A Simulated Battle in the Culture War 

By Abe Greenwald 

There’s something thoroughly postmodern about the Cracker Barrel logo controversy, as it hinges on an accepted confusion between image and reality.

It seems strange to have to say this, but Cracker Barrel is not a one-off general store with a kindly old man perpetually sitting outside it. Just because it calls itself an “old country store,” you don’t have to believe it.

It’s not a place where local country folk go and the shopkeeper floats you a bag of flour on credit because you couldn’t make ends meet that week. Cracker Barrel is a massive, corporate-run chain restaurant and gift shop with more than 600 locations; the company’s stock trades on the Nasdaq.

Its logo—the image of an old man sitting beside a barrel—is, in postmodern terms, a constructed reality. It’s a visual fiction dreamed up by advertisers to evoke nostalgia and affection for a place that doesn’t exist. And this particular fiction has seemingly become what postmodern thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard and others would call hyperreality. That is, in the mind of the viewer, the logo is more real than the thing it represents.

I’m generally not a fan of postmodern philosophy, and I never expected to cite it as anything but absurd. Yet it’s the only way I can make sense of the strange fact that Americans really care about a potential change in Cracker Barrel’s logo. If you’re arguing over whether the old man should stay or go, all you’re saying is that you prefer to be peddled one corporate-hatched fantasy over another—this fake reality instead of that one. You’re taking a side in a culture war that exists entirely in simulacra, not the real world.

It’s like betting on the Bud Bowl instead of the Super Bowl, or objecting to royal decrees issued from the throne of the Magic Kingdom. It’s a fight over the purely imaginary.

It would be one thing if the controversy were about an actual small-town general store being run out of town by a woke big-box chain. That’s something to care about—or not. And I’d understand if Cracker Barrel were taking your favorite dish off its menu. But why invest in the kind of advertising myth that’s used to sell a product you already like or dislike?

Because of wokeness? Sorry, but streamlining and simplifying a logo isn’t wokeness. It’s what virtually every major company does over time. This includes getting rid of, and sometimes bringing back, brand-associated characters. The Cracker Barrel man is no different from Burger King’s late “King” or McDonald’s cashiered Hamburglar. Guess what? Like the Cracker Barrel guy, they were white, too.

What is woke is being such a snowflake that you melt when a fictional figure is pulled from a chain-restaurant logo. (And while being nostalgic for fake nostalgia isn’t exactly woke, it’s certainly postmodern.)

The term “woke right” hasn’t arisen out of nowhere. It describes a real tendency among right-wingers to mirror the sensitivities and tactics of the woke left. Among these is a heightened sensitivity to symbols and a disregard for reality. If you want to have a man sitting next to the barrel outside a quaint rural market, go open an old country store and sit there. At least you’ll have a stake in the real world.

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.