Thank God we're not serious then. They can go to whatever new equivalent of "Five Guys" or "In and Out" is in fashion this week to get their Current Thing.
Where was all the outrage when Wendy's took the old-timey fonts off of the logo? Or when Arby's stylized the cowboy hat? Or when McDonalds ditched the clown? Or when Kentucky Fried Chicken became "KFC"?. Or when Bob Evans unveiled a new "farm fresh" look for its packaging?
So, was it about the barrel, or about the cracker?
"Selective outrage is when people scream at the wrongs of their enemies but fall silent at the same wrongs committed by their friends." -- Unknown
> Where was all the outrage when Wendy's took the old-timey fonts off of the logo? Or when Arby's stylized the cowboy hat? Or when McDonalds ditched the clown? Or when Kentucky Fried Chicken became "KFC"?. Or when Bob Evans unveiled a new "farm fresh" look for its packaging?
It was there then too. There were laments for Wendy's restyle, and one still reads complains about the change in McDonalds branding and style.
But also none of them were seen as icons of the "deplorables" side of the culture wars. A mere corporate rebranding is not the same as a corporate rebranding that looks like removing its Southern/old timey trappings.
What was more of an "icon of the deplorables" than Kentucky Fried Chicken?
Even when NASCAR banned the "Civil War, Second Place" surrender flag, the outrage seemed to last about two days max.
Cracker Barrel? I had just assumed it was a moribund brand the carcass of which was long in the process of being stripped by private equity anyway. If that's what it takes to be an "icon" these days, then they'd better get themselves some better icons.
Probably not. But the same people who likely go there seemed pretty worked up over Starbucks holiday cups even though they'd probably never been in one either. All this manufactured outrage simply has to stop.
That's right. It's Buc-ees now. If I'm lucky, I'll be long dead when they deal with the backlash over ditching their chipmunk or whatever it is. By then, they'll have shrunkflated all the good stuff anyway.
> What was more of an "icon of the deplorables" than Kentucky Fried Chicken?
KFC has been a global generic franchize for decades, nothing Southern specific about it. And the name was shortened like 35 years ago - I'm pretty sure even without social media, there was some complains back then too.
> Even when NASCAR banned the "Civil War, Second Place" surrender flag, the outrage seemed to last about two days max.
Well, I don't think this one will keep up long either...
Gunnar, I don't think it is about Cracker Barrel. It's another straw on the camel's back. It is about normies who think a formerly decent and dependable restaurant experience while traveling is now pretty crappy, and are rightly pushing back at elites--girl bosses--who think the problem is branding.
I also think it ties in to the fact that normies (and I count myself as one) don't want a lot of the crap the elites think we want: AI in every facet of our lives, self-driving cars, technology that prioritizes safety and wrings all the fun out of life, faucets that we can't control the flow or temperature of the water. In short, we're tired of being treated as consumers. And quit f'ing with everything.
I somewhat understand that. But it's sort of as duplicitous as "normies" complaining about how the general stores downtown went out of business because they would rather shop at the big box store with an insipid smiley face as a logo. Patronize a business and make it successful enough that the owners don't even *think* about changing the logo https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Coca-Cola_logo.svg .
I'm just gonna point out that in the past couple years the food has genuinely gotten worse, so new branding isn't going to save them. I think Ted is right: Cracker Barrel was never really Country, they just tried to look it. Let 'em sink from sight, and patronize the good local restaurants.
The difference now is that in the last five years, the culture of online outrage has taken on an enormous life of its own. People are being spoonfed hyperbolic outrage by the shovelful thanks to how much time we as a collective culture spend online.
So of course a beloved brand makes a change and people are going to throw fits. No one knows how to healthily process this stuff anymore.
Sorry, this is a red herring fallacy. Analogies are considered poor logic. You are ignoring that the country is in the middle of a cultural revolution. A Neo Marxist culture war or so called "woke" phenomena which also is a misnomer that minimizes the concentrated political and industrial effort to move us toward a Maoist China.
It's not about the packaging as much is it about a devious adherence to class warfare in the guise of racism. it's also worth remembering that the American financial class has always been enamored of socialisms of one sort or another. Recall only its role in the financing of the three great socialisms of the early 20th century: Lenin, Roosevelt, and Hitler.
Two main reasons with woke morality and the ruling class are destroying the values that historically have been an obstacle to state power such as individualism self-reliance and self-responsibility and secondly by promoting the idea that one's group identity determines whether one is a victim or an oppressor the ruling class are executing a strategy of divide and conquer, they are pitting race against.
Race gender against gender Rich against poor and they are in inciting the masses to fight amongst each other and in the process Overlook the real danger that should unite us the unceasing growth of centralized estate control. The promotion of group identity politics—where individuals are categorized primarily by race, gender, or class—creates internal conflicts within society. By framing people as either victims or oppressors, the ruling elite manipulates social tensions, distracting attention from systemic issues like government overreach.
Your comparison, intentional or poor judgement? diverts attention from this cultural revolution which has been fought against other corporations....succesfully. Nobody has forgotten anything and the outrage is anything but selective,
Target,which lost $2.4–$12 billion in sales and 2.5 million shoppers in 2025, with a confirmed 3.8% sales drop in Q1, partly linked to Starbuck’s anti-DEI campaign and subsequent boycotts. Target’s CEO resigned in 2025 due to the sales drop and boycott pressure following the DEI rollback. Would you like a complete list of corporations which have caved to the constant public pressure against "woke" and "Dei" policies. They would be a much more reasonable analogy than simple brand changes that occurred 25 years ago that had different motivations?
Currently, Ted is the only substack I have a paid subscription. Two reasons. First reason was his interview with Rick Beato where I believed he had the pulse on the Zeitgeist of the time with music and art. The second was the realization that he was an advocate of the humanities. The Greeks had 7 disciplines people were required to study where the quadrivium were paired with the trivium. Aristotelian logic was a primary study as it's aim was to derive the truth. When fallacious reasoning is exploited right here within in his substack, it gives me great pause.
So where do the current administration's steps toward government takeovers of private industry and demands for corporate fealty fit into your narrative? That certainly feels pretty (national) socialist to me. Genuinely curious as to the cognitive dissonance required to not be more upset about that than "wokeness".
non-sequitor, veiled ad hominem and mind reading fallacy veiled all in one reply. Excellent. True student of the humanities. And you meant a communist revolution against the republic as I explained it? But you want to know my opinion on Intel? OK
The history of companies going bankrupt or broken up (to allow other units to fail) after being dropped from the Dow as a stand alone entity is very high.
A gov't bailout of a stock that can't make a new high highlights this risk. Solution to the latter, don't invest in it. I won't. I have free will through research to avoid the trap of jumping on the Intel bandwagon. NONE for those who might want me dead or a slave. See the difference?
Too big to fail bailouts not my favorite economic policy. Judges and politicians who perpetrate crimes that harms the public to forward a political agenda, against the constitution. Treason. See the difference?
And for the record, no response is considered an agreement. At least you acknowledge the woke.
I don't give a hoot about cracker barrel. What they do with their logo or their interior design. I guarantee CEO and Board of Directors in meetings doing damage control. And if they wake up Monday morning, and their stock is tanking, I won't be crying. I do care about the repercussions of political policy of the last 20 years and the effect on our daily lives.
And for the record, I agree with Ted. I don't give a crap about a faux Americana company that makes you feel good because you like the feeling of the good ole days. Not my brand whatever logo they choose.
I'm sorry to have to inform you but woke has nothing to do with Marxism
Thats just a bs right wing idea. Marxism whole philosophy is about CLASS relations not identity silos.
To think people like Pelosi or rich oligarchs like Bill Gates are communist just shows you know nothing, they are Capitalists and its rampant neoliberalist capitalism that is currently turning the western world to shit.
You might want to read something outside your far right bubble once in a while.
Excellent response, I was about to write the same. The right is so inflamed by the trigger words of woke and Marxist; most on the right can’t even define woke or provide a coherent description of Marxism, as if there were any actual Marxists still walking the earth. For the right it all comes down to tribalism and outrage with no appetite for critical thinking. Cracker Barrel was never a good chain, and if their product was any good the logo wouldn’t matter.
The old mind reading trick. If you think you can deduce my political affiliation, which is somewhere between center of left and right of Kansas you're living in a mental prison. Some humans think they are good judges of what others are thinking. In fact, your absolute conclusions are dreadful. But you being like most people on the internet without any formal training in thinking , imagine you are good at it while also believing other people are not. Your vague absolute conclusions might mean you were either drunk when you wrote it, or deeply in need of a very a remedial class on critical thinking skills before pointing fingers. And the guy before you, disrupt, thinks that listing postulates such THIS does NOT EQUAL That probably deserves a round of applause and an award for deep thinker of the year. Loserthink is a slippery slope. Unfortunately, neither one of you know the difference between syllogism and syphilis. That's not an insult. That's an objective observation based on the quality of your responses. I was afraid that Loserthink would eventually find it's way onto Ted's Substack. The writer that heralds the humanities but a segment of his readers herald hubris. As we speak, your type that made into the halls of government are being purged. Cry louder!
Sorry, I like it, or I don't like it doesn't classify as an evolutionary comment or contribution. You can't name one logical fallacy or reasoning error in my response. I'm not here for your entertainment.
I definitely believe we’re in a cultural revolution but it’s coming from AI billionaires and Republican theocrats. You’re worried about a Neo Marxist culture war? Examples? I’m worried about a President who wants to send armed troops into American cities on the flimsiest of pretexts, praying that someone will oppose him so he can ratchet up his response. No one on the right is interested in obstacles to state power at the moment. Checks and balances are a whimsical memory as courts, corporations, law firms and universities capitulate to a vengeful autocrat. Has Marxism ever been a vital force in America culture and society? There were the antics of the MLA; those were comic even at the time. The groupthink of “woke” is easily countered; the impulse behind it is as American as “liberty and justice for all.” That doesn’t sound like Das Kapital. — On the other hand I’m with you on the critical importance of the humanities and I also enjoyed Ted’s talk with Rick.
Marxism analyzes society through the lens of class struggle, dividing the world into oppressors (capitalist bourgeoisie) and oppressed (working-class proletariat). It views economic structures as the primary driver of societal conflict, with the goal of dismantling capitalism to achieve a classless society.
Woke ideology, rooted in social justice activism, also focuses on oppression but extends it beyond class to include identity-based categories like race, gender, sexuality, and other marginalized statuses. It frames society as a system of interlocking power structures that perpetuate inequality, often emphasizing systemic racism, patriarchy, or heteronormativity.
