Some countries have true, serious problems.
Then there are countries that have national discussions over a buxom young white woman in a jeans commercial.
Obviously, America is the latter.
This week, the internet – and the media more generally – exploded over a commercial starring actress Sydney Sweeney for American Eagle. The spot features Sweeney, lying seductively on the ground as she buttons her jeans, stating, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.” The ad concludes with the tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
According to those who apparently have far too much time on their hands, this ad is reminiscent of Nazism. Washington Post fashion critic Rachel Tashjian lamented that the ad felt “regressive.” A wide variety of colorfully haired and bewilderingly pierced TikTok users labeled the ad a “Nazi dog whistle,” presumably based on the idea that praising the genes of a blond-haired, blue-eyed woman with an hourglass figure is somehow an ode to the Third Reich. Charlie Warzel of The Atlantic wrote, “(Sweeney’s) image has been co-opted by the right, accurately or not, in part because of where she’s from (the Mountain West) and some of her hobbies (fixing cars). Even her figure has become a cultural stand-in for the idea, pushed by conservative commentators, that Americans should be free to love boobs.”
Yes, we have now reached the point in American life that it is controversial to suggest that men like breasts; it is now apparently “right-coded.”
This is patently insane.
But perhaps the insanity isn’t just a sign of a culture infected with terrible ideas, ranging from the mutability of gender to the evisceration of beauty standards to the willfully ridiculous attempt to treat the male sex drive as uniquely evil. Perhaps it’s a sign of a culture that has lost touch with actual, real problems in the world. A culture that is out of touch not just with reality, but with threat.
For a while, such cultures can survive. After all, America is uniquely placed in the world: thousands of miles from any direct foreign policy threat, blessed by natural resources beyond those of any other country, heir to a robust tradition of Anglo-American law and custom that have generated an unprecedented level of economic prosperity.
But reality has a funny way of clocking such cultures back into reality. It turns out that history never stops moving, that threats never stop militating. And what’s more, a self-obsessed and shallow culture that worries about whether boobs in jeans ads are a return to Hitler makes itself uniquely vulnerable to such threats. A people who imbibe the stupidity that trauma amounts to taking mild offense at a dumb pun in an advertisement is a people utterly unprepared for the return of reality.
The great German leader Otto von Bismarck once remarked, “There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.” We can only pray that Providence continues to protect us from our own idiocy as we sink ever deeper into social media reveries of borderline psychopathy.