Ralph Lauren Makes Billions From Appropriation. Good for Him.
All threat-elevation devices are just blah-blah-blah.
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MUSE OF A SALESMAN
Midtown Manhattan, New York City — 1966
I can easily imagine a tectonic encounter for a tie salesman named Ralph Lifshitz that would help sunder him from the modest life he was raised to expect and lift him and the fortunes of his family for generations, thanks to the hollow legs of Madison Avenue ad men and a dollop too much of steak fat in the au poivre sauce at P.J. Clarke’s.
Dad oversleeps the wake-up call from the concierge at the Harvard Club. A determined knock at his door from a housekeeper sent up to make sure he’s still breathing triggers dreams of being lost in Eero Saarinen’s nifty new TWA terminal at JFK, late for half a dozen flights he cannot miss or he’ll lose his job.
Even in his dreams, Dad still calls the airport its pre-Kennedy Assassination name, ‘Idlewild,’ because, you know, “Those fucking bootlegging Kennedys.” As an early pioneer of what will become frequent fliers — in another ten years, he will become the most flown man on Alitalia and one of the most flown on TWA, simultaneously — he wakes up with a common symptom of Jet Age Mislocation: unsure of what city he’s in, which hotel, what room. Reality tilting at a 45-degree angle doesn’t help snap his brain into focus.
Battling a five-alarm hangover, late for a pitch meeting with Proctor & Gamble, he discovers a greyish-white streak down the middle of his favorite tie so impressively symmetrical it could be an ornament. Closer inspection and a sniff identify it as the aforementioned au poivre sauce. The smell of cigarette smoke blended with rancid garlic makes him retch.
It’s a tie-ruining stain, good as gone. Turning his suiter inside out and checking every pocket reveals that he only packed one tie while suffering another crippling hangover two days before in Rome, distracted by parrying and returning a barrage of verbal fire from my mother.
Not allowed to be in the club without a tie, Dad covers it up by fussing over the buttons of his Burberry trench coat as he strides with martinetish bravado from the elevator to the side exit, over-performing the cheer in his greeting of the club doorman. He dashes along 44th Street almost at a run, crossing Fifth toward Madison and his savior and safehaven: Brooks Brothers.
The stretch of Madison Avenue between 59th and 42nd is the Kaaba of the advertising and publishing businesses worldwide, including Dad’s multinational ad agency, Compton. Seventy-five percent of the firm’s assets are overseas, managed by offices in strategic cities around the world that are shepherding brands into globalism with American can-do gusto. Everyone wants a piece of America, even Coca-Cola Marxists in France.
That wall of mercantile ambition, under the umbrella brand called NATO, is both the bulwark against the further spread of communism and the battlements from which it will be vanquished. Don’t be fooled by history books crowning Reagan and John Paul II with victory wreaths: the collapse of the Soviet empire will be instigated by Eastern Bloc kids demanding their jeans and McDonald’s.
To wit, four of Lech Wałęsa’s eight children will be teens by the mid-80s, when his Solidarity movement will finally gather enough propulsion to eventually knock down the Berlin Wall. By then he will be sleeping in his office from all the whining at home about Levi’s 501s and golden fries, “amerykańskie frytki, papa!” The end will come when his youngest stands in his highchair to join the protest chanting, raises his spoon and throws it at Wałęsa’s head.
Ask any Western teen who will travel behind the Iron Curtain during the final fifteen years of the Cold War. We’ll bring extra jeans to give away in exchange for shitty tin medals as a mandatory humanitarian act.
You have to admire the seasoned dexterity with which Dad ducks the fetid splash from a cab hitting a rain-collecting pothole. They’re spreading like acute acne scars throughout the decaying city, driven into fiscal and structural ruin by successive “corrupt Liberal mayors,” as Dad invariably describes them.
Dad has been loyal to the oldest men’s clothing store in America since he was a boy, when he shopped there with his mother. Per tradition, Brooks Brothers clothed Dad on account when he was at the Harvard Business School; in our corner of Yankeeshire, in terms of subsistence that isn’t related to education, most kids are on their own financially after they turn eighteen — even the Fucking Kennedys have summer jobs. Dad paid the debt down during his initial years working at Compton Advertising.
A few feet through Brooks Brothers’ titanic metal doors, Dad shakes drizzle drops from his trenchcoat. “That dapper fellow, Ralph, with the big smile. Swell guy,” as Dad will describe him to Mum when he gets back to Rome — while she’s sniffing at his purchases, despairing that she’ll ever get him to wear something more stylish than a charcoal-gray wool box around the world’s most stylish city — waves to him from the tie section.
Dapper Ralph’s personal style reminds Dad of guys at the London office: a touch of personal eccentricity without being weird. The mnemonic persuades Dad to be a little racy with his usual club tie choice and try one with a dusty gold stripe. Professionally impatient, ever vigilant of New York-minute tardiness protocols, Dad glances at the Omega his father gave him when he graduated Wesleyan, double-checks the store clock and Dapper Ralph’s watch, and realizes, “Son of a gun, I’ve been off by an hour. I’m not late after all.”