Both share a binary view of society (oppressor vs. oppressed) and a belief that societal structures (economic for Marx, cultural and systemic for woke ideology) maintain inequality. Wokeism’s focus on cultural and identity-based oppression can be seen as an evolution of Marxist ideas, particularly through the lens of neo-Marxism or critical theory.
Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School of thinkers ( Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno) were all Marxist. Objectively true. They extended Marxist theory from purely economic to class struggle based on race and identity. e: Adorno’s work, including Dialectic of Enlightenment (co-authored with Horkheimer) and Negative Dialectics, engages deeply with Marxist. Anybody in denial of this connection can research the works of the other authors and their attempt at blending Marxism and psychology.
Both marxism, and woke-ism don't acknowledge boundaries. Woke refuses to acknowledge the inherent biological differences between a man and woman. Forcing men to compete with women. Both systems eliminate meritocracy where, rewards, opportuntities, and advancement are distributed based on individual ability, effort, and achievement rather than factors like identity, status, or connections. The largest corporations have adopted this critical race theory in attempt to blur the lines between sexes, race, so as the Federal reserve system of the United States and so as a large number of judges, district attorney's and members of the political class as well as the universities who were the bullies, statist thinkers, creators of the AI billionaire class who taught Marxism and identity politics for at least the last 30 years. They tried to indoctrinate me. Where have you been? They were both taught in my obligatory Marxist class at a major university. I could produce a LONG list of politicians current in the past that have Marxist leanings and you can't think of one? Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Checks and balances? Bill Clinton: 364 executive orders
George W. Bush: 291 executive orders
Barack Obama: 276 executive orders
Donald J. Trump (first term): 220 executive orders
Joe Biden: 162 executive orders
Donald J. Trump (second term, as of August 27, 2025): 196 executive orders
Which team leads in executive orders? And which team leads in the most international conflicts? NOt this one.
Flimsiest of pretexts are just adjectives They are not reason. Postulates that groups are being bullied without the slightest context or justification isn't the work of an individual interested in the classical liberal arts, rhetorical speech, ancient art of debate, Socratic dialogue where critical thinking, and logic were the basis for everything else.....science, math, music. "Woke" is easily countered" yet you didn't even try. Believe me, if I am your debate partner, and there was one neutral moderator with the ability to decipher and count the number of logical fallacies put forward, you'd have a hard time not being eliminated.
The sum total of ALL the objections to my post, above and below, were nothing more than a list of postulates without an attempt to qualify. That's EXACTLY a sign of a distorted world view where one thinks that stating something with colorful language equals logos or truth.
Did you think your comment was clever before you wrote it? Maybe the beanie is cutting off blood flow to your brain? We can consider all options. Ok Mr. Wokster?
I usually wear proper pants i think maybe they’re called slacks, and shirts with buttons. I’ve got a small suitcase full of ties, some from my Dutch fraternity. Try to discuss on what people say, not what you presume they ‘are’ so you can intellectually grow beyond the level of a toddler. By the way your piece was incoherent gibberish.
Artists with Trump Derangement Syndrome sound exactly like this. The best part is you have a bunch of Americans owning real estate in your head and you live thousands of miles away. Classic lib mental illness
I don’t have a bunch of Americans in my head in any way, i have no idea of what you trying to refer to. I merely commented on the nonsense you wrote that it’s, wait for it, nonsense. I enjoy reading O’Rourke, there are plenty of right wing politicians whom I respect and left wing leaders whom I’m disgusted with. There must be a difference between disagreement and dismissal. Between political activity and fascism. If course I’m interested in the politics of the empire’s rulers, which is the US regime. If you’re unable to make the point you show your immaturity by name calling.
Well, you missed the point: the outrage is the signifier about moving yet one more degree of separation from reality and towards living in a simulation of the world. The sadness isn't the loss of the logo -- how trite -- rather, the sadness is about living in a dramatic reality created by the reality creators. The masses live in an alternate reality, most obviously in the screens world, but also in the "simulacrum" stuffed world filled with fake scenery that is Cracker Barrel. Those who don't understand this are the ones who reject the critique, clinging to the idea that they are living in reality, unaware of how many degrees of separation they are from what was once real. The shifting baseline is so far past the mark from previous times that these folks have no idea how far gone society is.
I like Cracker Barrel. It definitely has its own thing going on. It may well have all been planned in a boardroom 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean the restaurant sucks. I don't go often, so maybe I've missed something. But the food is still good. The menu is southern cooking, and I know of no chain restaurant that has such a unique menu. What is the equivalent to Cracker Barrel? There isn't one. Now, how many Mexican chains are there? Pizza? Burgers? Fried seafood? Fried chicken?
People might laugh when I used the word 'ambiance', but whatever that decor is, I'll take it over any other chain anywhere. And I hope to hell that the corporate wiz kids don't try to update it to some slick "latest thing" just like all the other slick latest things. Ho hum.
The old logo feels down-home. The new logo is just a boring shape. I guess it's meant to suggest a wedge of cheese, but it really doesn't.
People - everyday people, from many places - are genuinely attached to this chain b/c tiny corner stores have been replaced by chain gas/snack places, and who just sits out on the front porch anymore? Yes, it began as a contrived thing, but the people who care about these places don't necessarily see them in that way.
It strikes me as somewhat unkind to disregard the very real importance that such places can have in our lives, contrived or not. (And I do think the criticism of marketing and franchises is valid. Nevertheless...)
Also, the "cracker barrel" image - having nothing to do with this chain - is a thing in northern New England.
Trend followers are always looking for the next new thing. Nostalgia is treated as if it's, well, behind the times. We could do with a whole lot less 'trendy' and a whole lot more nostalgia.
"Enter the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in the United States. Its Corporate Equality Index is something of a benchmark that rates companies on how friendly their policies and practices are for workplace inclusion. You'll often find investment firms like BlackRock work with the HRC to judge companies, and those who fall out of favor with the HRC often find themselves facing pressure from BlackRock to raise them."
"HRC is known for pressuring companies to become more "inclusive" and leftist in nature, and if a bad score is given, it becomes a target for leftist hate, which could also result in bad press, boycott efforts, and more.
So basically, it's a leftist bullying operation, and Cracker Barrel was a prime target for bullying."
A stupid article from a questionable source. Besides, nearly all corporate decisions are made because of external forces. There's nothing "woke" about the new logo or about the current atmosphere in Cracker Barrell. This is a case of people looking for something to get worked up about.
The thing about Vance is that he's *not* a "hillbilly." (He grew up in Ohio.) Even the name he now uses isn't his original surname. One of his grandmothers married a Vance, and he took that name to look "authentic" prior to publishing his book.
If you look up the Hatfield-McCoy feud, you'll find that some Vances were involved.
Hah, I kinda knew that. But I was really talking about his doctored up autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy. If he believed what he wrote and he ran to be an Ohio senator he would be like Sherrod Brown, not shamelessly defected to MAGA under the spell of Trump whisperer Peter Thiel!
Listen, people from Appalachia are po'd about that book, with very good reason. It's wildly... well he takes pathologies in his family and slaps them on *everyone.* He also completely ignores the fact that Appalachia is not now, and never has been, all-white. Black people + other POC have been there all along. Black people were just as influential in creating what we think of as "white" musical styles - old-time, country - as actual white people were. Even some instruments - banjo in particular - originated in West Africa and evolved once they hit the English-speaking Caribbean and the US. (Banjo is also played in Haiti and some other Francophone Caribbean islands.) There's been quite a change here in recent decades per Black musicians becoming well-known and loved figures in both old-time and country.
Vance has been challenged by a bunch of writers from Appalachia, of all colors and ethnicities. It does hurt to see how widely believed he is as a fake expert on Appalachia's people and culture.
"You have to force behaviors, and at BlackRock, we are forcing behaviors,"
Who said that?
There's also nothing particularly southern about the new logo of the current atmosphere at Cracker Barrel. People who are looking for that can go somewhere else.
I was inviting you to consider the moral bankruptcy of right-wing views like the ones expressed on the website you mentioned. Perhaps you thought I was bullying you, or shaming you for promoting intolerance, and for that I apologize.
My Views & Politics are all over the place Left/Right & everywhere because every issue is Not cut & Dried (don't ANYONE assume I support the Orange Turd & Friends in anyway - Especially their phony rotten claim to being Christian ) but in this comment - "What an Idiotic comment" I totally agree with you.
If you want to get worked up over something related to Blackrock, get outraged over the firm buying every house that is not nailed down and turning it all into rental property. That drives up home prices because fewer houses are available to buy. Period. Amazing how the media will cover NIMBY movements or regulations and blame all of them for housing prices yet overlook the far bigger contributions of vulture capitalism.
The phenomenon of private equity and other investors buying up all the reasonably priced housing to take it off the market, and turn it into rental property, is a further exploitation of the poor and middle class by the rich. The resulting rentals are much more highly priced than they would have been in a free market. Just as the houses are. This assault on the free market is not frequently discussed.
That is what I was complaining about / trying to explain. Sharpening up my pitchfork! (If there were actually a free market, prices would adjust according to the old rules. They did, pretty much, until the corporate vultures were allowed to participate.)
Please quit while you're at least even. You don't seem to read the posts before throwing out inane, irrelevant comments. Or maybe you just don't like women speaking their minds.
I can tell you from decades of experience in brand design that if you change a trademark, people will scream bloody murder. It's usually not the customers, though, who don't even notice most of the time. It's the design community.
Here's the embarrassing truth: Designers of logos are jealous of firms who get the big juicy assignments. They're always sure (or pretend to be sure) that they could've done a better job, that their taste is superior, that they're the more deserving of that project and the money it brings. That's all there is to it. Now you know.
As to the actual redesign, it's pretty good for what it needs to do. I'd give it an A-minus. In two years' time everyone will be fake-loving the new one and scoffing at the old one, if they even remember it. I can give you scores of examples, but I don't want to distract from Ted's beautifully simple point.
I was a "Commercial Artist " for a time. Even did many Logos & Card designs. It was fun until around the change to all Digital in all things. I embraced it to a point. But got out of that world when you couldn't do anything else & even Logos morphed onto the Bland Lifeless things they are today.
That's a good observation. What happened, it seems to me, is that the interest in corporate identity was overtaken by an interest in website design. When corporate budgets moved over to web design, the corporate identity business dried up, almost overnight.
