Being in on the Grift

One of the more peculiar things about our recent road-trip through the American South was the presence of Trump Stores.  

Generally speaking, I appreciate the South.  The pace of life, the easy sociability, and the use of the second person plural?  There's something to be said for Y'all Country.  But there's weirdness, too.  There's the juxtaposition of faith and decadence, of extreme wealth and poverty.  And, of course, the lingering racism.  The Trump Store is definitely a bit of Southern Weird.  We passed two of them in our travels, one in Western North Carolina and one in Tennessee, and both were just plain odd.

There they were, festooned with MAGA flags and images of the current president, looking for all the world like a far-right Spirit Halloween.  I was tempted to stop and check it out as we passed, just to go in and immerse the oddness, in the same way that I enjoy now and again dining at a local restaurant run by cultists.  But I didn't even suggest it to my wife, mostly because I knew she couldn't stomach the experience. 

If we were still in the lead up to an election, there'd have been a sense to 'em.  But we're not.  Trump merch just a fixture now, a permanent and peculiar part of our I'd-buy-that-for-a-dollar zeitgeist.  There's not ever been anything like this in my lifetime, this brazen embrace of politician as brand.  It's the teensiest bit pornographic.

Folks know there's money to be made off of the Trump name, and American neofascism has a healthy dollop of PT Barnum profiteering woven into its flag-festooned snake-oil DNA.

At the apex of the brand, a family business makes money hand over fist, selling access and power like never before.  It's not just cheaply made Bibles branded and sold for three times the going retail price.  Now that they're in power, it's $TRUMPcoin, a cryptocurrency that allows the wealthy to buy into the brand and get access and favors in return.  It's a $400,000,000 aircraft, offered up as a gift...not to the nation, but the president directly.   It's private clubs for the oligarchs, where just getting in the door will set you back $500,000.  Emoluments Shmemoluments!  There's money to be made!

And at the bottom of the food chain, folks buying shirts and hats and flags wholesale, which they then hawk online and at Trump stores.  

It's all just so danged crass and venal, pure 100% uncut American Mammonism injected straight into the veins of our Trump addiction.

I thought these things as I drove by, but I thought something else.  Don't be a hypocrite, I thought.

I, too, have been making money off of the Trump name.  I've self-pubbed a whole bunch of my manuscripts through Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service over the years.   Of them, only one has sold in even modest numbers.  Since the election, a book I wrote back in 2022 has moved a couple of copies a day, every day.  TRUMP ANTICHRIST, it's called, and it's written in the voice of Satan himself.  It goes for $6.66 a copy, a low, low price selected more for symbolic value than for profit margin.  Amazon gets most of that, and I get about a buck.  Still, that's money.

Though I had to write the book to exorcise Trump-hatred from my soul, I've always felt a little weird about making even modest bank on it.  Those royalty checks ain't a livin', but they're not nothin', either.  How, I mused as we drove, am I different from that Trump Store owner?

Thankfully, Jeff Bezos has solved that problem for me.  

On demand printing costs have risen, and so I recently got a message from Amazon noting a rejiggering of their royalty payment policy.  Come June 10, every self-pubbed paperback on Kindle Direct Publishing that's selling for less than ten bucks will yield no royalties at all.  Not one thin dime.  So every penny of that Six Dollars and Sixty Six cents will go right into Amazon's pocket.  

In a little under two weeks, I'll get nothing from the Great Grift at all.

It feels liberating.

Faith, Brand, and Identity

What is it that defines us, as beings?  What gives cohesion to our sense of ourselves, and from that establishes our relationship to others?

These questions were bopping around in my head the other day while walking the dog, hovering about like the summer gnats that flew around me in a cloud.

Two ways of understanding identity surfaced and played off of one another.  On the one hand, identity as "brand."  On the other, faith.

Brand identity is the Big Buzzy Thing in our consumer culture.  It used to be less all pervasive, less radically defining.  I mean, shoot, back when I was a kid there was Tide and Ivory, Coke and Pepsi, Chevy and Ford, but those lived in their own domain.  Now, with the net-driven commodification of all human interaction, we're all supposed to attend to our brand.

But what is this identity, that brand-focus creates within us?  Brand is about the relationship between a product/service and a consumer of said product/service.  It is intended to develop a pattern of repeat or customary purchase, based on the consumer's perception of qualitative dynamics of the brand.

I use Google products, for instance, like this blog platform, and Gmail, and my Chromebook.  I use them because Google represents, for me, innovation coupled with an imperfect but intentional beneficence.  I eat at Chipotle, because, again, there's a general focus on doing less harm, plus it's dang tasty and a heck of an option for non-carnivores like myself.

Brand does more than confer corporate identity.  It "rubs off," by intent, in the relation.  The brands we consume are meant to modify our own sense of self, to be a social marker within culture as to our place and status.

