He told you so.
I know I said I was going on vacation, but I’m waiting for my laundry, and I don’t leave until this afternoon, and I had a thought that I wanted to share.
If you’re not online all the time like I am, you may not know that there is a national uproar about the changing of Cracker Barrel’s logo from its old-timey original to something more sleek and corporate. On the left is the old branding, and on the right is the new branding:
This an example of the simplification of corporate logos that has taken hold across the business world, what blogger “Lindyman” Paul Skallas calls “refinement culture.” (I think that’s a misnomer: it’s not refinement, it’s more like filtration.)
For a brand whose whole thing is nostalgia, I think it’s a pretty stupid idea to touch anything. But touch it they did: now, the stock has fallen, and a whole culture war fracas has started up. People suspect that the “liberal elites” are responsible for the destruction of their beloved brand. (Or, even, as it’s implied or sometimes said openly, the Jews.) The removal of the kindly old white man has raised racial anxieties about the “replacement” of “heritage Americans.” (They don’t call it cracker barrel for nothing, right? Sorry, I haven’t been able to make this bit work yet, but seriously, Cracker Barrel once had to settle a federal Civil Rights lawsuit under the George W. Bush administration for discriminating against minority customers.) Essentially, Cracker Barrel is thought to have gone woke. “We take no pleasure in reporting that Cracker Barrel has fallen,” one conservative organization tweeted, as if it were a city being sacked by barbarians. One of the right’s chief demagogues, Christopher Rufo, who never misses a trick, even jumped in on the action:
And for good measure, here’s a tweet from conservative Hillsdale College that I think captures the entire thing:
Now, most well-adjusted adults would probably look at this and say, “This is all totally ridiculous,” but the United States is not made up of well-adjusted adults; it’s made up of Americans. It may seem patently absurd, but I think this entire “controversy” tells us a lot about the mentality of the American right and the state of the national culture.
Cracker Barrel, of course, is not a real old country store or restaurant; It’s a replica of an old country store, an institution which had already gone the way of the dodo by the time the chain was founded in 1969. Conceivably, people could be nostalgic for the old stores in the early days of Cracker Barrel, but by now, people are nostalgic for the nostalgia, for the experience of going to a Cracker Barrel itself. As the Bulwark blog writes, it’s “a Xerox of a Xerox.”
There’s a fancy theoretical term for this: “simulacrum.” I’m, of course, referring to the work of the late Jean Baudrillard and his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation. You may recognize it from The Matrix, where the cover briefly appears to make the movie look smarter than it is, despite having very little to do with what happens.
Basically, a simulacrum is a representation that no longer has an actual referent; there’s no preexisting reality it refers to, it has become the reality itself. Cracker Barrel is not pointing to a remembered Americana; it directly generates the feeling of Americana through its simulation of old-timey-ness. “When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning,” as Baudrillard gnomically comments. It’s really the perfect example because Cracker Barrel wasn’t some old institution that got updated; it was always already a corporate simulation of country life. It’s a gimmick to sell gas, thought up by a Shell executive: It was meant to be plugged into the commercial matrix of the interstate highway system. People at Cracker Barrel are consuming the idea of communal wholesomeness and a pre-suburbanized society; the managers should’ve known this, but they fucked up. It’s the habit of high-tech morons to intone “we live in a simulation,” and, yeah, we do, but it’s happening at the Cracker Barrel, not because robot overlords are running the show. They messed with the matrix, and now the people are upset.
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