Cracker Barrel culture will not nourish you

 When my grandfather, John H. McIntyre, died in 1945, my father, Raymond McIntyre, took over the operation of his general store in Elizaville, Kentucky. It was a going concern. 

For one thing, Elizaville, population about 100, was on the road from Maysville to Lexington. Travelers would stop at the store for cheese, cold cuts, and snacks because of the lack of restaurants along the highway. On Saturdays, people from outlying farms would come to the store to shop and socialize. My older sister remembers that my father and Eugene Wood, who owned the general store across the street, would compete for customers by hiring musicians on Saturday nights. 

All that is gone. When U.S. 68 between Maysville and Lexington was built, much of the automobile traffic dried up. The early supermarkets in Flemingsburg, the county seat, had a broader array of stock that drew away the customers. Today both general stores in Elizaville have been closed for years, though in the past year a Dollar Store opened in town. 

I am reminded of this lost era by the furor on over Cracker Barrel's rebranded logo. 

Cracker Barrel is a chain of restaurants trafficking in manufactured nostalgia. Customers enter and leave the restaurant through a shop brimming with tacky tchotchkes. The menu in the restaurant evokes the plain country cooking of the remembered (and imagined) past. Once, years ago, I got a perfectly good slice of country ham with my eggs. Two years ago when I ate at another Cracker Barrel, country ham was no longer on the menu and I had to wonder why anyone would patronize a restaurant that could not competently bake a potato. 

The old logo included a man in a chair leaning on a barrel; the revised logo simply displays the words "Cracker Barrel," and there lies the source of the outrage. 

The person leaning on the barrel in the old logo is an older white man, and his removal feeds into white people's apprehension of being overtaken by non-whites, their dominant culture diminished and supplanted. 

And so it goes. The demographics are clear: White people are well on the way to becoming a minority in the U.S. population, and it is a fantasy that the Trump administration can deport enough non-whites and right-wing influencers can gin up enough of a white population boom to counter these trends. Establishing some kind of apartheid might be attempted, but South Africa already tried that and we know how it came out. The current administration is addicted to performative stunts to intimidate non-whites and prop up white people's shaky sense of self, but stunts wear off fast and new ones have to be concocted. 

White people have been leaving the country for the cities over the past century, and our culture is coming out of the city rather than the farm. Black people have been here for five centuries and are not going away. Brown people are here doing the kinds of work that white people don't care to do, and won't do. A return to the white-dominant culture of the 1950s cannot be imposed from above and is not going to happen. 

If Cracker Barrel is the best you can come up with to exemplify and defend your values, you need to get out more. 

In case you missed it ...

 With all the claims on your time, along with your wide reading, it seems possible that you have not been assiduous in following this blog. Always seeking to be helpful, I have assembled a set of links to previous posts that you may find merit a look. 

Despite everything you have been told, life on the copy desk was good. 

The principles copy editors follow.

The twenty-year decline of The Baltimore Sun.

Unlearning is part of the job. 

The journalists' superstition that refuses to die. 

I know people hate that. Here is one reason not to. 

If you can indulge me, I reflect on the destruction of the family farmhouse. 

Just pick up a book

 It has been a dreary summer in Baltimore, too damn hot to venture out of doors when it was not pouring down raining. Then a week of a vile summer cold, followed by a week of bronchitis. Thank God for books and the Enoch Pratt Free Library. 

Earlier this year I got hold of Daniel Okrent's The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America. The account of the federally imposed immigration quotas of the 1920s seems like fresh reading today, with white people apprehensive of being overcome by a flood of non-white immigrants. (Take some comfort in progress: Over the past century Italians and other European immigrants got to be honorary white people.) 

Jill Lepore's The Deadline: Essays reprints 46 essays previously published in The New Yorker, each one a gem of insight and lucid writing. Once you start it, you will inevitably read it through. 

Nick Harkaway is the son of David Cornwell, whom you probably know as John le Carre. His book, Karla's Choice, slides neatly into the chronology of Le Carre's Smiley novels. If you enjoyed Tinker, Tailor and the others, you will find that Harkaway does not dishonor the tradition. 

Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power tends to play down Jefferson's inveterate duplicity as mainly a reflection of his reserved character, but he is on the mark in pointing out Jefferson's unfailing instinct to use power when it comes into his hands. And Meacham gives full credit to Jefferson's substantial accomplishments, which today we tend to overlook because his awareness of the evil of slavery did not stop him from benefiting from it. 

Rereading John Keegan's account of the Battle of Trafalgar in The Price of Admiralty, I realized that I had somehow neglected to look into Six Armies in Normandy, his account of the invasion to the liberation of Paris. We generally know it from The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan, but Keegan pieces together the story from six different perspectives to give us a much fuller sense of what happened in the spring of 1944. (If you have access to A.J. Liebling's Normandy Revisited, which has been reprinted in the collection Liebling Abroad, read his account of being present at the liberation. "In the Place d'Orleans, just within the city limits, we came upon a sight unique in my experience--thousands of people, tens of thousands, all demonstrably happy. In any direction we looked, there was an unending vista of people. It was like an entry into Paradise. ...")

I'm not sure that we in the United States believe in education any longer, what with the universities ditching courses in the humanities on their headlong rush to become trade school limited to STEM and business administration. But Tara Westover's Educated, a memoir of a woman brought up in a survivalist Mormon family who, at great personal struggle, acquires for herself a college education, should remind you about the value to place on actual education rather than the simple-minded indoctrination our current masters advocate. 

Just for fun, I picked up Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. It's still hilarious. 

Tais-toi, Karoline

 The marginally literate White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week that the French should be "grateful" to the United States that they are "not speaking German." 

It is a plain fact that the United States exists as an independent nation because of support from France during the Revolution. People who read books* may be aware from Stacy Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America that American diplomats, principally Benjamin Franklin, kept alive the flow of money and, ultimately, military power that secured our independence. It was, in further fact, that this enormous support bankrupted the French crown, a factor leading to their own revolution. 

Yes, the French collapsed as the Germans invaded in 1940, and yes, it was Americans among the Allied forces that liberated the country in 1944, but the French decorate the graves of U.S. soldiers in Normandy every year. 

France is our oldest ally, and it does not merit cheap slurs from the White House briefing room.  

*I realize that this excludes the bulk of the current administration.