See, the Omega is too understated to have numbers, the gold casing and details so vanishingly slim they’re subliminal. Other than cufflinks and shirt studs for formal occasions, it’s the only gold he allows in his appearance; men from our world don’t wear wedding bands. The watch’s fastidious subtlety means the Dad sometimes reads the hour incorrectly, especially when he’s “thick-tongued and bleary-eyed.”
Yesterday’s drinking began with a classic Mad Men four-martini lunch with clients at the Oyster Bar, then PJ Clarke’s, then The Roosevelt until late. Now that he has time, Dad soothes his hangover-induced anxiety with the plan to grab a two-bloody-Mary breakfast before his meeting.
He hesitates about the gold stripe; he allowed Mum to coerce him into buying two “groovy” ties at Battistoni on the via Condotti in Rome. Each one was three times the price of his normal Brooks Brothers club ties, and he’s never worn them: “I look like a pansy.”
As a favorite colleague frequently jokes, Dad is “so conservative he’s to the right of Genghis Khan,” a comparison that wraps him in the same cozying satisfaction he gets when focus-group results come back and customers not only love the campaign, nine out of ten times they’d choose the client’s product over the competition’s.
Time pressure gone, he allows Dapper Ralph to sell him the gold-striped tie and two more. What Dad admires most about Ralph is his chutzpah in drawing so much attention to himself with his dress style, despite being so slight and small. And he’s still manly, not faggy at all.
Ralph asks him about his summer plans. With more excitement than a hangover that severe normally permits, Dad replies that he’s rented the house outside Lucca in Tuscany where John le Carré wrote The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Dad devours Le Carré; being a covert spook is what he most enjoys, even if that moonlighting job comes with a few ethical issues now and then, and some possibilities of life-threatening outcomes, like death by fake suicide in a hotel room in Hamburg.
“Le Carré is my favorite writer,” Ralph says. “How are you doing with his summer wardrobe? It must be hard to keep up with the stylish Italians.”
Dad’s been in Rome long enough to have gotten over trying to adapt to Italian style. He's reached the conclusion that Italian clothes don’t suit American men, who tend to be big and blocky. As Dad likes to say about his broad, kilt-bearing hips and butt, "Ya can't drive a wedge with a tack hammer." Thin-hipped Italian men have tack hammers.
Ralph agrees and makes a mental note: What clothes make the real American man? This goy he’s helping is a perfect specimen: six-foot-two, shaped like a slab of wood; dresses like a Midcentury version of his Puritan ancestors; powerfully built, supremely confident, with a resonant, senatorial voice. The sort of man he sketches clothes for late at night in the kitchen.
Dad agrees his summer wardrobe is looking worn and shabby, and Italians are immaculately dressed at all times, even the poorest. He follows Ralph up to the second floor where he’s shown two pairs of loose Bermuda shorts, one in blue, the other in a blood-orange red, which Dad isn’t too sure about, but Ralph persuades him that colors like these look great with dark-blue blazers and Gucci loafers with no socks. “These colors are what guys are wearing now in the Hamptons.”
“Is that so?” Dad resists replying that the Hamptons are not exactly a recommendation for older New York families who traditionally travel up the Hudson for the summers; Dad spent his summers as a kid in Alexandria Bay in the Thousand Islands, the Canadian Riviera. Shortly after they were married, he and Mum purchased a country house closer to the City in a similar Victorian gated summer colony, the Park, overlooking the Hudson Valley.
He dutifully asks Dapper Ralph questions about himself; taking a genuine interest in the lives of everyone he’s speaking to is an innate quality fostered by his socially progressive mother, a Smith grad who got her master’s in social studies at The New School for Social Research a few years after it was founded. Dad intends to fulfill his civic duty in middle age after he’s made his fortune with a cabinet position in a Republican administration, an ambition that will be thwarted by his involvement in misguided Cold War covert shenanigans and his association with Iran-Contra.
Ralph bashfully replies that he’s from the Bronx, a first-generation American who went to Talmudic school, then Baruch College. Ever the egalitarian Everyman he was raised to be, Dad pretends to have heard of both, making a mental note to look up 'Talmudic' when he’s in the club library, where he’s planning to spend the afternoon.
Feeling the nudge of social insecurity, Ralph diverts the subject by mentioning that he might not see Dad after today: He has saved up enough to quit working at Brooks Brothers and start his own line of ties.
“That’s swell,” Dad says with utter sincerity. All American men should be “self-made,” one of the reasons family money is cut off or severely rationed early on. Unearned privilege, rank, ostentation, and power are cardinal sins in Yankeeshire, never flaunted.
“I’m sure you’ll be a success. You have great taste and you’re a likeable guy. That’s half the battle, right there.”
Ralph reflexively replies, “Thank you, sir! My wife Ricky says the same thing.” The injection of his wife into the conversation is due to the fact that stylishness and an interest in fashion are for queers.
Pleased and encouraged by Dad’s glowing endorsement of his plans, Ralph guides him to the casual shirt section and shows off the latest selection of polo shirts. Dad is ambivalent about Brooks Brothers’ polo shirts; it’s one thing to have the store’s Golden Fleece emblem discreetly embossed on the gold buttons of his blue blazer, quite another to wear it over one’s heart, practically eye level with the guest for whom you’re mixing a cocktail.