Oh, but it's everywhere - particularly in book cover design and illustration. While I've seen some excellent digital book cover design, my favorites (ironically) imitate physical media - paintings, drawings, scratchboard, etc.
I wish publishers would use both physical and digital media for covers.
Marty, I'm not so sure anyone will fall in love with the new logo. The old one is about connecting with other human beings. The new one is... a shape. That could be interpreted as a wedge of cheese, maybe. It doesn't have a human element, though. Bad move!
You may be asking too much of a logo. One of the great trademark designers of the 20th century, Paul Rand, famously said that a company doesn't get its power from its logo; the logo gets it power from the company. If people love the company and its products, they'll become attached to the logo. The logo can be beautifully designed or badly designed, but in the end it's a just signifier for the feeling people have about their experience. I think this is Ted's point. If you want to fix a brand, don't worry so much about the logo. Fix the experience instead.
Agreed, but this is about a restaurant chain, so I think the new logo is too abstract for its purposes.
Big corporations, airlines, etc. are another thing entirely. But this is supposed to be about "down home" food, and that new logo just doesn't communicate that at all.
Ah, yes—the death of authenticity, served lukewarm with a side of reheated biscuits. The Cracker Barrel panic is less a populist uprising than the sound of a thousand nostalgia junkies mainlining brand equity and calling it heritage. You’d think BlackRock snuck into Meemaw’s kitchen at midnight and burned down her cast-iron skillet.
The drawl in country music? A performance. The boots? A costume. Cracker Barrel? A Crate & Barrel with banjo Muzak and a porch tacked on. If you want actual “country values,” go buy your chicken-fried steak from a family diner that still knows how to use a skillet. Otherwise, keep signing those online petitions to bring the barrel back. It’s the perfect American act of rebellion: loudly demanding authenticity from a corporation while dining on frozen hashbrown casserole.
Country music accents are often Appalachian accents, and may or may not be performative. There are multiple “Southern” accents, including Appalachian accents, all of which are much more common in rural areas. Most people with stronger Southern/Appalachian accents can code switch it on and off. This was actually a topic on NPR recently.
Boots are regional but are frequently seen in real life in areas where people ride Western. They are standard daily wear for many in those areas. I have yet to see someone barrel race without a cowboy hat and boots. May or may not be performative.
Cracker Barrels are primarily highway restaurants that serve country-style food that usually isn’t available in restaurants in urban areas, such as pinto beans with cornbread and salt pork, chicken fried steak, biscuits with sausage gravy, etc. People in rural areas usually do eat non-chain versions locally or cook it themselves. People who like traditional country food don’t always live in rural areas and can’t always cook well.
Barrel racing competitors ride Western by default. You don't compete if you only ride English. Even Back East, where I'm from.
Cowboy hats and boots are popular everywhere, including rural New England. I went to a county fair in southeastern Connecticut and couldn't get over the number of young men wearing 10 gallon hats and coewboy boots!
There are not a few Black old-time and country musicians who have Appalachian accents. Valerie June, for example. Rhiannon Giddens is from NC, but she's got a lovely regional accent as well.
I have to say that there's an awful lot of prejudice toward Appalachian culture that sits all wrong with me. I grew up in a similar region and was embarrassed by it and kind of hated it for years. Now that I'm older and have lived in various places, I've lost some of those youthful prejudices. Like it or not, I'm from this place, and even though I'm not a country fan, i know the music is deeply meaningful to Americans from many rural - and urban - areas. My love for jazz and R&B, etc. doesn't give me some kind of cultural "superiority" award. Please, Mr. Trujillo, let people love the music that speaks to them. Listen to some of the best material, and folks might find that it speaks to them as well.
Also, old-time, bluegrass and country have followings/fans in many European countries + what might seem very unlikely places. West and Central African countries, for example. Country 78s were widely marketed in Africa by the British HMV record label, and people really loved (for example) Jimmie Rodgers' guitar technique. I have some Nigerian country cassettes (digitized) from the 70s, and an Ethiopian neighbor once told me that she really loves country.
I was a snob about it until I started learning more + listening to a lot of W., Central and Southern African recordings of guitar music. People both adopted and adapted the 6 string acoustic guitar and some of the musical styles they heard on records. Today, acoustic and electric guitar are the norm in African popular music.
> If you want actual “country values,” go buy your chicken-fried steak from a family diner that still knows how to use a skillet.
People like their country shacks and "holes in the wall", but they also like to ditch urban snoberry and enjoy their "country style" corporate franchize (just one among dozens of globo franchizes if that's not too much to ask) even if it's not authentic enough for hipsters...
Kind of they can like Townes Van Zandt but also appreciate some Good Times & Tan Lines fun...
I had a similar thought yesterday, but this article articulated that thought so much better than I could. And the reference to Jean Baudrillard is excellent. One can see something similar regarding the “Old South” movement, and particularly the use of the Confederate flag. Symbols divorced from reality to the point that the symbols themselves are more real than the reality they used to represent.
In another vein, our obsession with brands and large corporations has to end. It’s Stockholm syndrome-esque. They destroyed more humane ways of life and took us captive in their soulless world; and gee-willikers isn’t it grand.
I have to disagree with you about the use of what everyone thinks is the Confederate flag but which was not, in fact, the flag of the Confederate States of America. It is specifically a battleflag, the flag of Scotland, the St Andrew's flag, something which is fitting when you consider the overwhelmingly Scots - Irish ancestry of most of the soldiers who fought for the South.
It's a flag of resistance which became a flag of white racism. If you look at photos of Ku Klux Klan rallies in the 1920s, do you see the mass of sheeted idiots and inbreds waving that battleflag. You do not. You see almost as many Stars and Stripes as you see Klansmen. As with Habash and Arafat and their instantiation of the fantasy of a nation of Palestine which never actually existed, sometime in the 1950s, Southern white racists began to use the battleflag as a symbol, thereby trashing the flag's historical provenance. Shelby Foote, the late historian, noted the tragedy of this, and lamented that in the early 1960s, white Southerners didn't deal harshly with the creeps who were doing it. He conceded that they'd soiled the battleflag beyond repair in the minds of decent people.
Still, with the wonderful, almost magical, display of the Union Jack all over Great Britain in the last week, it's possible the Confederate battleflag could make a comeback akin to the small town tramp who disappears, has a genuine Christian conversion, and returns home, a genuine lady with a family, a decade later.
It was a Confederate battle flag - and even though lots of Southerners today say the Confederacy fought for "states' rights," all you have to do is look at the secession documents for every one of those states. Chattel slavery is front and center.
The "stars and bars" was a symbol of chattel slavery, of the "right" of one human being to hold others as chattel.
Not exactly a thing that fans of the "Lost Cause" will admit.
I don't believe the claimed Scots antecedents are real. The Klan says that about burning crosses, too.
I don't blame you for the instinct to extrapolate. It's the sign of an active mind. But given the inescapably pejorative interpretation of a person's character which the drawing of such a conclusion would be, it would have been charitable if you had asked me first.
I did point out some facts. And inasmuch as fewer than ten percent of Confederate soldiers owned a single slave, we could surmise that it was as much a cultural war, which it was, as a war for the perpetuation of a system which people realized would be obsolete by 1900.
The fact remains that the formation of the Confederacy was all about the "peculiar institution."
I am well aware that most soldiers came from poor backgrounds - yet they *still* fought for the Confederacy, and ended up being memorialized as "the sacred martyrs of the Confederacy" on far too many monuments throughout the Southern states. Fighting for the Confederacy really *did* mean fighting for enslavement and its horrors. Any attempt to explain that away is revisionism - and a lie.
As a Northerner, I'm aware that racism is a very serious problem in all 50 states. But only in the South did it become legislated and institutionalized, after Reconstruction was ended by the Wilmington, NC Insurrection.
I don't mean to be insensitive. I lived in the South for a time. The stars and bars has troubled me since I was in grade school and saw people like Lester Maddox and George Wallace tout their segregationist views and practices on the evening news. Of course, we also saw footage of Civil Rights protesters being beaten, having attack dogs set on them, firehoses turned on them. And the coverage of Dr. King's assassination.
For me, though, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and the death of 4 very young girls ('older than me, went to church and Sunday School like me) is what *really* made me wince away whenever i saw the stars and bars.
FWIW, people in the mid-Atlantic states were pretty free with the n-word + many other racial, ethnic and religious slurs back then. Many still are. People here - some, anyway - have always displayed the stars and bars. The KKK had real presence here at one time, too. Now it's semi- underground, but I have a friend who accidentally came upon a cross burning one night, not all that many years ago.
So maybe nobody's hands are entirely clean - white people, i mean - no matter what state they're from.
I'm southern, seventy - three years old, so there is a good chance I've seen things you've only seen film of or read about: blacks humiliated on account of their race.
The first time was in 1957, when I was five, on a bus in Little Rock. We had been uprooted from our home the year before because of an economic downturn, so I had already figured out that the world was not a benign place, but I think what I saw and heard in that moment was my real introduction to the dysphoria which pervades it. I hate virtue signaling, but I do ask you to believe me that after I became really aware of the segregation system, in 1960, I thought the whole thing was evil.
Flags can have second lives. In my first post on this matter I alluded to the rather shocking fact that the Union Jack has been displayed without irony in Ireland in the last few days. The Irish have concluded that while they may not like the English, uncontrolled Third World immigration poses a greater threat to what used to be Great Britain than the English do to the Irish.
Clearly, the Nazi flag is beyond rehabilitation, but as a symbol of resistance to tyranny, the Confederate battleflag may not be. It's curious that Che Guevara's face has been a T shirt icon for forty years, probably because he looked as insolent as Jim Morrison at his best. But Morrison was harmful only to himself, while Che was a lusty murderer who Castro may have sent to South America in the hope that he'd get himself killed.
We had the coverage of Dr. King's assassination on until it ended that night.
Maybe you didn't see what i said about the killings at the 16th St. Baptist Church? I was younger than those 4 girls, but not *that* much younger.
I also have Vietnam footage, including self-immolations by monks, kinda burned into my brain, b/c I saw it live. I saw live footage of George Wallace body-blocking a building James Meredith needed to get into.
So when i speak about the Klan here, and racial slurs here, I'm referring to the 60s *and* to right now. Worst, most racist city in my state is Philadelphia. Then and still.
Also, I'm no fan of Fidel or Che.
And the racist reasons for Irish people displaying the Union Jack don't surprise me at all. Though I'm not sure which "Third World" countries you're referring to.