I'm composing this on an iMac, which bears the Apple brand, as does my iPhone.  That is meant to tell me that I have disposable income, that I am successful, and that...from the suite of creativity software bundled with the iMac, that I am part of the self-styled "creative class."  This is a good thing, because those folks are the only people still allowed to make a living in our culture.

Out in the carport and driveway, we have a Honda and a Toyota, which tell us that we are a practical, reliable, comfortably bourgeois family.  The more we internalize the brands we interact with as shaping our own identity, the more we are embedded as a consistent and reliable consumer.

And so the question becomes: what is the relationship between brand identity and an identity shaped by faith?

It's an important question, because as branding becomes the defining feature of both corporate and individual self-understanding, there's bleed over into the realm of faith.  Churches need to "think about their brand" in the process of the endless self-promotion we're now obligated to pursue.  Our living out of spirituality together becomes both shaped and expressed in terms of the market ethic.  Is that an issue?

Honestly, it is.  Because faith shapes identity in ways that are radically different from "brand."

Brand, after all, is about ownership and possession.  It is driven by commodified self-interest.  The point and purpose of branding is to promote the corporate or individual person being branded.  While it creates relationship, that relationship is essentially grasping, oriented to benefit the brand itself.

And in that, brand identity is the inverse of the identity created by faith.

Faith is oriented not towards the self, but the self orienting itself towards a purpose that transcends self.  Or the organization orienting itself towards a purpose that transcends organization.   The telos created by faith--or at least, an existentially valid faith--challenges persons to be grounded in something that will continually demand their own growth.  It is relation with the other rooted in the other.

An identity shaped by faith is a different thing, a different thing entirely, and that's worth keeping in mind before we press that hot metal against the surface of our souls.

God Knows Your True Brand

I've been thinking more about the whole concept of branding and reality over the last few days, stirred by two separate but conceptually linked inputs.   The first came in the latest propaganda circular from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.  Here in DC, we get those every week or so, pitching out the party line through the "China Daily," which is inserted into local newspapers as if it were the Sports Section.

I read that Chinese propaganda in the same way I used to read English language versions of Pravda back in the 1980s, as a fascinating insight into the falseness of manipulative writing.  The article that struck me was a discussion of a study conducted for China's communist leadership by a US marketing firm.  Yes, you read that right.  Ours is a very strange world these days.

Here a mea culpa: I'd link to it, but China Daily is...well...it's a twitchy website.  Things shift and change on Official Dot CH websites, and danged if I could find the "article."  I fear you'll have to trust me on this one.

The study revealed that China has a problem with "negative brand perception."  Meaning, Americans and Europeans perceive Chinese goods as of inferior quality, and associate them with oppressive working conditions.   Overcoming that perception, the marketing gurus suggested, is key to China's export success.  This is all about "perception," mind you.  Ahem.

That then played off of another story this week.  In Australia, the conservative government there has been coming down hard on US tobacco producers in an effort to reduce Australian lung and mouth cancer rates.  Now, in addition to the nasty, nasty warnings that cover the entirety of cigarette packs, recent Aussie legislation has mandated that cigarette packs use a drab, standardized font.  No more brand identity, beyond the megabrutal Aussie cancer-stick packaging.  

Tobacco producers, including US businesses and the government of Communist Cuba, have taken this as affront to the rights of brands to manage their own identity, and is resisting it in international courts.  How can we sell our product if we can't brand differentiate?  It's a violation of international treaties!  What right do you have to tell us who we are?

Here again, there's a peculiar partnership of marketers and propagandists...one that places the spin of branding over and above the reality that brand masks.

And I find myself thinking about corporations as persons, and just how existentially meaningless the concept of "branding" is.  Is a brand the reality of a corporate culture, representing the actuality of how that entity impacts the world?  Then it's a real thing.

But if it is not, if "brand" is simply an illusion cast to serve profit or power, then it is something else entirely.  It can be a false face, a mask that plays off of the manipulated fears and desires of those it encounters.

There are human persons like that, of course.  We know them.  They're the folks who are all image, all fluff and bluster.  All hat and no cattle, as my Texan ancestors would have put it.

As a Christian mystic, I tend to believe that those human beings have a difficult encounter with their Creator when the veil of our mortal subjectivity falls away.  God knows our true selves, the selves etched into the Real.  The lies we tell ourselves and others shatter against the reality that God knows and will share with us fully.  It is the most terrible thing about God, for we creatures who like to pretend we are other than we are.

And as it is with people and their projected identities, so it is with the brands of corporate "persons."  If the reality of a brand is injustice and oppression, or the reality of a brand is sickness and death?

Participating in those falsely cast images won't fly with our Maker, no matter how vigorously we spin and market and manipulate perceptions.

Lord, have mercy.