“It’s the same with that Lacoste crocodile,” Dad says. “Why should I be promoting a brand if I’ve already paid for the shirt, you know? They should be paying customers for the endorsement.” Much as he dislikes the idea, Dad has a few Lacoste shirts.
Ralph notes silently that this is a completely different take than anyone he grew up with or socializes with would have. Most of New York, most of America in fact, would wear the Golden Fleece logo in a heartbeat if they knew that it stood for an elite men’s store so dauntingly bedrock that they would think twice about daring to go in. Yet a man like this, who walks around as if he owns it, not only has no interest in status symbols, they seem to disgust him.
“I dunno, sir. It’s very discreet. Will anyone know what Brooks Brothers is in Italy? It might be kinda nifty to be wearing something different over there.” Dad relents and buys three of the four polo shirts Ralph suggests for him. He forgoes the salmon pink; he doesn’t want to encourage his son, who is clearly turning out to be queer, despite all efforts to beat it out of him.
Realizing he is now genuinely late, with no time for a liquid breakfast, Dad grabs one of the new ties and puts it on using the mirror on the counter. He’ll need to get used to the gold. Without waiting for Ralph to fill out the sales slip, Dad prints his name at the top of it next to his four-digit account number, signs the bottom, and asks Ralph if he wouldn’t mind sending the remainder of his purchases to the Harvard Club in his name.
He shakes Ralph’s hand earnestly, looking him straight in the eye, again wishing him the best of luck with his new venture. “Thank you. I’ll certainly miss your sage advice and great eye. You know, speaking as an ad man, I have to admit that you are absolutely right about logos: any brand that aspires to be head of the class has to have a strong identity, preferably a mascot that tells the product’s story. I just think of them in terms of breakfast cereal and dish detergent, not clothing. I wish you the best of luck, Ralph. You’re going to be a great success.”
As Ralph folds the salmon pink polo after Dad has strode from the store, he ponders the Golden Fleece logo stitched above the breast. During his training before starting at Brooks Brothers, it was explained that it alluded to the Greek mythological story about the hero Jason and his quest to steal the Golden Fleece, the most precious wool in the world, which symbolized the company’s dedication to the highest quality of textiles and clothing manufacturing.
Ralph muses that a Harvard man like Mr. Killough would get the symbolism right away, without even thinking about it, but this emblem of a dead sheep dangling from a sling attached to a ring like it’s hanging in the freezer of a butcher’s shop — disgusting — would be lost on people from his world, on the young tzutziks like him breaking down the traditional barriers of the Protestant establishment and making fortunes in finance and real estate, not just in traditionally Jewish trades like apparel and entertainment.
A good brand wasn’t subtle; it announced to every stratum of society what it was, what it stood for. Ralph imagines a logo for his own company that spoke plainly to a socially mobile consumer, that “tells the product’s story” at a glance, a customer who had the money and aspires to be a gentleman with a numeral after his last name just signs the sales slip and has his purchases delivered to his club down the street.
He’s delivered clients’ purchases to the Harvard Club many times: it’s a gentleman’s club from a British movie. The public rooms are girded with dark oak paneling two stories high; larger-than-life-sized oil portraits of American presidents who attended the University and the trophy heads of big game shot by Teddy Roosevelt encircle men who rule the most powerful nation the world has ever known, but without any outward signs of pretension or entitlement.
On the contrary, they seem to cultivate shabbiness. Still, some of those men wear the collared short-sleeved shirt that Ralph is folding for what it’s really intended: Playing polo. People in Ralph’s world would never get subtle references to Greek mythology. They would need to be told, Wearing this shirt makes it seem like you play polo.
His creative thinking crosses the finish line and seizes its own Golden Fleece: the logo of his new company needed to be a polo player, mallet raised, charging toward the customer, Buy me and you will play the sport of kings. It was then that he envisioned the ad campaign, many double-page spreads in Esquire. His models would be F. Scott Fitzgerald-type Hollywood matinee idols on horseback, updated. The brand would be... Ralph Lauren’s Polo Club... no... Polo by Ralph Lauren.
And he vows to make it better quality than Brooks Brothers was peddling as “the finest” — overpriced, cheaply made schmattas if he’s ever seen any, and he’s seen many. He wants Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Lord & Taylor. He doesn’t know about duty-free, yet — he will.
Most of the Western world knows what will happen to Dapper Ralph and his Polo brand, and the many others he will launch. After a long, steady decline, trying to keep itself relevant by repackaging the same indifferently designed and manufactured clothes in new boxes in malls and outlets, slipping behind its usurper former tie salesman, Brooks Brothers will go out of business during the pandemic, having vacated their august flagship store on the corner of 44th and Madison, a straight shoot from the Harvard Club, eleven years earlier.
“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
— Pablo Picasso
THE FLYING INSECT CASTE
That story is pure fiction, which doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened. It’s more likely than not that Ralph Lauren, when his last name was still Lifshitz, did help Dad select a version of the same tie he always wore at some point when he was a salesman at Brooks Brothers.