I do know that Gen X-Gen Z folks in the UK and Ireland know virtually nothing about our extremely bloody history, from what we have done to 1st Nations peoples to the hell that was chattel slavery, or why colorism and racism exist side by side here, and how pervasive they are. My hunch is that they don't know much about British colonial practice (when slavery was legal) in the Caribbean, either.
I wrote my MA thesis on a Black painter from DC. He couldn't exhibit any portraits of his family members in shows or galleries, not til the late 70s. Going into that world, albeit at a remove, was a shock. Because I'm unfamiliar with legal segregation and how cruel it was. I've known people who experienced it, though.
This is an astroturf uprising, directed by the usual suspects. "Ya'll keep yer big-city hands off our precious country way of life!" Cut to shot of Don Jr. wearing jeans.
Just curious: have you ever lived in a rural area?
It's not "astroturf" anything. They serve a lot of regional dishes and people from those regions (locals and folks who live very far from where they grew up) get a taste of normal home cooking at a chain restaurant, no less.
Please just allow people to have their own tastes. They don't have to be the same as yours to be valid.
No. You both assume I am looking down on country people because I look down on Trump and his gang. I am a country person, born of farmers on both sides. I live in the middle of nowhere. I have eaten at Cracker Barrel (which is not an old company). I associate Cracker Barrel with pre-packaged cheese and crackers from shops in shopping centers. Their stuff is honestly not great, but I'm not making fun of it and --more important-- I'm not making fun of the people who want to eat there.
I was pointing out that the outrage over the logo change did not come from diners. It came from people who will pick up any stick to beat "liberals" with. It came from political people looking for a way to score points with white voters. It came from the usual suspects. You may disagree. In my honest opinion, most of Cracker Barrel's customers are probably a bit unhappy with the logo change. I don't like it either.
I'm also convinced the ever growing rise of regional breakfast chain First Watch (14% increase in total revenue year to year) has had a major influence on their desire to rebrand Cracker Barrel. I even see knock-off similarities between the new CB restaurant interior and the First Watch decor.
I was surprised that First Watch was so big. My first experience with it was in the Cincinnati suburbs maybe two years ago, and I thought it was a fairly small Florida-based chain that had just started working its way up north. Imagine my surprise when I pulled up a list of locations and saw a bunch in the Philly area, not far from where I live.
I had a similar experience when driving cross-country and trying to find healthier food options in the food desert that is America once you get outside the major cities. And the first time dining there was kind of heavenly as they were about to close and gave us avocado toasts with easily a half inch layer of mashed avocado from edge to edge on the bread.
Sorry, I should have been more specific - I was referring to the inability to access clean organic minimally processed prepared foods at grocery stores or restaurants.
I'm sorry, but I think you're writing off a great deal of good, non-processed foodstuffs that are 1. Available in local grocery stores and farmers' markets, and 2. Have never lived in a rural area. If you had, you wouldn't be talking about a "food desert." Anyway, the term primarily refers to city neighborhoods where grocery stores are *not* easy to get to. Applies primarily to Black neighborhoods - and it's a very real thing.
Maybe you need to get out more? Seriously. (I'm from a farming area, but lived in or near cities for several decades - i can get wonderful produce, breads, meat, etc. in the rural area where i currently live.)
I think you've missed out on some great eating and hope you have a chance to rectify that. But you have to travel through small towns, on secondary roads, not highways, to find the best eating.
Sorry, next time I will make sure to write very specific biographical information about my dietary needs and restrictions and why they make it difficult to find pesticide-free fresh produce that I can eat, and provide a specific definition of what I mean when I say "food desert" as it relates to those needs and restrictions. Overall, I have a pretty dismal view of our ability to obtain nutritious and clean food in our country, unless you have the space to grow your own or can join a CSA.
And in my original comment, I was specifically referring to the difficulties in locating food that suits my diet when roadtripping across the country from one coast to the other. And I'd also like acknowledge that living in a city doesn't mean I think we have an abundance of options that rural areas lack. Its just once you're living out of a car for a week, without access to a kitchen, your choices can get quite limited. HappyCow was a great resource that led us to a handful of natural groceries and restaurants, but there were long stretches where we had to rely on simple meals of fruit and nuts.
That shallow american culture is growing more shallow should be no surprise. These people traded the most opulent human existence ever for the enchantments of the phone. As we glibly watch on little screens, the ultra wealthy siphon off our remaining wealth, and we're left talking about logos.
But thats natural law, and if you dont or wont defend what you have, you dont deserve it, simply bc someone else *will* take it.
Theres a good reason these people complained about the logo. Bc thats about all they have left. *That* is whats been passed down. Can you blame them? Their entire world is presented to them in logos and other cheap crap created to sell people shit. That *is* american consumer culture. When youve sold your life for marketing and products, shit like the logo is important.
It was a great article but i feel like it was a little like hey i went to the ocean and guess what its wet. But yeah, this shit is sad.
I wrote this comment earlier and think it rhymes closely with your sentiments:
The outrage among the logo lovers signifies moving yet one more degree of separation from reality and towards living in a simulation of the world. The sadness isn't the loss of the logo -- how trite -- rather, the sadness is about living in a dramatic reality created by the reality creators (e.g., ruling class like Black Rock). The masses live in an alternate reality, most obviously in the screens world, but also in the "simulacrum" stuffed world filled with fake scenery that is Cracker Barrel. Those who don't understand this are the ones who reject the critique, clinging to the idea that they are living in reality, unaware of how many degrees of separation they are from what was once real. The shifting baseline is so far past the mark from previous times that these folks have no idea how far gone society is into the simulacrum.
One may ask: what's the point? The point is nothing less than the Agricultural Revolution evolving to herd humans for the wealth of the tiny minority farmers, such as Black Rock. What would make you more money, a herd of goats or a herd of humans? Managing human livestock without fences requires other means of control, and that looks like slaves to fashion, brands, logos, screens, narratives/ stories, myths, "all the crap I learned in high school," and the coralling required to maintain a two-party political system based on the left-right duality: the laborer on the left and the consumer on the right, which everyone has simultaneously embodied for much of their lives. Ever wonder why life is so taken up with work and shopping -- that has been our prime function for quite some time now. "The Story of Stuff" is the story of how the farm works. Ever wonder why the farmer comes home from the market after selling a side of goat and keeps the income for themself and only spends the minimal amount managing the herd?
Yep, thats pretty much dead on, at least imo. They wont make the mistakes that led to the french revolution again. From the "american dream" through to social media, theyre perfecting their methods of controlling peoples very thoughts and feelings. And its pretty disgusting how well its working.
The silver lining is that it takes this kind of extreme pressure to bring out our most noble qualities.
I have eaten at Cracker Barrel just once and it was no great shakes. Instead of revising the logo, the chain's management should improve the quality of the meals.
> Hey, I love American traditions as much as the next bumpkin. But Cracker Barrel isn’t a tradition by any stretch of the imagination. The company was founded on September 19, 1969.
That's enough for 3 generations to have grown with it...
One correction: Southern accents are still real. City/suburbia? You're right, you pobably won't hear much difference. That's pretty much the same monoculture as everywhere else (as far as I can tell, not being a city/suburbia resident myself). But when you go rural, the drawl is not dead. It varies by intensity and flavor, and it's certainly not always slow, but it's not performative.
I wonder where the Northern Southern accent originates. If you have heard NYC Mayor Eric Adams, he sounds like he just fell off the back of a turnip truck. So do a number of his friends and appointees. It's a Black thing.
It's because of the Great Migration. Black people came North and brought their ways of speaking, cuisine, music - everything - along with them. (Just like white Southerners who came North to work in munitions factories during WWII did.)
There's plenty of good writing about the Great Migration out here. Maybe start with The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written here, other than to maybe say go a little easy on folks who genuinely were dismayed at the logo change. As someone born in 1981, I’m no spring chicken. Cracker Barrel was a staple of road trips and family vacations my entire life. The same goes for most people I know. I understand it was never authentic, but it still holds a nostalgic place for a lot of people, and it feels like each and every one of our touchstones are being dismantled. I understand that you are pointing out that this touchstone was always a fake - you are probably right. But I can hardly go back and rewrite my childhood experiences to make them more authentic.
On a different note, there are plenty of people here in the Ozarks of Missouri whose twangs and cowboy boots are 100% authentic, and I imagine the same is true in Texas if you go outside the urban centers.
35 years ago, I went to Mississippi during the Christmas holidays. I had the privilege to go to a local restaurant out in the woods/wetlands. It was a great experience. Real catfish, fried ochra (apologies my spelling sucks) fresh cornbread, etc. It was an eye opener. Never forget it. I highly recommend getting off the beaten path. There are gems everywhere.
No serious person who is making good use of having a pulse gives a rip about Cracker Barrel.
Thank God we're not serious then. They can go to whatever new equivalent of "Five Guys" or "In and Out" is in fashion this week to get their Current Thing.
Where was all the outrage when Wendy's took the old-timey fonts off of the logo? Or when Arby's stylized the cowboy hat? Or when McDonalds ditched the clown? Or when Kentucky Fried Chicken became "KFC"?. Or when Bob Evans unveiled a new "farm fresh" look for its packaging?
So, was it about the barrel, or about the cracker?
"Selective outrage is when people scream at the wrongs of their enemies but fall silent at the same wrongs committed by their friends." -- Unknown
Addendum: Q.e.d. Ponderosa Steak House in the early '70s https://substack.com/@retroist/note/c-148629617
"It was always about the Cracker." - me.
> Where was all the outrage when Wendy's took the old-timey fonts off of the logo? Or when Arby's stylized the cowboy hat? Or when McDonalds ditched the clown? Or when Kentucky Fried Chicken became "KFC"?. Or when Bob Evans unveiled a new "farm fresh" look for its packaging?
It was there then too. There were laments for Wendy's restyle, and one still reads complains about the change in McDonalds branding and style.
But also none of them were seen as icons of the "deplorables" side of the culture wars. A mere corporate rebranding is not the same as a corporate rebranding that looks like removing its Southern/old timey trappings.
What was more of an "icon of the deplorables" than Kentucky Fried Chicken?
Even when NASCAR banned the "Civil War, Second Place" surrender flag, the outrage seemed to last about two days max.
Cracker Barrel? I had just assumed it was a moribund brand the carcass of which was long in the process of being stripped by private equity anyway. If that's what it takes to be an "icon" these days, then they'd better get themselves some better icons.
Cracker Barrel regulars aren't anyone you know, obviously.
