Truly a headline for our times

(This post is adapted from something I wrote on Facebook.)

As much as I like to hope that the United States has not actually entered its period of long decline, it seems like not a week goes by–and sometimes it’s not a day going by–when I’m not offered at least one data point in support of the idea that yes, we are indeed circling the drain and our time as the forefront nation in the world is almost up. Now, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that, but it’s the manner of our onward march into unseriousness that bothers me.

It seems, sadly, that we are becoming a stupider nation.

Today’s case study is a headline I saw on an article from Facebook, referring to a “controversy” that’s been going on for a few days now, and I have to admit that while I’m pretty thick-skinned when it comes to my ability to see what the MAGA crowd is upset about and just roll my eyes, this one has had some staying power.

Steak-n-Shake blasts Cracker Barrel for erasing its iconic past

Yeah.

If you’ve managed to not keep up with this one, the short version is: Cracker Barrel has changed its logo, simplifying it, making the font a little cleaner, and eliminating what has been a key graphic component: an old dude sitting next to a barrel.

MAGA has absolutely lost its collective SHIT over this.

It was amusing at first, it really was. I mean, what can you do besides laugh when some FOX News weirdo actually tweets out into the world his disappointment, noting that he “gave his life to Jesus in a Cracker Barrel parking lot”. I really don’t know what to do with that other than laugh. I mean, you can give your life to Jesus anywhere, I suppose, but are we really suggesting that the spot where you do it somehow must be preserved forever? Are we really suggesting that there was something about the logo on the sign on the nondescript brown building a stone’s throw from I-whatever that made you uniquely open to THE LORD!!! at that particular moment?

Had this just been another of those momentary-MAGA-freakout-of-the-day moments, it would have been fine. But for some reason, this one had legs, and it’s been in the news and dominating social media for several days now. I’ve noted this with increasing annoyance as more and more prominent MAGA “thinkers” (now there’s a term to deploy loosely) weigh in, almost invariably with some crap about how they’re never eating there again. It’s just typical MAGA crap, complete with wanton misuse of the word “woke”. But again, it’s stuck in the news, which brings me to the headline of the article linked above, where some other restaurant chain decided to enter the fray.

For one thing, let’s just state the obvious: the Steak-n-Shake people see an opportunity to maybe drive some sales by appealing to the MAGA crowd. That’s all that is. But it’s also interesting, in an infuriating way, to dig a little into that headline and what Steak-n-Shake is saying, because they’re accusing Cracker Barrel of betraying its past. Its ‘heritage’.

Let me say that again: They’re accusing Cracker Barrel of betraying its heritage.

That’s where I find myself wanting to press a pillow over my face and scream, because the very idea that Cracker Barrel has a heritage to uphold is ludicrous to the point of being literally insane.

Cracker Barrel was founded in 1969 as a chain of restaurants with a faux-Southern menu, and faux-Southern decor, and right from the get-go they focused exclusively on opening near Interstate exits. Cracker Barrel has never been real. It has never been authentic. It has always been fake. It’s a faked-out joint designed with almost clinical precision to sell the exact same menu in the exact same building on the exact same plates to the exact same clientele by the side of the exact same highway. The whole idea of Cracker Barrel, and places like it, is to serve the exact same dishes with the exact same flavors (which are always somehow simultaneously blandly seasoned and loaded with sodium) so you can drive 1200 miles over two days and eat the exact same food at every stop, without ever having to venture more than a thousand feet off the freeway. This is why all the buildings are identical, and why they are always built to face the freeway. Not the street it’s on, but the freeway at whose exit it sits.

I used to work for one of Cracker Barrel’s big competitors in the Great Lakes region, Bob Evans. Many is the exit where as soon as you reach the traffic light, there’s a Bob Evans on this side, and a Cracker Barrel on the other.

So there is exactly nothing about Cracker Barrel that is the least bit “authentic”. It is about as real as Main Street USA at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom: it’s someone’s carefully-designed and market-tested version of what a maximally inoffensive Southern-inspired restaurant would be like. This is what MAGA is flipping out about: a chain of cookie-cutter restaurants whose existence makes it possible for MAGA to eat white-coded food without ever having to actually enter a town where they might encounter those people. (Who are those people? Well, does it matter, these days?)

Cracker Barrel’s “heritage” is nothing more than a fantasy, and it’s never been anything but.

Cracker Barrel’s sales have been in decline for several years, probably for many reasons, but one thing that just about every company on Earth will do when enduring a lengthy period of sales decline is rebranding, to some degree. Some go overboard, some just tweak it around the edges. Cracker Barrel appears to have done a tweaking-around-the-edges, removing the pictorial element of their signage and updating their font a bit. But this is somehow a betrayal. Were these same weirdos freaked out when KFC ditched “Kentucky” from its name? Do they get upset every time Pepsi changes its cans? I hope not. Pepsi changes it cans more often than some people change their undergarments.

It’s beyond depressing that this kind of thing occupies our national attention in a time when we’re facing all manner of threatening issues, and I suppose I’m not helping by writing this. Right now I’m one more voice in the annoying fugue. I get it. But a larger issue here is that this whole business reveals again the degree to which MAGA’s preferred America is a pure fiction. For years people on my side of the fence have said that they want to turn back the clock, and to an extent they do, but really, they want to turn back the clock to another reality. MAGA pines for an America that never existed. They’ve cooked up this whole false America in their heads, convinced themselves that it was real, and they’ve unleashed upon the rest of us all the righteous anger they can muster because we won’t let them have the thing back that they never had in the first place. I don’t know how to solve that problem, and I fear greatly for the fate of a country where such a large portion of the population lives in utter devotion to a place that is as much a fantasy as the Star Trek future I prefer.

(Aside: As for Cracker Barrel itself? I’ve only eaten at one a few times, and it’s been quite a few years. I checked out a couple times when I was working for Bob Evans, out of curiosity and a need to know what “the competition” was doing. It was fine. The food isn’t terrible at all, it’s just…there. There is absolutely nothing memorable about it, but sometimes that’s fine, and there really is a place for a decent meal after a long day of driving when you decided to squeeze in another hundred miles and now it’s 8:30pm and you’re tired and hungry. What I actually remember most about my visits to Cracker Barrel were the check-back visits by my servers. Each time, when the server would come back to check on us after we had our main orders, they wouldn’t ask “How is everything?” or “Hey, are we doing OK?” or any of the usual questions. I assume they were trained to do this, because it’s so specific, but each time the server would ask, “Does it taste good?” I remember that because I’ve never heard that phrasing from a server, in that situation, in any restaurant.)