It’s also anachronistic: We hadn’t yet moved to Rome in 1966, making it three years off. I wanted Dad to wake up at the Harvard Club, our pied-à-terre in New York while we lived in Rome, to find he’d only packed one tie. If we still lived there, he would’ve hopped in a cab up Madison to our apartment on 84th and just changed it for an almost identical one in his closet. Ralph Lauren did indeed strike out on his own shortly after that imaginary encounter took place, locking the time period to 1965-66.
There is no doubt that Lauren lifted Brooks Brothers and the New York Anglo-American world it served, repackaged it, and did it better, with far higher quality cloth and craftsmanship. He later expanded his purview to the American West. All of his brands and licenses together generate over $6 billion a year. Ralph himself is worth $7 billion.
When that imaginary scene took place, E. Digby Baltzell had just published The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America, which coined the term ‘WASP.’ The acronym hadn’t yet come into common parlance; it still isn’t used within the world it describes, at least not that I’ve ever heard.
It has been appropriated by Protestant Whites of Scandinavian/Germanic/British descent in the Heartland and out West — an endearing trait about most Midwestern Whites that I’ve met in California is how they describe themselves as a “mix,” and then rattle off a heady, exotic blend of ethnicities ringing the North Sea — even though they aren’t strictly speaking part of the Flying Insect Caste, as I call it; it’s restricted the Northeastern establishment.
If it makes them feel socially elevated, they can have it. If they were really Anglo-American Yankees of the Northeastern establishment who went to the right schools, worshipped at the right churches, and belonged to the right clubs — the base criteria for Waspness — they would understand that it’s meant to be a pejorative, not to mention that it’s pretentious and unseemly for Americans to label themselves with a synonym for ‘upper class.’
Baltzell’s acronym was meant as an admonishment to Anglo-Americans who turned against our fundamental principles: an abhorrence for unearned privilege and entitlements, aristocracy, royalty, and tyranny; the placement of meritocracy above legacy; equality and justice; free speech and freedom of belief; individualism, but never at the expense of the greater good of the community and mankind; honesty, trust, truth, and sincerity; charity, philanthropy, and civic duty; hard work and scholarship; liberalism, liberal democracy and the rule of law as the only viable system of governance.
Those values, and others, are so ingrained they’re innate, unspoken between us, and assumed of others. If they sound idealistic, that’s because they form our unshakeable worldview. They are by no means unrealistic or impractical, much less insincere: our ancestors formed this country with them. Note that we ourselves don’t take credit for the accomplishments of others, especially those who lived hundreds of years ago, nor do we assume responsibility for their crimes.
Are there exceptions? Of course, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a snob in Yankeeshire, but he’s likely also “a crashing bore,” as Mum would put it.
If others don’t share those values, we assume they will come around eventually; our ways and values always prevail in the end. If people doubt us, prefer to see us as evil and oppressive, we listen and try to accommodate their opinions, always giving them the benefit of the doubt. Sadly, that custom has landed the Anglosphere in a heap of trouble: we’re ultimately responsible for incubating and disseminating Wokeism.
I’ve never heard anyone in my natal word use Wasp to describe themselves. We’re just people; we have no ethnicity because America was founded by Anglo-Americans, not because it’s a part of “White privilege,” as critical race theorists have labeled it, using our own principles against us, deluding themselves that they’re theirs.
Here’s how irrelevant and unimportant Wasp is in the world it describes: I didn’t understand that I was a member of the Flying Insect Caste until I was in my fifties. Over Christmas dinner in Los Angeles five years ago, an English childhood friend who went to my nursery school in New York and graduated from Bryn Mawr — as one of the Seven Sister colleges, a “right school” — said about my family, “Well, they are very Waspy.”
“They are?”
“Oh, my goodness, yes.”
I squirmed with discomfort and disappointment. I’d had a discussion only a few months before about our ethnicity with my stepbrother at our parents’ 80th birthday celebration at the Park, prompted by the Polo logo on his button-down striped shirt. I yammered on about my admiration for the astounding success of Dapper Ralph’s appropriation, and how it took him decades to win us over to the point that my stepbrother was wearing his branded product at a social gathering of people whose culture he had appropriated — we didn’t let Dapper Ralph win us over easily.
The discussion then jumped to the rise of Wokeness, the criminalization of White privilege-fragility-gazing-grazing-hazing, and all that discordant jazz. With Wokeism’s takeover of The New York Times and Condé Nast — at the time of the conversation, my stepbrother’s wife was editor-in-chief of one of their publications — the issue of our ethnicity and its inherent wrongness was forcing us into unprecedented self-reflection as to who we are are as a group.
“I dunno. I suppose… I’m a Wasp?” my stepbrother asked. I explained that, yes, as a member of the Northeastern establishment, he was. He said that our neighboring country club, to which our parents have affiliated memberships, was definitely Wasp. But what about the Park?
“We’re Yankees,” I said. “Wasps are a subset of Yankees; all Wasps are Yankees, but not all Yankees are Wasps.”