Probably not. But the same people who likely go there seemed pretty worked up over Starbucks holiday cups even though they'd probably never been in one either. All this manufactured outrage simply has to stop.
That's right. It's Buc-ees now. If I'm lucky, I'll be long dead when they deal with the backlash over ditching their chipmunk or whatever it is. By then, they'll have shrunkflated all the good stuff anyway.
> What was more of an "icon of the deplorables" than Kentucky Fried Chicken?
KFC has been a global generic franchize for decades, nothing Southern specific about it. And the name was shortened like 35 years ago - I'm pretty sure even without social media, there was some complains back then too.
> Even when NASCAR banned the "Civil War, Second Place" surrender flag, the outrage seemed to last about two days max.
Well, I don't think this one will keep up long either...
Then nobody'd better tell 'em that the Mountain Dew hillbillies were removed! https://youtu.be/dyu4Tpoq8hc .
Gunnar, I don't think it is about Cracker Barrel. It's another straw on the camel's back. It is about normies who think a formerly decent and dependable restaurant experience while traveling is now pretty crappy, and are rightly pushing back at elites--girl bosses--who think the problem is branding.
I also think it ties in to the fact that normies (and I count myself as one) don't want a lot of the crap the elites think we want: AI in every facet of our lives, self-driving cars, technology that prioritizes safety and wrings all the fun out of life, faucets that we can't control the flow or temperature of the water. In short, we're tired of being treated as consumers. And quit f'ing with everything.
I somewhat understand that. But it's sort of as duplicitous as "normies" complaining about how the general stores downtown went out of business because they would rather shop at the big box store with an insipid smiley face as a logo. Patronize a business and make it successful enough that the owners don't even *think* about changing the logo https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Coca-Cola_logo.svg .
People forget that before the white apple, and the rainbow apple, there was this logo https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Apple_first_logo.png .
I'm just gonna point out that in the past couple years the food has genuinely gotten worse, so new branding isn't going to save them. I think Ted is right: Cracker Barrel was never really Country, they just tried to look it. Let 'em sink from sight, and patronize the good local restaurants.
Not to mention the absolute skyrocketing Sodium content of their "Tasty Fixins"
That is a problem when there's no more buns.
The difference now is that in the last five years, the culture of online outrage has taken on an enormous life of its own. People are being spoonfed hyperbolic outrage by the shovelful thanks to how much time we as a collective culture spend online.
So of course a beloved brand makes a change and people are going to throw fits. No one knows how to healthily process this stuff anymore.
Articles like these are also spoon-feeding outrage to us, just in sanitized packages that let us think it's high brow commentary.
Yes. Also, it's profitable to be and/or pretend to be outraged, if you're seeking to market yourself.
So not only would people need to process things maturely, they'd also need to be willing to forego easy money to do it.
Seems unlikely.
Sorry, this is a red herring fallacy. Analogies are considered poor logic. You are ignoring that the country is in the middle of a cultural revolution. A Neo Marxist culture war or so called "woke" phenomena which also is a misnomer that minimizes the concentrated political and industrial effort to move us toward a Maoist China.
It's not about the packaging as much is it about a devious adherence to class warfare in the guise of racism. it's also worth remembering that the American financial class has always been enamored of socialisms of one sort or another. Recall only its role in the financing of the three great socialisms of the early 20th century: Lenin, Roosevelt, and Hitler.
Two main reasons with woke morality and the ruling class are destroying the values that historically have been an obstacle to state power such as individualism self-reliance and self-responsibility and secondly by promoting the idea that one's group identity determines whether one is a victim or an oppressor the ruling class are executing a strategy of divide and conquer, they are pitting race against.
Race gender against gender Rich against poor and they are in inciting the masses to fight amongst each other and in the process Overlook the real danger that should unite us the unceasing growth of centralized estate control. The promotion of group identity politics—where individuals are categorized primarily by race, gender, or class—creates internal conflicts within society. By framing people as either victims or oppressors, the ruling elite manipulates social tensions, distracting attention from systemic issues like government overreach.
Your comparison, intentional or poor judgement? diverts attention from this cultural revolution which has been fought against other corporations....succesfully. Nobody has forgotten anything and the outrage is anything but selective,
Target,which lost $2.4–$12 billion in sales and 2.5 million shoppers in 2025, with a confirmed 3.8% sales drop in Q1, partly linked to Starbuck’s anti-DEI campaign and subsequent boycotts. Target’s CEO resigned in 2025 due to the sales drop and boycott pressure following the DEI rollback. Would you like a complete list of corporations which have caved to the constant public pressure against "woke" and "Dei" policies. They would be a much more reasonable analogy than simple brand changes that occurred 25 years ago that had different motivations?
Currently, Ted is the only substack I have a paid subscription. Two reasons. First reason was his interview with Rick Beato where I believed he had the pulse on the Zeitgeist of the time with music and art. The second was the realization that he was an advocate of the humanities. The Greeks had 7 disciplines people were required to study where the quadrivium were paired with the trivium. Aristotelian logic was a primary study as it's aim was to derive the truth. When fallacious reasoning is exploited right here within in his substack, it gives me great pause.
Lastly, if you think it's just about a logo and interior design, think again. https://x.com/robbystarbuck/status/1959097759350378743
So where do the current administration's steps toward government takeovers of private industry and demands for corporate fealty fit into your narrative? That certainly feels pretty (national) socialist to me. Genuinely curious as to the cognitive dissonance required to not be more upset about that than "wokeness".
non-sequitor, veiled ad hominem and mind reading fallacy veiled all in one reply. Excellent. True student of the humanities. And you meant a communist revolution against the republic as I explained it? But you want to know my opinion on Intel? OK
The history of companies going bankrupt or broken up (to allow other units to fail) after being dropped from the Dow as a stand alone entity is very high.
A gov't bailout of a stock that can't make a new high highlights this risk. Solution to the latter, don't invest in it. I won't. I have free will through research to avoid the trap of jumping on the Intel bandwagon. NONE for those who might want me dead or a slave. See the difference?
Too big to fail bailouts not my favorite economic policy. Judges and politicians who perpetrate crimes that harms the public to forward a political agenda, against the constitution. Treason. See the difference?
And for the record, no response is considered an agreement. At least you acknowledge the woke.
I don't give a hoot about cracker barrel. What they do with their logo or their interior design. I guarantee CEO and Board of Directors in meetings doing damage control. And if they wake up Monday morning, and their stock is tanking, I won't be crying. I do care about the repercussions of political policy of the last 20 years and the effect on our daily lives.
And for the record, I agree with Ted. I don't give a crap about a faux Americana company that makes you feel good because you like the feeling of the good ole days. Not my brand whatever logo they choose.
Uncle Ben’s / Aunt Jemima? Anyone, Anyone- Bueller…
I'm sorry to have to inform you but woke has nothing to do with Marxism
Thats just a bs right wing idea. Marxism whole philosophy is about CLASS relations not identity silos.
To think people like Pelosi or rich oligarchs like Bill Gates are communist just shows you know nothing, they are Capitalists and its rampant neoliberalist capitalism that is currently turning the western world to shit.
You might want to read something outside your far right bubble once in a while.
Excellent response, I was about to write the same. The right is so inflamed by the trigger words of woke and Marxist; most on the right can’t even define woke or provide a coherent description of Marxism, as if there were any actual Marxists still walking the earth. For the right it all comes down to tribalism and outrage with no appetite for critical thinking. Cracker Barrel was never a good chain, and if their product was any good the logo wouldn’t matter.
The old mind reading trick. If you think you can deduce my political affiliation, which is somewhere between center of left and right of Kansas you're living in a mental prison. Some humans think they are good judges of what others are thinking. In fact, your absolute conclusions are dreadful. But you being like most people on the internet without any formal training in thinking , imagine you are good at it while also believing other people are not. Your vague absolute conclusions might mean you were either drunk when you wrote it, or deeply in need of a very a remedial class on critical thinking skills before pointing fingers. And the guy before you, disrupt, thinks that listing postulates such THIS does NOT EQUAL That probably deserves a round of applause and an award for deep thinker of the year. Loserthink is a slippery slope. Unfortunately, neither one of you know the difference between syllogism and syphilis. That's not an insult. That's an objective observation based on the quality of your responses. I was afraid that Loserthink would eventually find it's way onto Ted's Substack. The writer that heralds the humanities but a segment of his readers herald hubris. As we speak, your type that made into the halls of government are being purged. Cry louder!
I was actually enjoying the conversation and your comments until now. DEVOLUTION is real.
Sorry, I like it, or I don't like it doesn't classify as an evolutionary comment or contribution. You can't name one logical fallacy or reasoning error in my response. I'm not here for your entertainment.
I definitely believe we’re in a cultural revolution but it’s coming from AI billionaires and Republican theocrats. You’re worried about a Neo Marxist culture war? Examples? I’m worried about a President who wants to send armed troops into American cities on the flimsiest of pretexts, praying that someone will oppose him so he can ratchet up his response. No one on the right is interested in obstacles to state power at the moment. Checks and balances are a whimsical memory as courts, corporations, law firms and universities capitulate to a vengeful autocrat. Has Marxism ever been a vital force in America culture and society? There were the antics of the MLA; those were comic even at the time. The groupthink of “woke” is easily countered; the impulse behind it is as American as “liberty and justice for all.” That doesn’t sound like Das Kapital. — On the other hand I’m with you on the critical importance of the humanities and I also enjoyed Ted’s talk with Rick.
Marxism analyzes society through the lens of class struggle, dividing the world into oppressors (capitalist bourgeoisie) and oppressed (working-class proletariat). It views economic structures as the primary driver of societal conflict, with the goal of dismantling capitalism to achieve a classless society.
Woke ideology, rooted in social justice activism, also focuses on oppression but extends it beyond class to include identity-based categories like race, gender, sexuality, and other marginalized statuses. It frames society as a system of interlocking power structures that perpetuate inequality, often emphasizing systemic racism, patriarchy, or heteronormativity.
Both share a binary view of society (oppressor vs. oppressed) and a belief that societal structures (economic for Marx, cultural and systemic for woke ideology) maintain inequality. Wokeism’s focus on cultural and identity-based oppression can be seen as an evolution of Marxist ideas, particularly through the lens of neo-Marxism or critical theory.
Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School of thinkers ( Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno) were all Marxist. Objectively true. They extended Marxist theory from purely economic to class struggle based on race and identity. e: Adorno’s work, including Dialectic of Enlightenment (co-authored with Horkheimer) and Negative Dialectics, engages deeply with Marxist. Anybody in denial of this connection can research the works of the other authors and their attempt at blending Marxism and psychology.
