american iconography

the ideology of hallucination runs smack into reality

“so you think you’re an icon, well why’s that? i remember when icons meant classics.”

-DJ 8ball, space cowboys, san francisco, back in my rowdy raver youth.

fashion, culture, memes: these can all be iconic and iconic is an important idea. an icon is that which transcends, that which has instant recognition and meaning. a classic. a marker. a sort of platonic form or reference value.

for anyone gen X or older and many who are younger, the sydney sweeney jeans ad is an obvious icon, a cultivated callback to a genre that once was, the latest modern take on a corbusier chaise lounge or an homage to 1950’s sport shirts. it looks like 1,000 other things you saw your whole life, a piece of classic americana once as common as summer sunshine and about as objectionable.

i present it here as exhibit A.

on its overt level, this branding makes deep sense as jeans styles are changing, moving from the stretch-fit skinny jeans paradigm of the last 15 years back to a looser and baggy 80’s and 90’s low-rise style. it’s all of a piece: a throwback ad style to foreground a throwback clothing style. it caught the zeitgeist. it’s clever, stylish, sexy, and strong. she’s an attractive woman doing cool stuff in a cool way. sweeny looks like a bad ass, the car is epic, and this triggers appeal to women and men alike. you want to go to there.

so why has the internet and the aggrievement industrial complex of media babble-heads exploded into such a lockstep tizzy over an ad that would have been utterly unremarkable during most of living memory?

it comes down to one line:

“sydney sweeney has great jeans.”

that’s it. an embedded dad joke that has very literally gotten her and american eagle called nazis, white supremacists, eugenicists, and lynch mob inciters. i’d love to tell you that i’m taking some license on that and exaggerating, but, alas, i am not.

this is one video, but there are uncountable others like it all saying similar things.

this tearful lady is straight up convinced that this is a sign she’s in danger of being lynched. (or at least would like to appear to believe such in order to shake money out of people)

the vestigial remnants of the cancel culture mob were all out in force demanding boycotts and censorship and playing that favorite role of theater kids everywhere: the victim.

but a funny thing happened on the way to the struggle session:

nobody cared.

academia roused itself to towering rage.

yawn.

newspapers manufactured outrage at printing press scale.

yawn. snork.

the internet exploded in outpourings of tearful anxiety projection and attempted villification.

and the jeans sold out in record time.

the same group that has held such sway over the last 10-15 years (and especially the last 5 or so) suddenly found itself powerless. you can’t have a cancel culture once no one listens to you anymore. you just become a poopy diaper baby committee squalling for attention that everyone is too exhausted and (increasingly) too wise to give you anymore. the world woke up to woke and realized that it was a self-digging hole that fed on appeasement. just like giving a cookie to a screaming child, the more you gave in to their demands for “tolerance,” the less they would tolerate and the more they would demand.

the world has changed. people are deathly sick of having to play make-believe and pretend that a bunch of hyper-aggressive crybullies rampaging around in the full flower of their pathological personalities and life choices represent “normal” when what has been going on in recent years has been nothing of the sort.

it’s been a force-feeding of exotic, even insane ideas treating the public like some sort of pâté geese to be shoved full of wokester wheat, fattened for a kill to come.

it was flood-the-box level propaganda and demoralization.

very few people actually thought this was a good idea.

but everyone was forced by cancel culture mobs to pretend as though they did.

and this shows you just how far things had drifted.

the purpose of media saturation and struggle session cancel cohorts is to misrepresent reality and to manufacture false consensus. it’s a concerted effort to create and sustain an abilene paradox in which a group of people who all know damn well what a woman is all have to pretend that they don’t because they all believe that that’s what the rest of the group believes and fear to buck consensus and face cancellation/censure/punishment.

it’s false consciousness around false consensus.

such structures are inherently a function of media and discourse control and of fear. you need to control the message, and you need to be able to threaten immediate, predictable, and severe consequences for expressing wrongthink.

it’s basically one big game of “the emperor’s new clothes” played at gunpoint. any mouthy kids uttering phrases like “he’s naked” go straight to gulag.

sound far fetched?

it was not long ago that “pretend that this is your standard of beauty and empowerment or else” was the law of our media jungle.

it’s also why those in command of such cultural rule by abilene paradox are so keen to erase and replace history with piles of made-up nonsense, pulling down old heroes and values that they may not stand as indictment of the doctrine they desire to force-feed to the populace.

the very idea that your society was ever different or that such difference was, to the extent that it did exist, tolerable must be memory-holed. no one may ever doubt that oceania has always been at war with eastasia.

if you are allowed to know your own history, it might become painfully clear that this:

is not even new, not even the dad joke about “great jeans.”

it’s a rehash of a calvin klein ad from the 80’s featuring brooke shields.

watch this ad, which elicited (to my knowledge) basically zero controversy at the time.

imagine this ad today.

now, for some real fun, imagine the CK ad with the “pregnant man” above in 1980.

see the drift? that’s what’s being defended.

and it’s simply indefensible.

it’s one thing to say “i should be free to express my identity.”

fine. great. that’s a discussion that can be had and where i would side with most behavior from peaceful people.

but “i am the benchmark, the center of the curve, and you are the problem and need to be suppressed and mitigated and adjust yourself to me” is a very different proposition.

and it’s simply indefensible.

you cannot just tell people, “this is normal,” “obesity is healthy,” or “if a man (or a woman) will not date a woman because she has a penis, that’s transphobic” (people really claim this by the way and disagreeing with it has been treated as hate speech) and expect to be believed or to become a cultural touchstone.

and people are exhausted by it, desperate to return to a different time and a set of standards more in line with their lived (and biological) experience and preferences.