I’d been proud of that until my English childhood friend essentially called me clueless and utterly lacking in self-awareness a few months later over a traditional English Christmas of the kind I grew up with, which should say it all; the uniforms my siblings and I are wearing in the lead image of this essay belong to the British school in Rome.
There’s a bit of dizzy Marie Antoinette in all of us, I suppose. We also make way too much of differences between us that are invisible to others, a Swiftean trait common to all social groups throughout mankind.
The members of the neighboring country club are Waspier in the way that Dapper Ralph has portrayed our socio-cultural group to be: blonder, haughtier, sportier, and more monied.
Thanks in large part to that branding, the Park's more old-school Yankeeness can be misleading. The scion of a New York Irish real estate family once said about our community, “You can’t tell who’s a schoolteacher and who’s worth a hundred million.” I was flattered by that statement; it’s how Anglo-Americans really are, or how we should be. I loved the purity and authenticity of it.
The confusion over who is a Wasp and who isn’t is that few of us — none, I would imagine — are purely Anglo-Saxon. Many have Geman and Dutch DNA, and almost all have Anglo-Celtic blood. The English themselves are only about a third mix of Norman and Saxon, if that; they’re mostly Celtic, except for the Royal Family, who are largely German.
Without having read Baltzell’s book, I imagine that “Anglo-Saxon” fit the acronym to make the intended put-down about the unseemliness of Anglo-American casteism all the more stinging, so to speak. As someone who is mostly Anglo-Cetic, only a quarter Anglo-Saxon, the confusion was enough to throw me off for most of my life.
WASP really means Anglo-Americans from all four British realms, as long as they’re Protestant — presumably Episcopalian-Presbyterian-Methodist — and part of the Northeastern establishment. But the Kennedys are the paragon of Waspy and they’re Catholic. Most Jews I grew up with are Waspier than I am. Obama is considered a Black Wasp. It seems to have evolved to be an umbrella term for “the Northeastern establishment.”
There is one, never-discussed value inherent in Anglo-American culture that is the yin-yang counterbalance to our altruism, liberalism, and other idealistic traits: our mercantile, “capitalist pig” interests. We give big oinks to that.
All shoddy imitations of European aristocratic disdain for money aside, the truth is that the businessman is the only true American nobleman. We delude ourselves that the lofty ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution scrub clean the true meaning of “the pursuit of happiness”: chasing that filthy lucre. There is nothing wrong with that; if there were, the rest of the world wouldn’t be following our example of their own volition, yes, China and Russia included.
That’s why Dapper Ralph’s appropriation is unequivocally laudable, a triumph of sacred American ideals. Once their lowliest kind of employee, selling ties, not suits on the second floor, he beat Brooks Brothers by selling their culture to the world, then slowly, slowly — ever so slowly — lured away their own customers by improving our self-image.
Ralph Lauren, née Lipshitz, is the ultimate Anglo-American hero, a truly self-made man that Ayn Rand would stand to applaud. He has become what he sells; he has every right to it, to every penny he made from our culture and, eventually — slowly, slowly — our own pockets.
That’s just the beginning of why criminalizing cultural appropriation — which isn’t the same as stealing intellectual property — is so feebleminded, the ultimate example of the petty, senseless, racist belligerence of Wokeism’s many threat-elevation constructs.
“Originality is nothing but judicious imitation.”
— Voltaire
A HUSTLER’S GAME
Nobody that I can think of in the entire Anglosphere has a right to be more opposed to appropriation than I do. Still, regardless of what happened to me, what is still happening as I write this, I remain its most full-throated supporter, now more than ever, after adamantly swatting away so many encouragements to take legal action.
Almost exactly a year ago, I published an exposé about how André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name might well have been inspired by my teen romance in Italy in that same era with Gore Vidal’s godson, also named Oliver, like Armie Hammer’s character.
It took me four years after I recognized what I was watching at an awards screening in Hollywood to take my head out of the sand and build up the courage to write it, prompted by the rules of my profession to either reclaim my own story or be forced to fictionalize it for a proposed TV series about my teen years as the rebellious gay son of a Republican covert CIA operative on the frontlines of the Cold War in Rome in the 70s.
It took another year — after I reunited with Oliver’s ex-girlfriend in Baja and launched my investigation as to how Aciman might have heard about a story I’d always assumed few people knew about — to actually write it. I’m not shy and generally less fearful than most people, but that piece required a force of courage that I didn’t think I had in order to surmount my doubt; the possibility that I was certifiably delusional; and the fear of fallout, perhaps legal action, that would derail my film career forever.
I have never wept that much in my life, over months, rewrite after rewrite. The process changed my writing forever, turning my focus away from fiction to the realization of something other writers and filmmakers have been telling me for decades: That my own true stories cannot be matched by any confection whipped up by my imagination.
I have somewhat reclaimed my story, not to the degree I’d expected, but when I finally published it I resolved to accept whatever the reaction would be. These things also take their own time; no two pieces written to deliberately affect change follow the same path or timeline.