Both marxism, and woke-ism don't acknowledge boundaries. Woke refuses to acknowledge the inherent biological differences between a man and woman. Forcing men to compete with women. Both systems eliminate meritocracy where, rewards, opportuntities, and advancement are distributed based on individual ability, effort, and achievement rather than factors like identity, status, or connections. The largest corporations have adopted this critical race theory in attempt to blur the lines between sexes, race, so as the Federal reserve system of the United States and so as a large number of judges, district attorney's and members of the political class as well as the universities who were the bullies, statist thinkers, creators of the AI billionaire class who taught Marxism and identity politics for at least the last 30 years. They tried to indoctrinate me. Where have you been? They were both taught in my obligatory Marxist class at a major university. I could produce a LONG list of politicians current in the past that have Marxist leanings and you can't think of one? Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Checks and balances? Bill Clinton: 364 executive orders
George W. Bush: 291 executive orders
Barack Obama: 276 executive orders
Donald J. Trump (first term): 220 executive orders
Joe Biden: 162 executive orders
Donald J. Trump (second term, as of August 27, 2025): 196 executive orders
Which team leads in executive orders? And which team leads in the most international conflicts? NOt this one.
Flimsiest of pretexts are just adjectives They are not reason. Postulates that groups are being bullied without the slightest context or justification isn't the work of an individual interested in the classical liberal arts, rhetorical speech, ancient art of debate, Socratic dialogue where critical thinking, and logic were the basis for everything else.....science, math, music. "Woke" is easily countered" yet you didn't even try. Believe me, if I am your debate partner, and there was one neutral moderator with the ability to decipher and count the number of logical fallacies put forward, you'd have a hard time not being eliminated.
The sum total of ALL the objections to my post, above and below, were nothing more than a list of postulates without an attempt to qualify. That's EXACTLY a sign of a distorted world view where one thinks that stating something with colorful language equals logos or truth.
I haven’t laughed so much in a long time a when reading your incoherent gibberish. Did you make notes while a parrot was talking?
Did you think your comment was clever before you wrote it? Maybe the beanie is cutting off blood flow to your brain? We can consider all options. Ok Mr. Wokster?
I usually wear proper pants i think maybe they’re called slacks, and shirts with buttons. I’ve got a small suitcase full of ties, some from my Dutch fraternity. Try to discuss on what people say, not what you presume they ‘are’ so you can intellectually grow beyond the level of a toddler. By the way your piece was incoherent gibberish.
Artists with Trump Derangement Syndrome sound exactly like this. The best part is you have a bunch of Americans owning real estate in your head and you live thousands of miles away. Classic lib mental illness
I don’t have a bunch of Americans in my head in any way, i have no idea of what you trying to refer to. I merely commented on the nonsense you wrote that it’s, wait for it, nonsense. I enjoy reading O’Rourke, there are plenty of right wing politicians whom I respect and left wing leaders whom I’m disgusted with. There must be a difference between disagreement and dismissal. Between political activity and fascism. If course I’m interested in the politics of the empire’s rulers, which is the US regime. If you’re unable to make the point you show your immaturity by name calling.
Or when the Starbucks mermaid lost her nipples, and then even her belly button!
After all that it makes you wonder what's really the point.
Or when the Starbucks mermaid covered up her tits!
Well, you missed the point: the outrage is the signifier about moving yet one more degree of separation from reality and towards living in a simulation of the world. The sadness isn't the loss of the logo -- how trite -- rather, the sadness is about living in a dramatic reality created by the reality creators. The masses live in an alternate reality, most obviously in the screens world, but also in the "simulacrum" stuffed world filled with fake scenery that is Cracker Barrel. Those who don't understand this are the ones who reject the critique, clinging to the idea that they are living in reality, unaware of how many degrees of separation they are from what was once real. The shifting baseline is so far past the mark from previous times that these folks have no idea how far gone society is.
I like Cracker Barrel. It definitely has its own thing going on. It may well have all been planned in a boardroom 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean the restaurant sucks. I don't go often, so maybe I've missed something. But the food is still good. The menu is southern cooking, and I know of no chain restaurant that has such a unique menu. What is the equivalent to Cracker Barrel? There isn't one. Now, how many Mexican chains are there? Pizza? Burgers? Fried seafood? Fried chicken?
People might laugh when I used the word 'ambiance', but whatever that decor is, I'll take it over any other chain anywhere. And I hope to hell that the corporate wiz kids don't try to update it to some slick "latest thing" just like all the other slick latest things. Ho hum.
Ive never been inside a cracker barrel but i do believe i agree with you completely
The old logo feels down-home. The new logo is just a boring shape. I guess it's meant to suggest a wedge of cheese, but it really doesn't.
People - everyday people, from many places - are genuinely attached to this chain b/c tiny corner stores have been replaced by chain gas/snack places, and who just sits out on the front porch anymore? Yes, it began as a contrived thing, but the people who care about these places don't necessarily see them in that way.
It strikes me as somewhat unkind to disregard the very real importance that such places can have in our lives, contrived or not. (And I do think the criticism of marketing and franchises is valid. Nevertheless...)
Also, the "cracker barrel" image - having nothing to do with this chain - is a thing in northern New England.
Trend followers are always looking for the next new thing. Nostalgia is treated as if it's, well, behind the times. We could do with a whole lot less 'trendy' and a whole lot more nostalgia.
At some point, "old" things become "new" again, anyway.
Yeah. What you said.
Exactly.
Well I guess the food went downhill so that was why the sales were disappointing. TBH I've never eaten at one!
"But the food is still good." As in Used to Be
It was still good the last time I ate there, a few months ago.
Interesting article (as always). But I think it misses a key point.
Cracker Barrel was compelled to change its image by outsiders. That's not capitalism or the free market.
See this article:
https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2025/08/22/the-disastrous-cracker-barrell-rebrand-finally-gets-an-explanation-and-it-will-surprise-no-one-n2193129?utm_source=rsmorningbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
"Enter the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in the United States. Its Corporate Equality Index is something of a benchmark that rates companies on how friendly their policies and practices are for workplace inclusion. You'll often find investment firms like BlackRock work with the HRC to judge companies, and those who fall out of favor with the HRC often find themselves facing pressure from BlackRock to raise them."
"HRC is known for pressuring companies to become more "inclusive" and leftist in nature, and if a bad score is given, it becomes a target for leftist hate, which could also result in bad press, boycott efforts, and more.
So basically, it's a leftist bullying operation, and Cracker Barrel was a prime target for bullying."
A stupid article from a questionable source. Besides, nearly all corporate decisions are made because of external forces. There's nothing "woke" about the new logo or about the current atmosphere in Cracker Barrell. This is a case of people looking for something to get worked up about.
Yes, the site was called Red State and had plenty of fawning articles about JD "hillbilly" Vance!☹️
The thing about Vance is that he's *not* a "hillbilly." (He grew up in Ohio.) Even the name he now uses isn't his original surname. One of his grandmothers married a Vance, and he took that name to look "authentic" prior to publishing his book.
If you look up the Hatfield-McCoy feud, you'll find that some Vances were involved.
Hah, I kinda knew that. But I was really talking about his doctored up autobiography, Hillbilly Elegy. If he believed what he wrote and he ran to be an Ohio senator he would be like Sherrod Brown, not shamelessly defected to MAGA under the spell of Trump whisperer Peter Thiel!
Vance went from being a liberal Dem to a "never Trump" R to what he is now. He jumps from one thing to another for power and financial gain.
I cannot stand him, for his book alone, but what he is now - it's BAD.
Listen, people from Appalachia are po'd about that book, with very good reason. It's wildly... well he takes pathologies in his family and slaps them on *everyone.* He also completely ignores the fact that Appalachia is not now, and never has been, all-white. Black people + other POC have been there all along. Black people were just as influential in creating what we think of as "white" musical styles - old-time, country - as actual white people were. Even some instruments - banjo in particular - originated in West Africa and evolved once they hit the English-speaking Caribbean and the US. (Banjo is also played in Haiti and some other Francophone Caribbean islands.) There's been quite a change here in recent decades per Black musicians becoming well-known and loved figures in both old-time and country.
Vance has been challenged by a bunch of writers from Appalachia, of all colors and ethnicities. It does hurt to see how widely believed he is as a fake expert on Appalachia's people and culture.
"You have to force behaviors, and at BlackRock, we are forcing behaviors,"
Who said that?
There's also nothing particularly southern about the new logo of the current atmosphere at Cracker Barrel. People who are looking for that can go somewhere else.
Jesus Christ was a notorious leftist bully, but nobody ever complains about that.
What an idiotic statement
I was inviting you to consider the moral bankruptcy of right-wing views like the ones expressed on the website you mentioned. Perhaps you thought I was bullying you, or shaming you for promoting intolerance, and for that I apologize.
An even more idiotic explanation. I did not feel bullied or shamed. I was merely invinting you to think twice before posting.
My Views & Politics are all over the place Left/Right & everywhere because every issue is Not cut & Dried (don't ANYONE assume I support the Orange Turd & Friends in anyway - Especially their phony rotten claim to being Christian ) but in this comment - "What an Idiotic comment" I totally agree with you.
And you have evidence that took place and caused the change?
not really!😆
If you want to get worked up over something related to Blackrock, get outraged over the firm buying every house that is not nailed down and turning it all into rental property. That drives up home prices because fewer houses are available to buy. Period. Amazing how the media will cover NIMBY movements or regulations and blame all of them for housing prices yet overlook the far bigger contributions of vulture capitalism.
The phenomenon of private equity and other investors buying up all the reasonably priced housing to take it off the market, and turn it into rental property, is a further exploitation of the poor and middle class by the rich. The resulting rentals are much more highly priced than they would have been in a free market. Just as the houses are. This assault on the free market is not frequently discussed.
What free market? That died ages ago under vulture capitalism. I fully expect another pitchfork revolution when investor greed goes a bridge too far.
That is what I was complaining about / trying to explain. Sharpening up my pitchfork! (If there were actually a free market, prices would adjust according to the old rules. They did, pretty much, until the corporate vultures were allowed to participate.)
Its basically all about stoking "Culture Clash" & their loss of Market due to Greed & trying to Stiff the Lemmings on Quality
That is what she said. Do your own reading.
Please quit while you're at least even. You don't seem to read the posts before throwing out inane, irrelevant comments. Or maybe you just don't like women speaking their minds.
