Newsletter: Is This Peak Woke?
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Dear Political Animals,
One of the things that I honestly cannot believe people still argue about is evolution. I saw a tweet yesterday on the internet and it really proved to me how much the world is constantly evolving. Check it out:
What a dinger. Amazon, a trillion-dollar company, is naming a stadium after its company-wide fight against global warming.
I do not want to get too fancy on you but I think it would be useful to spend a few minutes reviewing the history of what civilizations named their massive buildings after. This is important because monuments, whether to people, Gods, or corporations say a lot about what a nation values.
Back in the day, you basically had to be a god to get your name carved in marble. Pretty much everyone else got shut out of the naming rights to the Parthenon, the Pantheon, and Mount Olympus.
But society got way more equal during the Middle Ages, when you just needed to be one of God’s homeboys to get a national landmark named after you. For example, St. Peter’s in Rome and Notre Dame in Paris are named after people who Jesus used to chill with.
Unfortunately, civilization got jacked-up by nationalism after that and people stopped caring what God thought. Instead of letting the Pope decide which nations were real and which nations were fake news, free peoples with a shared cultural ancestry made their own countries. Basically, people in places like England, France, and Germany told the Pope that his funny hat had nothing to do with whether or not their nations were legit.
In this time, what people valued were the achievements of their countrymen. The biggest and most iconic projects were named after those things. For example, Trafalgar Square in London is a monument to the time that the English Navy crushed the Turks in battle. Another example of this is Independence Hall in the USA, which is where freedom was invented by George Washington and Ben Franklin. Later on the USA received the Statue of Liberty, which is another example of the same thing. So is the Arc de Triumphe in Paris, which literally means, “Arch of Triumph” — something that the people in France have not experienced in a very long time.
But as we all know, what modern people value the most is money. President Calvin Coolidge famously said that, “The business of America is business.” So the next generation of really baller buildings was named after money. For example, the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower, and the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.
But the thing about people who have enough money to name a skyscraper after their company is this: eventually they will want to cut out the middle man and just name their DIY monument after themselves. This makes sense because if we are being totally honest, human beings’ favorite thing to worship is not God, it’s themselves. Anyway, the best example of a person naming skyscrapers after himself is Donald Trump. Another example is naming buildings on college campuses, like the George Lucas and Dr. Dre buildings at USC, or the Steve Schwartzman Library in New York City. What a genius play.
But if you thought this trend of evolution towards secular monuments would last forever, you are wrong. Going to church is way more boring than playing Call of Duty and watching porn, but just because no one does it does not mean the country is getting less religious. In plain fact, America is getting more religious.
The country is officially woke AF and ready to riot for social justice and the environment. So I personally am extremely encouraged to see that Amazon, which is a company worth more than a trillion dollars, is naming its stadium after something bigger than itself — climate change. In the Woke Church, we are all martyrs to oil companies and carbon footprints.
So we have come full circle — back to the Pantheon and Notre Dame — where we named our public spaces after our gods. “Climate Pledge” arena is a cultural cathedral, and naming it this way is basically the same thing as naming a real cathedral after Jesus or one of his friends. We are talking about two different faiths — Christian and Woke — but one shared heroic model, enshrined in a public monument: sacrificing for the cause.
At the end of the day, the “Climate Pledge” is just one of the three parts of the woke Holy Trinity. The other two are legal pot and anti-racism. So it is really only a matter of time before Jeff Bezos names an art museum “The Snoop Dogg Center for the Arts and Getting Blunted.” Maybe we will even see Google build the “White Privilege is Bad Superdome.” IDK.
Whatever happens, this is 100 percent proof that evolution is real. We are quickly evolving from a secular society to a religious one. I personally hope I can be a saint with a pot shop named after me when it is done.
KEENDAWG.
Good article. You made a nice observation of this surge of American “wokeness”, but you don’t really put forth a hypothesis as to why.
Maybe you just think you don’t have to state the obvious…Covid + Floyd / Sociopath President = Social Unrest.
It’s much much more than that though.
What do all “woke” CEOs you mentioned have in common?….The answer….Young, NEW Money!
I don’t think this would be possible if the new tech economy was run at the VP level and up by the trust fund class. The senior management of the old economy is pretty much a circle jerk of old money ivy league legacy trash….Think Bush old money generations 1 & 2….not getting finer with age. The Trump/Kushner orgy of old money has spat out some fine examples of humanity. Every generation that really doesn’t have to work for a living seems to get lazier (intellectually and generally) not to mention the growing sense of entitlement for themselves and their descendants. It was inevitable that the oligarchy that ensued would eventually be controlled by an economically inbred clan of Gollum spawn.
As a little sidebar…that’s why the south can’t seem to shake racism..too many descendants of slave owners who lost their god given right to a free ride….too many stories of the good ol’ days live on in family oral history. Tens of thousands of dynastic families suddenly had to work a lot harder for a lot less profit. They were abruptly demoted to the farmers and homesteaders they always should have been…and apparently they still feel the sting and continue to hold a grudge. To me slavery in the south was worse than Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia…just because it went on for so long.
Russia and Germany during WW 1/2 were generational blips of nationalism taken advantage of by cults of personality and eventual military coups of their previous governments. I doubt race or ideology cleansing by genocide is ever widely popular with most of the societies that get caught up in it. They just go along to get along lest they be cleansed themselves…waiting for some sort of liberation or revolt to back.
Southern racism (and racism lite in the north) was the cultural norm for like 300 years. Overt racism in the south had only begun to be socially unacceptable starting in the late 1960s…That’s pretty recent history….Lotta people still alive from the “Good ‘ol Days” I doubt it’s much stressed in our schools (particularly southern schools) that we BARELY beat South Africa to ending federally endorsed segregation…the last “democracy” on earth to do so. Trump pulled a lot of old reformed racists back on the wagon. 4 years later a not insignificant number have passed on and a good many others realize it’s not as “Great Again” as they remembered and are looking for the nearest exit.
I think a big part of the reason this feels like such a unique and strong “Awakening” is that there is the unusual case of a parallel battle going on in the oligarchy.
New, Socially Progressive, Self-made Entrepreneur $Billions VS The Entitled Class $Billions.
I can’t point to a time when there were more bottomless pocketed class traitors taking on the old guard.