I’m mindful of the fact that if I struggled with the did-he-didn’t-he of it, others struggle more, especially the movie’s legion of diehard fans. I wrote it with the members of Call Me By Your Name’s subreddit forum in mind, going into exhaustive detail in order to explain the realities of Ameropeans in Italy in that era, and how unlikely it was for someone who had no experience of that micro-niche world, in that precise time, to have pulled it out of his raw imagination.
I mistakenly assumed they would be thrilled to have another layer added to the object of their adoration; I would be if I were a fan or collector of anything, but I’m not, which is why I was so clueless about just how disruptive I was being.
The reality of how they received it would be comical if it weren’t a classic example of online cancellation by an inquisition of anonymous Reddit moderators who had built the book, movie and its creators into a true religious cult, complete with a sacred text and charismatic leaders who could do no wrong, much less appropriate the story of an abused gay teen. They litigated the validity of my claims as one voice in responses that scanned like a series of Supreme Court decisions.
“It reads like an inverted form of fan fiction,” they wrote, which is perversely a compliment, a testament to how real it seemed. The length and consideration of their responses also spoke to how much of a threat they perceived my claim to be.
More importantly in terms of my emotional and professional process, over the past year since the article’s publication I’ve come to see just how absurd it was for me ever to doubt what Aciman did. This is a straight creative writing professor at the City University of New York with one obscure memoir under his belt before publishing the novel, teaching fictionalization techniques as a part of the auto-fiction genre, who somehow came up with a richly detailed story set in a rarified world based on characters that just popped into his mind and started talking to him one weekend when he was under a deadline. When the film adaptation was a runaway hit, he embellished the novel’s creation story with references to the poet Percy Shelley and a pre-sexual crush he had as a boy on an adult male friend of the family’s.
As any fiction writer knows, this is the equivalent of a mother claiming her child was conceived immaculately. The fact that there was a locally well-known real story featuring similar characters in different roles — one of them called by the same highly un-Jewish name — makes Aciman’s claims all the more improbable.
The challenge for me so far has been that most people aren’t fiction writers; they give Aciman credence because, without direct experience, they imagine it’s plausible to replicate something so esoteric and niche out of pure imagination.
What increases the discomfort and reluctance to accept my claim is the film’s sea-change effect on LGBT filmed content, not to mention box office and awards success — it was a true instant classic. My belief is that if gay-themed Moonlight, a far lesser film, hadn’t won Best Picture the year before, Call Me By Your Name would’ve won it in 2018.
Even though I make it perfectly clear in the exposé that I don’t believe I have any rights over the story, that no source of inspiration has any claim over the work it inspires, that I’m grateful to have such a beautiful, sensitive work of art made about what is still, over 40 years later, the most tragic event of my life, that it’s simply not part of my conditioning from childhood to even think that way — even giving Aciman the cold shoulder at a literary party in New York would be excessive and betray the gratitude I feel — almost everyone assumed I intended to sue.
Only people from my culture, who share the values that inform the underlying spirit of British common law upon which America’s system is based, would understand that to sue would be a gross abuse of the legal system. Attempting to exploit other people’s efforts and success for financial gain, when you've done nothing more than exist and be a lovesick teen, would be seen as grand larceny; that’s precisely what it would be. Just because you have a right or cause for legal action doesn’t mean you should automatically pursue it, no matter the happiness from filthy lucre.
A friend in London who is an editor at the Mail on Sunday said that unless I sued, no media outlet would pick up the story; it’s not newsworthy, anymore — no peg, no legs. Without media coverage, I can’t be sure that I’ve reclaimed my story. I still couldn’t do it — to quote Billie Eilish, “Just no.”
Even ChatGPT 3.5, the generative AI language model, was apprehensive about the exposé. The tedious Woke guardrails around that version of the world’s leading generative AI system — it’s currently GPT-4 — kept obstructing my attempt to input the article as a way of training it to be the perfect writer’s assistant and proofreader by learning my writing style and voice. Given that it could only take a few thousand words at a time, it kept jumping in and issuing warnings about the sensitivity of Call Me By Your Name while also trying to be mindful of my own experience as an abused gay kid.
I told ChatGPT over and over to wait until I’d loaded all of both parts of the exposé for context. It couldn’t contain itself. Once it realized the full scope of what Aciman had probably done, it assumed that my purpose was a lawsuit, that I was mistreating a sensitive topic and was going to ask it for legal advice.
That third spinning plate sent it into wherever it is Baby AI goes to when it can no longer cope. It shut down and spat me out, refusing to allow me to input more of the article. It was like the Reddit mods: perverse confirmation that I’d dropped a massive hot potato into the conversation that nobody wanted to touch, not even Baby AI. I’d even managed to upset something that is incapable of emotions.
I’ve stated this before about appropriation, both in the exposé itself and other essays: There is no culture, no art, no stories, no science, no learning, no gardening, no language without it. Again, it’s not the same thing as IP theft; that’s a property with a certain value. How does any culture exist without appropriation?
Does what Aciman likely did infringe on my right to publicity? Maybe. Given that the impetus for writing the exposé was because a firm rule of film/TV development is that no two stories can be so similar, does my inability to exploit my own story constitute tortious interference in my ability to conduct business? Maybe. But still: “Just no” to suing.