I can tell you from decades of experience in brand design that if you change a trademark, people will scream bloody murder. It's usually not the customers, though, who don't even notice most of the time. It's the design community.
Here's the embarrassing truth: Designers of logos are jealous of firms who get the big juicy assignments. They're always sure (or pretend to be sure) that they could've done a better job, that their taste is superior, that they're the more deserving of that project and the money it brings. That's all there is to it. Now you know.
As to the actual redesign, it's pretty good for what it needs to do. I'd give it an A-minus. In two years' time everyone will be fake-loving the new one and scoffing at the old one, if they even remember it. I can give you scores of examples, but I don't want to distract from Ted's beautifully simple point.
I was a "Commercial Artist " for a time. Even did many Logos & Card designs. It was fun until around the change to all Digital in all things. I embraced it to a point. But got out of that world when you couldn't do anything else & even Logos morphed onto the Bland Lifeless things they are today.
That's a good observation. What happened, it seems to me, is that the interest in corporate identity was overtaken by an interest in website design. When corporate budgets moved over to web design, the corporate identity business dried up, almost overnight.
Oh, but it's everywhere - particularly in book cover design and illustration. While I've seen some excellent digital book cover design, my favorites (ironically) imitate physical media - paintings, drawings, scratchboard, etc.
I wish publishers would use both physical and digital media for covers.
Marty, I'm not so sure anyone will fall in love with the new logo. The old one is about connecting with other human beings. The new one is... a shape. That could be interpreted as a wedge of cheese, maybe. It doesn't have a human element, though. Bad move!
You may be asking too much of a logo. One of the great trademark designers of the 20th century, Paul Rand, famously said that a company doesn't get its power from its logo; the logo gets it power from the company. If people love the company and its products, they'll become attached to the logo. The logo can be beautifully designed or badly designed, but in the end it's a just signifier for the feeling people have about their experience. I think this is Ted's point. If you want to fix a brand, don't worry so much about the logo. Fix the experience instead.
Agreed, but this is about a restaurant chain, so I think the new logo is too abstract for its purposes.
Big corporations, airlines, etc. are another thing entirely. But this is supposed to be about "down home" food, and that new logo just doesn't communicate that at all.
Will wait patiently for some of these examples in a future Scarlett Files post. ;o)
Ah, yes—the death of authenticity, served lukewarm with a side of reheated biscuits. The Cracker Barrel panic is less a populist uprising than the sound of a thousand nostalgia junkies mainlining brand equity and calling it heritage. You’d think BlackRock snuck into Meemaw’s kitchen at midnight and burned down her cast-iron skillet.
The drawl in country music? A performance. The boots? A costume. Cracker Barrel? A Crate & Barrel with banjo Muzak and a porch tacked on. If you want actual “country values,” go buy your chicken-fried steak from a family diner that still knows how to use a skillet. Otherwise, keep signing those online petitions to bring the barrel back. It’s the perfect American act of rebellion: loudly demanding authenticity from a corporation while dining on frozen hashbrown casserole.
Country music accents are often Appalachian accents, and may or may not be performative. There are multiple “Southern” accents, including Appalachian accents, all of which are much more common in rural areas. Most people with stronger Southern/Appalachian accents can code switch it on and off. This was actually a topic on NPR recently.
Boots are regional but are frequently seen in real life in areas where people ride Western. They are standard daily wear for many in those areas. I have yet to see someone barrel race without a cowboy hat and boots. May or may not be performative.
Cracker Barrels are primarily highway restaurants that serve country-style food that usually isn’t available in restaurants in urban areas, such as pinto beans with cornbread and salt pork, chicken fried steak, biscuits with sausage gravy, etc. People in rural areas usually do eat non-chain versions locally or cook it themselves. People who like traditional country food don’t always live in rural areas and can’t always cook well.
Barrel racing competitors ride Western by default. You don't compete if you only ride English. Even Back East, where I'm from.
Cowboy hats and boots are popular everywhere, including rural New England. I went to a county fair in southeastern Connecticut and couldn't get over the number of young men wearing 10 gallon hats and coewboy boots!
Lisa - THIS
There are not a few Black old-time and country musicians who have Appalachian accents. Valerie June, for example. Rhiannon Giddens is from NC, but she's got a lovely regional accent as well.
I have to say that there's an awful lot of prejudice toward Appalachian culture that sits all wrong with me. I grew up in a similar region and was embarrassed by it and kind of hated it for years. Now that I'm older and have lived in various places, I've lost some of those youthful prejudices. Like it or not, I'm from this place, and even though I'm not a country fan, i know the music is deeply meaningful to Americans from many rural - and urban - areas. My love for jazz and R&B, etc. doesn't give me some kind of cultural "superiority" award. Please, Mr. Trujillo, let people love the music that speaks to them. Listen to some of the best material, and folks might find that it speaks to them as well.
Also, old-time, bluegrass and country have followings/fans in many European countries + what might seem very unlikely places. West and Central African countries, for example. Country 78s were widely marketed in Africa by the British HMV record label, and people really loved (for example) Jimmie Rodgers' guitar technique. I have some Nigerian country cassettes (digitized) from the 70s, and an Ethiopian neighbor once told me that she really loves country.
I was a snob about it until I started learning more + listening to a lot of W., Central and Southern African recordings of guitar music. People both adopted and adapted the 6 string acoustic guitar and some of the musical styles they heard on records. Today, acoustic and electric guitar are the norm in African popular music.
> If you want actual “country values,” go buy your chicken-fried steak from a family diner that still knows how to use a skillet.
People like their country shacks and "holes in the wall", but they also like to ditch urban snoberry and enjoy their "country style" corporate franchize (just one among dozens of globo franchizes if that's not too much to ask) even if it's not authentic enough for hipsters...
Kind of they can like Townes Van Zandt but also appreciate some Good Times & Tan Lines fun...
AI-generated comment on Substack?
No, native of the Blue Ridge on Substack. I don’t use AI to comment, either. Out of curiosity, why would you think I was using AI?
I had a similar thought yesterday, but this article articulated that thought so much better than I could. And the reference to Jean Baudrillard is excellent. One can see something similar regarding the “Old South” movement, and particularly the use of the Confederate flag. Symbols divorced from reality to the point that the symbols themselves are more real than the reality they used to represent.
In another vein, our obsession with brands and large corporations has to end. It’s Stockholm syndrome-esque. They destroyed more humane ways of life and took us captive in their soulless world; and gee-willikers isn’t it grand.
I have to disagree with you about the use of what everyone thinks is the Confederate flag but which was not, in fact, the flag of the Confederate States of America. It is specifically a battleflag, the flag of Scotland, the St Andrew's flag, something which is fitting when you consider the overwhelmingly Scots - Irish ancestry of most of the soldiers who fought for the South.
It's a flag of resistance which became a flag of white racism. If you look at photos of Ku Klux Klan rallies in the 1920s, do you see the mass of sheeted idiots and inbreds waving that battleflag. You do not. You see almost as many Stars and Stripes as you see Klansmen. As with Habash and Arafat and their instantiation of the fantasy of a nation of Palestine which never actually existed, sometime in the 1950s, Southern white racists began to use the battleflag as a symbol, thereby trashing the flag's historical provenance. Shelby Foote, the late historian, noted the tragedy of this, and lamented that in the early 1960s, white Southerners didn't deal harshly with the creeps who were doing it. He conceded that they'd soiled the battleflag beyond repair in the minds of decent people.
Still, with the wonderful, almost magical, display of the Union Jack all over Great Britain in the last week, it's possible the Confederate battleflag could make a comeback akin to the small town tramp who disappears, has a genuine Christian conversion, and returns home, a genuine lady with a family, a decade later.
It was a Confederate battle flag - and even though lots of Southerners today say the Confederacy fought for "states' rights," all you have to do is look at the secession documents for every one of those states. Chattel slavery is front and center.
The "stars and bars" was a symbol of chattel slavery, of the "right" of one human being to hold others as chattel.
Not exactly a thing that fans of the "Lost Cause" will admit.
I don't believe the claimed Scots antecedents are real. The Klan says that about burning crosses, too.
I'm not a fan of The Lost Cause.
I don't blame you for the instinct to extrapolate. It's the sign of an active mind. But given the inescapably pejorative interpretation of a person's character which the drawing of such a conclusion would be, it would have been charitable if you had asked me first.
I did point out some facts. And inasmuch as fewer than ten percent of Confederate soldiers owned a single slave, we could surmise that it was as much a cultural war, which it was, as a war for the perpetuation of a system which people realized would be obsolete by 1900.
The fact remains that the formation of the Confederacy was all about the "peculiar institution."
I am well aware that most soldiers came from poor backgrounds - yet they *still* fought for the Confederacy, and ended up being memorialized as "the sacred martyrs of the Confederacy" on far too many monuments throughout the Southern states. Fighting for the Confederacy really *did* mean fighting for enslavement and its horrors. Any attempt to explain that away is revisionism - and a lie.
As a Northerner, I'm aware that racism is a very serious problem in all 50 states. But only in the South did it become legislated and institutionalized, after Reconstruction was ended by the Wilmington, NC Insurrection.
I don't mean to be insensitive. I lived in the South for a time. The stars and bars has troubled me since I was in grade school and saw people like Lester Maddox and George Wallace tout their segregationist views and practices on the evening news. Of course, we also saw footage of Civil Rights protesters being beaten, having attack dogs set on them, firehoses turned on them. And the coverage of Dr. King's assassination.
For me, though, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and the death of 4 very young girls ('older than me, went to church and Sunday School like me) is what *really* made me wince away whenever i saw the stars and bars.
FWIW, people in the mid-Atlantic states were pretty free with the n-word + many other racial, ethnic and religious slurs back then. Many still are. People here - some, anyway - have always displayed the stars and bars. The KKK had real presence here at one time, too. Now it's semi- underground, but I have a friend who accidentally came upon a cross burning one night, not all that many years ago.
So maybe nobody's hands are entirely clean - white people, i mean - no matter what state they're from.
I'm southern, seventy - three years old, so there is a good chance I've seen things you've only seen film of or read about: blacks humiliated on account of their race.
The first time was in 1957, when I was five, on a bus in Little Rock. We had been uprooted from our home the year before because of an economic downturn, so I had already figured out that the world was not a benign place, but I think what I saw and heard in that moment was my real introduction to the dysphoria which pervades it. I hate virtue signaling, but I do ask you to believe me that after I became really aware of the segregation system, in 1960, I thought the whole thing was evil.
