be considered under specific circumstances by non-human lifeforms in distant galaxies as somewhat suggestive of something that is akin to and thereby tacitly affirming of a type of racism that is culturally bound, but still problematic nonetheless." While wordy, this approach is effective because it has exactly the same effect as saying "You're Himmler!" but the wordiness acts like a verbose smokescreen for you to escape under and then you don't have to deal with the awkwardness of direct fire. This use of indirect fire is quite clever, because you can still score hits and do a lot of damage. Your risible diction has promoted you to full bird colonel, so now you can safely sip coffee eight miles away while the explosive ordinance rains down on the enemy.
However, a successful dinner party is the one where there will be no need for any sustained military metaphors. The best outcome is for everybody to think the same, agree on everything and to affirm their elite status of being better than everybody who happens to not be sitting at that table with the Atelier Saucier rainbow denim napkins, (that are reclaimed, upcycled, fair trade and ethically made in LA in small batches with heirloom quality cloth). Not only does this mutual state of self-satisfaction help with digestion, it also means everybody understands the reason for being so freakishly assenting in the first place - social desirability.
And of course, it fulfils your responsibility as the host, to ensure no brains at that table are ever in danger of having an original thought. This last point is especially important for many folks of this elite ilk, because an original thought could be fatal. Apparently, when it's been so long since the last original thought, there's a good possibility of an immune response where the body identifies: "But don't all lives matter?" as a harmful foreign pathogen and a person's head has the potential to explode. And trust me I know from my lived experience, both 'as a mother' and as a 'neurodivergent person,' that when the dinner party guests' heads start exploding, it ruins desert for everybody.