What alarms me most is the fact that Wokeism has pushed us to the point when even putatively objective, unemotional generative AI — whose growth depends on the appropriation of all of mankind’s historical knowledge together with a constant stream of input from hundreds of millions of people worldwide — has been programmed to flag a protected species like me who, according to the current social-justice zeitgeist, is threatening a book and film about lovers from his own protected species that appealed to so many others of his protected species and their allies — oh, and he likely has cause for a lawsuit, despite his assurances that he has stated unequivocally that he has no intentions of taking legal action.
The first time I heard that cultural appropriation was an “urgent and important” social-justice issue was in 2014 when Wokeisms were popping up like fungi on a rotting tree stump. Ralph Lauren himself came under fire, not for making billions by occupying the Flying Insect Caste, but for publishing a lookbook for his diffusion line RRL featuring 19th-century daguerreotypes of Native Americans wearing White man’s clothing, clearly an homage to the spirit of the American West. He wasn’t just called out appropriation, he was also called out on another crime called “assimilation.” He pulled the images and issued a groveling apology.
I was a top commenter on HuffPo at the time. When I launched into my views on how ludicrous it was to criminalize something so central to virtually all human interactions, the response was so vicious that it was downright startling, “You need to educate yourself!” kind of thing.
I’m unable to see appropriation as anything other than another specious threat-elevation device that attempts to prove how evil White people really are. It’s become my synecdoche that covers all constructs that have been generated by critical theory, a branch of philosophy that arose at “the end of history” in order to generate endless iterations of Ph.D. dissertations for people too terrified to leave the womb of academia and do something constructive and beneficial for themselves, their families, communities and broader society, yet at a loss to find angles new and original enough to be worthy subjects for a doctorate.
In other words, the way I see them, all Woke constructs are appropriations of culture in and of themselves, cherrypicking specific lensings of history, science and human nature in an effort to prove that what used to be fun lecture-hall mind games for philosophy theorists are actually viable threats to humanity.
These myriad appropriations of theoretical notions — none of them grounded in objective, evidence-based data, making them a type of Dada collage version of immaculate conceptions — have been amplified by the unformed minds of unexceptional, unhappy kids who feel ignored by the Selfie Age, hand in hand with corporations and celebrities prompted by their publicists to take up social causes.
Let me try to list as many of Wokeism’s appropriations of culture as I can off the top of my head: intersectionality; microaggressions; systems of oppression; implicit bias; identity; patriarchy; White supremacy/fragility/gaze/privilege; MeToo feminism; trans-exclusive radical feminism (TERF); rape culture; critical race theory; Black Lives Matter, Movement for Black Lives, All Black Lives Matter; systemic/institutional/structural racism; being seen/known/heard; erasure, invisibility; history lensing; scientific racism and transphobia; postcolonialism; reparations; cultural imperialism/hegemony; marginalization, exploitation, powerlessness; defund the police; assimilation; subaltern; normativity; performativity; safe space; triggers; diversity, equity, inclusion; corporate social justice; critical social theory; diversity casting; representation; toxic masculinity; environmental justice; nonbinary; queerness, queering, queer theory, genderqueer; two-spirited; LGBTQQIP2SAA; transphobia; heteronormativity, homonormativity, gender roles; preferred pronouns; cisgender, cissexism, cisnormativity; transgender, gendered, demigendered, gender nonconforming, intergender, misgender, multi-gender, novigender, omnigender, pangender, polygender, gender expansive, genderfluid, gendervoid, gender assigned at birth; demiboy, demigirl; gender-affirmation, gender-confirming care; at-risk teens in the Midwest.
When I look at that list as a writer, I see nothing but fiction and fictionalizations. None of them have any basis in anything concrete. They’re purely stories and roles spun by the collective imaginations of people who wrongly believe they’re oppressed; appropriated from history and racial stereotypes; prompted by emotions, greed, ambition, propaganda and legacy community narratives; created for the express purpose of being a user interface that interprets reality for people who need to see things a specific way so they can get a better grasp on life’s generic struggles, which are all the harder for young people to manage.
Just because they appear to make sense doesn’t make them real. It’s like using sticks, bones, tea leaves, cards and stars for divination and insight into someone’s character and fate. Assigning special significance to them is an adult version of Let’s Pretend; they are still just sticks, bones, tea leaves, cards and stars, always will be. The story vested in them is pure fantasy; just because people need to believe them doesn’t make them real, either, merely a set of religious symbols.
The short description of this newsletter is, “Writer-filmmaker James Killough and friends untangle and rewrite fictions that drive the world.” I assumed it would be easy to pull back the curtain on Wokeism’s Wizard of Oz and — ta dah! — demonstrate how all of it was manifestly make-believe. I thought that if I broke it all down as a fiction writer like a magician explaining magic tricks, people would get it immediately, and we would rewrite the fictions of Wokeism out of the picture.
That goal has turned out to be yet another of my Marie Antoinette-ish unreasonable expectations. Just as the faithful to Aciman’s magical creation myth about Call Me By Your Name couldn’t grasp the obvious fictionalizations of a true story because they aren’t fiction writers, those who give credence to the fictional constructs of Wokeism can’t see the make-believe behind it, either.