Flags can have second lives. In my first post on this matter I alluded to the rather shocking fact that the Union Jack has been displayed without irony in Ireland in the last few days. The Irish have concluded that while they may not like the English, uncontrolled Third World immigration poses a greater threat to what used to be Great Britain than the English do to the Irish.
Clearly, the Nazi flag is beyond rehabilitation, but as a symbol of resistance to tyranny, the Confederate battleflag may not be. It's curious that Che Guevara's face has been a T shirt icon for forty years, probably because he looked as insolent as Jim Morrison at his best. But Morrison was harmful only to himself, while Che was a lusty murderer who Castro may have sent to South America in the hope that he'd get himself killed.
I'm almost 70. So, no. I saw it on live TV.
We had the coverage of Dr. King's assassination on until it ended that night.
Maybe you didn't see what i said about the killings at the 16th St. Baptist Church? I was younger than those 4 girls, but not *that* much younger.
I also have Vietnam footage, including self-immolations by monks, kinda burned into my brain, b/c I saw it live. I saw live footage of George Wallace body-blocking a building James Meredith needed to get into.
So when i speak about the Klan here, and racial slurs here, I'm referring to the 60s *and* to right now. Worst, most racist city in my state is Philadelphia. Then and still.
Also, I'm no fan of Fidel or Che.
And the racist reasons for Irish people displaying the Union Jack don't surprise me at all. Though I'm not sure which "Third World" countries you're referring to.
I do know that Gen X-Gen Z folks in the UK and Ireland know virtually nothing about our extremely bloody history, from what we have done to 1st Nations peoples to the hell that was chattel slavery, or why colorism and racism exist side by side here, and how pervasive they are. My hunch is that they don't know much about British colonial practice (when slavery was legal) in the Caribbean, either.
I wrote my MA thesis on a Black painter from DC. He couldn't exhibit any portraits of his family members in shows or galleries, not til the late 70s. Going into that world, albeit at a remove, was a shock. Because I'm unfamiliar with legal segregation and how cruel it was. I've known people who experienced it, though.
I don't boycott over a logo change.. but mess with the food and Hell No!
that's the real problem - they nailed the recipes. I can make most of the things on that menu, and I still like to eat theirs.
This is an astroturf uprising, directed by the usual suspects. "Ya'll keep yer big-city hands off our precious country way of life!" Cut to shot of Don Jr. wearing jeans.
MAGA!
Just curious: have you ever lived in a rural area?
It's not "astroturf" anything. They serve a lot of regional dishes and people from those regions (locals and folks who live very far from where they grew up) get a taste of normal home cooking at a chain restaurant, no less.
Please just allow people to have their own tastes. They don't have to be the same as yours to be valid.
No. You both assume I am looking down on country people because I look down on Trump and his gang. I am a country person, born of farmers on both sides. I live in the middle of nowhere. I have eaten at Cracker Barrel (which is not an old company). I associate Cracker Barrel with pre-packaged cheese and crackers from shops in shopping centers. Their stuff is honestly not great, but I'm not making fun of it and --more important-- I'm not making fun of the people who want to eat there.
I was pointing out that the outrage over the logo change did not come from diners. It came from people who will pick up any stick to beat "liberals" with. It came from political people looking for a way to score points with white voters. It came from the usual suspects. You may disagree. In my honest opinion, most of Cracker Barrel's customers are probably a bit unhappy with the logo change. I don't like it either.
I'm also convinced the ever growing rise of regional breakfast chain First Watch (14% increase in total revenue year to year) has had a major influence on their desire to rebrand Cracker Barrel. I even see knock-off similarities between the new CB restaurant interior and the First Watch decor.
I was surprised that First Watch was so big. My first experience with it was in the Cincinnati suburbs maybe two years ago, and I thought it was a fairly small Florida-based chain that had just started working its way up north. Imagine my surprise when I pulled up a list of locations and saw a bunch in the Philly area, not far from where I live.
It's pretty good, too.
I had a similar experience when driving cross-country and trying to find healthier food options in the food desert that is America once you get outside the major cities. And the first time dining there was kind of heavenly as they were about to close and gave us avocado toasts with easily a half inch layer of mashed avocado from edge to edge on the bread.
um, "food desert"? You've never lived in the country, I take it.
Regional dishes do not = a food desert. And food comes from farms, which are in what you call a "food desert."
Just saying.
Sorry, I should have been more specific - I was referring to the inability to access clean organic minimally processed prepared foods at grocery stores or restaurants.
I'm sorry, but I think you're writing off a great deal of good, non-processed foodstuffs that are 1. Available in local grocery stores and farmers' markets, and 2. Have never lived in a rural area. If you had, you wouldn't be talking about a "food desert." Anyway, the term primarily refers to city neighborhoods where grocery stores are *not* easy to get to. Applies primarily to Black neighborhoods - and it's a very real thing.
Maybe you need to get out more? Seriously. (I'm from a farming area, but lived in or near cities for several decades - i can get wonderful produce, breads, meat, etc. in the rural area where i currently live.)
I think you've missed out on some great eating and hope you have a chance to rectify that. But you have to travel through small towns, on secondary roads, not highways, to find the best eating.
Sorry, next time I will make sure to write very specific biographical information about my dietary needs and restrictions and why they make it difficult to find pesticide-free fresh produce that I can eat, and provide a specific definition of what I mean when I say "food desert" as it relates to those needs and restrictions. Overall, I have a pretty dismal view of our ability to obtain nutritious and clean food in our country, unless you have the space to grow your own or can join a CSA.
And in my original comment, I was specifically referring to the difficulties in locating food that suits my diet when roadtripping across the country from one coast to the other. And I'd also like acknowledge that living in a city doesn't mean I think we have an abundance of options that rural areas lack. Its just once you're living out of a car for a week, without access to a kitchen, your choices can get quite limited. HappyCow was a great resource that led us to a handful of natural groceries and restaurants, but there were long stretches where we had to rely on simple meals of fruit and nuts.
That shallow american culture is growing more shallow should be no surprise. These people traded the most opulent human existence ever for the enchantments of the phone. As we glibly watch on little screens, the ultra wealthy siphon off our remaining wealth, and we're left talking about logos.
But thats natural law, and if you dont or wont defend what you have, you dont deserve it, simply bc someone else *will* take it.
Theres a good reason these people complained about the logo. Bc thats about all they have left. *That* is whats been passed down. Can you blame them? Their entire world is presented to them in logos and other cheap crap created to sell people shit. That *is* american consumer culture. When youve sold your life for marketing and products, shit like the logo is important.
It was a great article but i feel like it was a little like hey i went to the ocean and guess what its wet. But yeah, this shit is sad.
I wrote this comment earlier and think it rhymes closely with your sentiments:
The outrage among the logo lovers signifies moving yet one more degree of separation from reality and towards living in a simulation of the world. The sadness isn't the loss of the logo -- how trite -- rather, the sadness is about living in a dramatic reality created by the reality creators (e.g., ruling class like Black Rock). The masses live in an alternate reality, most obviously in the screens world, but also in the "simulacrum" stuffed world filled with fake scenery that is Cracker Barrel. Those who don't understand this are the ones who reject the critique, clinging to the idea that they are living in reality, unaware of how many degrees of separation they are from what was once real. The shifting baseline is so far past the mark from previous times that these folks have no idea how far gone society is into the simulacrum.
One may ask: what's the point? The point is nothing less than the Agricultural Revolution evolving to herd humans for the wealth of the tiny minority farmers, such as Black Rock. What would make you more money, a herd of goats or a herd of humans? Managing human livestock without fences requires other means of control, and that looks like slaves to fashion, brands, logos, screens, narratives/ stories, myths, "all the crap I learned in high school," and the coralling required to maintain a two-party political system based on the left-right duality: the laborer on the left and the consumer on the right, which everyone has simultaneously embodied for much of their lives. Ever wonder why life is so taken up with work and shopping -- that has been our prime function for quite some time now. "The Story of Stuff" is the story of how the farm works. Ever wonder why the farmer comes home from the market after selling a side of goat and keeps the income for themself and only spends the minimal amount managing the herd?
Yep, thats pretty much dead on, at least imo. They wont make the mistakes that led to the french revolution again. From the "american dream" through to social media, theyre perfecting their methods of controlling peoples very thoughts and feelings. And its pretty disgusting how well its working.
The silver lining is that it takes this kind of extreme pressure to bring out our most noble qualities.
I have eaten at Cracker Barrel just once and it was no great shakes. Instead of revising the logo, the chain's management should improve the quality of the meals.
> Hey, I love American traditions as much as the next bumpkin. But Cracker Barrel isn’t a tradition by any stretch of the imagination. The company was founded on September 19, 1969.
That's enough for 3 generations to have grown with it...
One correction: Southern accents are still real. City/suburbia? You're right, you pobably won't hear much difference. That's pretty much the same monoculture as everywhere else (as far as I can tell, not being a city/suburbia resident myself). But when you go rural, the drawl is not dead. It varies by intensity and flavor, and it's certainly not always slow, but it's not performative.
I wonder where the Northern Southern accent originates. If you have heard NYC Mayor Eric Adams, he sounds like he just fell off the back of a turnip truck. So do a number of his friends and appointees. It's a Black thing.
It's because of the Great Migration. Black people came North and brought their ways of speaking, cuisine, music - everything - along with them. (Just like white Southerners who came North to work in munitions factories during WWII did.)
There's plenty of good writing about the Great Migration out here. Maybe start with The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson.
https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/migrations/great-migration
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written here, other than to maybe say go a little easy on folks who genuinely were dismayed at the logo change. As someone born in 1981, I’m no spring chicken. Cracker Barrel was a staple of road trips and family vacations my entire life. The same goes for most people I know. I understand it was never authentic, but it still holds a nostalgic place for a lot of people, and it feels like each and every one of our touchstones are being dismantled. I understand that you are pointing out that this touchstone was always a fake - you are probably right. But I can hardly go back and rewrite my childhood experiences to make them more authentic.
On a different note, there are plenty of people here in the Ozarks of Missouri whose twangs and cowboy boots are 100% authentic, and I imagine the same is true in Texas if you go outside the urban centers.
35 years ago, I went to Mississippi during the Christmas holidays. I had the privilege to go to a local restaurant out in the woods/wetlands. It was a great experience. Real catfish, fried ochra (apologies my spelling sucks) fresh cornbread, etc. It was an eye opener. Never forget it. I highly recommend getting off the beaten path. There are gems everywhere.