Nutritional Facts: This introduction contains more word calories than the main dish essay, but the entire post serves one. Your word-caloric needs may vary.
Every day there are several moments where I shake my head and say, “How in the world did you of all people end up defending conservative family values, men as a sex class, and how is it you railing against the left where you lived for 41 years?”
Only a few of you reading this actually know me, or knew me as I was most of my adult life. You know that I grew up in a deranged household, and that I used to be a liberal leftist. But you didn’t read my lunatic rantings “from the other side,” most of you. There were plenty.
This morning, one such maybe-still-that-person-but-reconsidering responded to what you’ll see below, after this introduction. He admitted that he hadn't thought any more deeply about it than thinking how much he loved seeing "the rednecks" "melt down" over some stupid restaurant chain.
He said he hadn't thought it through, and now he was understanding that ordinary people are tired of being told they're trash and stupid and unsophisticated by mainstream culture. But he still admits he loves to make fun of "those people" "on the other side."
I fired off a tart response about how he was insulting even when he was being cordial. Then, as I often do, I deleted the first draft that flies out of my fingers before my brain engages.
The fact that he's willing to reconsider, and that he said so, needs to be enough. I want to demand perfection and instant change, but that's unreasonable and counterproductive. Lacking patience is one my character flaws.
I'm choosing to take a leap of faith, at least as a temporary stance, to see how it wears. If I were a believer, I would say that God is rubbing my nose in who and what I used to be and reminding me that I still have work to do to be a better person than I was.
It cuts you down to size to see your own behavior in someone else, feel the disgust, and realize that's what other people felt when you acted this way.
The truth about who I used to be and why is this: I’m just poor white trash who came from a trailer park, born to a teen mother and no father. I grew up mostly on welfare, 20-year-old cars or bus passes, Salvation Army clothes, through a dozen different cheap apartments. As a teen I was put in a home for boys.
My people are poor white trash, and I just hide it underneath a fancy vocabulary and a nice haircut.
I went to a snotty college to get a snotty degree specifically and mainly out of shame for being trash and a desire to be somebody “better.” My political and cultural persona for most of my life was about running away from the shame of my childhood so I could look down on other people like me and feel better about myself.
Since parasociality online is weird, I feel compelled to say this: When I write essays like this, I am not fishing for compliments. I’m not trying to get readers to tell me what a great person I am, or anything like that. It probably looks like I’m doing the humble-brag, but I’m not.
What I’m trying to do is demonstrate an honest example. Yeah, I do hope other people like former-me will reconsider, and I hope they can see or hear something in what I say that’s enough for them to latch onto and say, “Maybe there is something for me to reconsider, and maybe that doesn’t make me a Bad Person even if I end up believing something non-leftist.”
Thank you for reading.—Josh
Those saying "who cares, it's just a chain restaurant," or "It was always fake anyway," and "what do you care—why don't you find a local restaurant?" are missing the point.
People objecting to the rebranding of Cracker Barrel are NOT simply reacting to Cracker Barrel alone. They're not lunatics who have an unnatural love for a middling, generic chain of restaurants.
Really and truly. This is not about "Cracker Barrel."
This is about American culture.
People are reacting against the willful, deliberate, snotty-behind-a-smile middle finger that "tastemakers" have been giving to ordinary Americans. To Southerners. To conservatives. To normal, middle of the road people with sense, whether they're Democrats, Republicans, or something else.
Since at least the 1960s, there has been a conscious and successful effort to disfavor ordinary working class Americans and American culture. To make non-leftists, and "unsophisticateds" the object of scorn, derision, insult, and mockery.
It has worked. This is why all you have to do to convey "this person is stupid" in mainstream America is to affect a Southern/country accent.
This is real. All of you see it.
It's gone on for decades, but it has "jumped the shark" in the past 10 years, and got turbo-charged during "Covid."
Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Cracker Barrel—yes, they're all "just soulless companies." But they are part of our world and our culture, and they convey something about our attitudes toward ourselves.
All these and more have been stripped of individuality or the simulacrum of it. They're just the most visible generic symbols of our turn away from color, whimsy, and "ordinary folks doing ordinary things" toward harsh fluorescent, cookie-cutter brutalism and "make everything look like either an industrial garage or an Apple store."
People are furious about Cracker Barrel because it's yet another middle finger in our faces from the set of people who have made political, religious, and cultural life unbearable.
"This is why all you have to do to convey 'this person is stupid' in mainstream America is to affect a Southern/country accent."
And you know what's sad? While the South certainly has its problems, some of them serious, I can FEEL the kindness in the air even in day-to-day interactions when I'm down there in North or South Carolina, even rural Virginia, where I'm from originally. International friends who've traveled the USA have remarked to me that their favorite region of the country to visit was the South because of how nice and earnest almost everyone was to them. Yes, the accents are endearing, but it's more than that; it's the little things they noticed. It makes it all the more cruel that some of the sweetest, most wholesome people in the nation are demonized as backward, unenlightened dolts by the tastemaker, laptop class. Many southerners would literally give you the shirts off their backs if they could.
Thanks Josh - another banger. In re "now he was understanding that ordinary people are tired of being told they're trash and stupid and unsophisticated by mainstream culture" I have a bit of a different take:
It's not labels like stupid, or unsophisticated, or (exactly) trash that offend me the most. It's when they imply that conservatives are the evil ones, and they're the righteous. Trans-ing kids, de-policing, flooding the country with illegals, and their myriad other positions (AND actions) are the polar opposite of righteous.
I don't care if you think I'm stupid or a knuckledragger, but when you tell me I'm rotten at the core, it's on.