those in charge of the content of the hallucinatory terrain of abilene have gone quite mad and the vision has lost fidelity, becoming distorted and inhuman to the point where no one wants to play.

the world would like the world back as sense supplants the senseless.

obviously, this is not welcome news to those who have had such success of late dominating the world and compelling it to dance to discordant tunes. the involuntary imposition of increasingly insane mandatory inclusiveness and mental health crises presented as virtuous lifestyle choices is over, and it is not lamented.

this seems sudden to the folks who had managed to be in charge of this parade and they are disoriented, lost, and scared.

for them, the whole world just flipped.

but their perspective is as lacking as their logic.

what’s amazing is that they are not lying. they really truly think that this is “nazi propoganda” of a scale that will wind up in the history books.”

they are, in fact, that disoriented and miscalibrated.

i told you that this was the most important graph in politics right now.

and it is.

this is carefully constructed self-hatred that has been used to induce this group to intense levels of fealty in exchange for the right to wield the whip hand and crybully others. in their desperate drive to distance themselves from themselves, they become impossibly externalized. none of that around which they allege their lives to revolve possesses reason or even substance.

the causes they espouse are false and incidental. they do not care about eugenics or racism, they care about tribal power and their ability to wield some piece of it and to play at “punch no punchbacks.”

easy test:

if you had run an ad with this picture of beyoncé and said “beyoncé has great jeans!” would any of team “ruffled feathers” have so much as twitched their plumage?

nope.

they would have loved it and attacked anyone who disagreed as racist.

the objective fact is that both of these women have great genes.

this hardly seems a controversial position.

so why is it OK to say this about one of them and not the other?

the agitariat will declare that this is about race and structural privilege, but it’s not.

it’s about power.

they experience the empowerment of a woman like sydney as an assault on them because they see power as a zero sum game.

but so intense is this will to power that it cannot be admitted, least of all to themselves.

they are absolutely sincere to the point of non-interrogatable delusion on this topic.

it’s grinding them to dust because none of this works anymore.

the magic words have lost their power. yell “racist! sexist! structural oppressor!” until you sprain your tonsils.

outside of your ever-shrinking always on rage tribe, no one cares.

a bit over two years ago, i wrote about “how to slay a magic word cult” and opined that woke was over the minute it became OK to call it out.

your speech is hate and their hate is tolerance.

the whole world was made a safe space for oppressive, dictatorial hallucinations masquerading as world views and exclusion oriented tyranny of the other side doing business as inclusive big love fluffy bunny pluralism.

until this unified edifice started showing cracks, it was very successful in essentially acting like an abusive spouse: coercion, intimidation, physical and emotional abuse, projection, making you feel unsafe while blaming it on you for making them feel unsafe, gaslighting, and endlessly doing to you exactly what they claim you are doing to them and claiming victim status so that when they attack you it’s “see what you made me do?”

this stuff is textbook.

and it unravels the same way.

take it from kitty:

the picosecond it started being OK to call it out, woke was over.

many doubted this, but here we are in the great unraveling.

the indignance oppression industrial complex has become a marketing tool, a spread vector for positive memes. their rage and affront is brand validation.

i have seen estimates that american eagle pulled in $300 million in sales in one day on this campaign and got $65 million of free media exposure.

honestly, i had fogotten they were even a brand until last week.

everyone remembers now.

arby’s and dunkies have both jumped in.

others will follow. the deluge is here.

this is not “an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness,” it’s just the end of an unbridled cultural shift against whiteness.

it’s just a return to “being me is OK too.”

this is only making those losing narrative control rage more intensely in their impotence and incomprehension.

they truly believe the world is about to be with them. they learned nothing from bud light, jaguar, kamala, big timmy walz, or little harry sisson.

they fell for the consent they manufactured and assumed it was sincere. it wasn’t. it was just fear.

mainstream hearts and minds had not been won, merely silenced.

but the preference falsification bubble burst.

and the cultural majority has found itself again.

it likes pretty girls and dad jokes, freedom and laughter, and being a little offensive because it’s fun and funny and because actual grown-ups can take it and bond over it.

it likes the approachable, low make up, “looks like an actual person” models instead of a plasticine uncanny valley, lip filler duckface goblin like lauren sanchez or the wobbling walruses in swimsuits festooning sports illustrated.

it always did.

it just gets to say so again.

the fragile flowers of woke offered up some really stark choices, and no one ever really bought what they were selling.

the A/B test was never a success, but the brand mistook suppressing dissent for winning.

when asked, “hey, which image more closely aligns with your core values?” everyone always knew the answer.

when told “this is the future” and “this is the way forward,” everyone always feared that it might be but hoped that it wasn’t.

the relief is palpable.

and no one is going back.

(if you think these two topics are unrelated, you have not been paying attention)

and once it became OK to mock these people

all their power was gone.

the brand of “woke” and “dictatorship, equity, and intrusion” has become an anti-brand and the people selling it so abhorrent that whatever they criticize becomes coveted and hip.

they have run out of tricks in the bag. they could not convince, and now they can no longer compel.

their “solutions” were the problems.

and the world has consigned them to the dustbin of discarded idology,

we are living through a phase change where society of a sudden comes as one to once more know its own mind and realize that what it thought to be the majority was just a tiny faction with a megaphone monopoly.

in the underlying world, not that much had really changed.

it was all perception and seeming.

and it ultimately got too obvious that we had departed from reality, and people woke up.

and we are so back.

and “icons” still means “classics.”

and we will choose a better way.

because that’s how we roll.

together.

“gato has great jeans”