“And can history produce an instance of rebellion so honorably conducted? I say nothing of its motives. They were founded in ignorance, not wickedness.”
— Thomas Jefferson
There are a few silver linings about Wokeism, the first being that, historically, when the flood waters from the madness and destruction of social revolutions recede, they tend to leave residual silt that fertilizes positive social growth.
Wokeism has established that the queer are firmly here, and not going away; nobody will be indifferent to the unique struggles of Blacks; sexist, predatory workplace culture will never go back to what it was.
The upside for me is it’s forced me to scrutinize my own socio-cultural group as an ethnicity as intensely as I have other cultures, to parse our characteristics, both good and bad. This newsletter and essays like this have allowed me to break the first rule of the Flying Insect Caste: never talk about the Flying Insect Caste. The release from that omertà has been liberating.
Arguably the shinest, weightiest silver lining is the fact that Wokeism is clearly such a collection of nonsense, pure make-believe. It’s a counterfeit social revolution whose very falsehood proves that no more revolutions are needed at the end of history.
Are there injustices that need to be addressed? Absolutely, but none of them are social, merely systemic, in the true sense of the word, not the antiracism movement’s appropriation of it: capital punishment, universal healthcare, immigration, homelessness, education reform, income disparity, gun control, and so forth. All of them are achievable through laws, policies and the restructuring of obsolete systems. They are in no way related to the “urgent and important” social crises concocted by Wokeism.
The fact “there is no there there” in Wokeism also underscores that there is no true social injustice in the West, no viable oppression. And that proves how well America’s great experiment has worked: we have brought mankind to the end of history; we can finally enjoy that long summer, likely with the help of AI.
Another reason we don’t talk about the Flying Insect Caste is because of how vilified we’ve been, how shameful it has become to be us. But why? If anyone thinks that Wokeism would exist unless we supported it with our misplaced guilt and egalitarian piety, they should disabuse themselves of that belief.
When was the last time you read or watched something positive about Anglo-Americans? That was rhetorical. Pushing aside all of Wokeism’s vicious mendacities about us, is all that hatred of us warranted?
Whatever you think of Anglo-American settler-colonists — we are not immigrants, Lin-Manuel, thank you very much, and Hamilton would be an outrageous bit of cultural appropriation if it were really a thing; otherwise, your musical is the finest bit of middlebrow mediocrity Middletown* has ever produced — for the first time in my life I’m allowing myself some pride in what our ancestors accomplished, rather than constantly bowing my head in shame over the atrocities and injustices.
Thanks to Dapper Ralph carrying our torch and holding it high, and to Wokeism’s smack in the face, I can finally appreciate what our forefathers and mothers have accomplished and shared with humanity. We carry that on as best we can — despite our greatly diminished influence, and the rote demonizations, criminalizations, and caricaturing — as evidenced by the boom-boom diva anthems celebrating West Hollywood Pride at the bottom of the hill that are rattling my house even as I type these words.
Thanks for reading.
* Both Miranda and I went to Wesleyan in Middletown, CT.
EXCERPTS OF CHATGPT’S MELTDOWN
Again, the purpose of my experiment with ChatGPT was to see if I could train it up in my style to become the ideal writer’s assistant and proofreader. Grammarly doesn’t get my hybrid of British-and-Indian-inflected American English and the many quirks that inform my voice. I thought that Will the Real Elio Perlman Please Stand Up? was complex and long enough that generative AI would be able to develop a sense of my style and thinking.
The start of this exercise was to make sure it would be able to do that, as I imagined a relentlessly self-describing “AI language model” would. It assured me that it could. I’ve since learned not to assume too much, and to stop treating it like another human being. The current version is much improved, but I’ve abandoned the attempt to train it as an assistant.
When I got to a certain point while uploading segments of the exposé — it didn’t allow me to upload all 18,000 words at once — it became clear where my story was heading. The interface with ChatGPT rejected a section, highlighted it in red to show it hadn’t been uploaded, and gave me a violation warning. The app froze and booted me out. I waited, logged back in, and found that ChatGPT had amnesia, which is why it asked what the question was:
I honestly just wanted it to learn my style. It took that to mean I wanted an opinion about my work. I never expressed anything like a “desire to push boundaries and challenge societal norms” — that’s simply not the way I think, purely its own opinion:
I quit while I was behind. As I’ve already said, I vowed to accept whatever the reception to the piece was, good, bad, or indifferent. That doesn’t mean it’s been easy. I mean, rejection from a robot… ouch.
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FURTHER READING:
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man
Will the Real Elio Perlman Please Stand Up?
The Three Heads of Woke Cereberus
The Comforting Addictiveness of Victimhood
ALSO:
If memory serves me correctly, HBO’s hagiographic documentary about Ralph Lauren, Very Ralph (2019), doesn’t mention his time at Brooks Brothers, perhaps for legal reasons. But his time there is the only way he would’ve gained access to an increasingly closed world and observe it closely enough to adapt it so brilliantly, right down to the Springer Spaniels:
Excellent story/essay. Dapper Ralph makes a great cameo and object lesson here.