Stupid Sexy Syrian Strongman Submariner!

And other dispatches from the Amplitude Modulation Era

basically one dollar for every innocent human being this dude killed

Reputation ain't shit 'cause see
What you done did in the past don't excite me — Bushwick Bill, “Size Ain’t Shit”

When you wear something like spats, I think you might as well wear your favorite player’s jersey because what you’re saying is I want to be powerful like the bear and I’m wearing its hide to tap into its power. — Film Noir Buff

It’s my failure to sound like my heroes that’s allowed me to sound like myself. — John Clayton Mayer

Your humble author has been working overtime for Trackday Club members lately; in addition to Saturday’s drive through the Hocking Hills, I spent the weekend before this one coaching a reader at Mid-Ohio. It was the same event, and the same student, as last year’s PCA weekend. only without the famous “BLAU BIRD”, who presumably was doing data coaching for Oscar Piastri in Qatar.

Until I moved to Mid-Ohio, I never understood just how many Porsche Club and BMW Club days happen out here. Their participants crowd every gas station, restaurant, and (occasionally) auto-parts store, easy to identify because most of them wear what I think of as the “Car Club Uniform”:

• A shirt and jacket proclaiming their ownership of a vehicle;

• A hat to match, if they are bald or balding;

• Some sort of faux racing shoes;

• An enormous watch.

Unsurprisingly, this has caused me to think a little bit about how we, as men, dress nowadays. I’ll be brief, because it’s RACE WEEK for me and I have a whole barn to clean.

Defining one’s self by accomplishment, identity, or ownership?

From prehistory forward, men have marked their clothing, their tools, and even themselves to denote accomplishment. In the beginning, of course, those marks signified success in hunting and war, the two primary actives of men for 99% of human existence. Military ribbons and silhouettes on planes are the modern equivalent. High school varsity jackets, too — they say “I did this, I represented the school on the field.”

The privilege of marking one’s self is always a rarer one than merely being recognized by the tribe for something — that prejudice survives in all sorts of vestigial ways now, like the fact that SCCA gives every winner a trophy but reserves a winning sticker for Divisionals and Nationals. Displaying a victory in public is a higher bar to clear than displaying a trophy at home.

The mildest form of display is something like the “event T-shirt”, but even then, there are rules. When I was in school, it was widely understand that “you don’t wear the shirt to the event,” whether it was the SigEp Spring Break party or a 5k run. Everybody understood that this was to prevent the whole group of attendees from looking like a bouquet of nerds, but it was also, at some level, because we hadn’t earned the party yet. We had no memories, no stories, no existence there. The purpose of the shirt is to remember that. Every time I do a trackday or race and I see people wearing the shirt from that trackday there, I shudder a little bit.

Marking one’s self to commemorate an accomplishment is the highest form of self-display, but it has a sicky sibling in the form of marking one’s self to commemorate an identity. Sometimes it’s a combination of accomplishment and identity; a man might get the “Budweiser” tattooed on his arm because he has made it through training and is now a Navy Seal. When you wear a shirt with the name of a band or country club or (this really happens) housing subdivision on it, you’re asserting identity. Gang members get tattoos, and “finance bros” wear Patagucci vests with the name of their company embroidered across from the mountain logo. Noble families often have some sort of heraldry or symbol associated with them — don’t get me started on the modern misconceptions regarding “Family Crests” and “Coats Of Arms”.

Until about 100 years ago, accomplishment and identity were pretty much the only reasons to display marks. They’ve now been joined by purchasing. Look around, anywhere you go; you will see the marks of purchasing everywhere. When you wear clothing with the name of the maker prominently displayed, that’s a mark of purchase. Almost all jewelry is a mark of purchase — it symbolizes that you have the money to buy it and the “taste” to know what to buy. Purchase marks combine trace levels of accomplishment marks — I can afford to wear an “OFF-WHITE” pair of Air Force Ones — and identity marks — I am a streetwear connoisseur/fashionista/upper-middle-class person.

The rise of the purchase mark

One unexpected side-effect of using “money” as a medium of exchange rather than barter is that it’s possible to accumulate a lot of money without really doing anything that would make sense to a neighbor, son, or rival. The man who finds himself in that situation is basically limited to a purchase mark. One example: I worked with a kind of jerk-off tech grifter who had never actually accomplished anything that would get him respect in the tech field, nor had he ever done anything that was traditionally masculine or competitive. So he decided to become “The Skittles Porsche Guy”, buying Porsches in every possible color.

That was a purchase mark in the rawest form. It doesn’t matter who he is — because he was a nonentity, my son could kick his ass and every aspect of his personality was a pastiche of other, more notable, personalities. And it doesn’t matter what he’s done, because you wouldn’t understand it and you wouldn’t respect it if you did. Thus, the purchase mark. He defines himself by his purchases.

When people talk about “new money behavior”, it’s often associated with purchase marks. Absent a family history or a reserve of respect within the community, new arrivals usually assert their identity via purchases. It’s become common in some subcultures to leave tags on clothing, all the better to confirm the “authenticity” of the purchase.

Very few of us are totally immune to purchase marks. I might make fun of PORSH SHITTLES in the paragraph above, but as someone who owns more than a dozen custom Paul Reed Smith Guitars, I’m not above wearing the “PRS Signature Club” shirts, and how is that any better or worse? (If you asked me to defend it, I’d tell you that I’ve played paying gigs with my PRS guitars, but would be thrifty with the details of how much those gigs paid.) In 2023, many of us have formed deep-seated relationships with brands. We define ourselves by the consumption of those brands. Because we have very few accomplishments, and not much of an identity, to mark ourselves otherwise.

There’s just one problem with purchase marks: they have no swagger. No “rizz”. Buying stuff is just buying stuff. Which brings us to:

McQueen, al-Assad, and the skin of the bear

In a world where the money printer hums continuously and fortune passes everywhere from Goldman Sachs to PPP fraudsters and Microsoft secretaries, the significance of most purchase marks has diminished to near zero. (Spend a morning at a California cars-and-coffee event if you’re not sure about that.) Therefore we now have a frantic struggle to reinvest items and marks with meaning. There is a yearning for authenticity…

…made tougher because the jobs that pay respectable money require more time than ever before. Once upon a time, the Masters Of The Universe put in six or eight hours a day then went home for a dinner party or quiet night. Now they are “work-involved” pretty much all the time. Consequently it has become harder and harder to create an identity outside your incomprehensible job, even if that identity is as toothless as “club tennis champion in the 35-44 age bracket”.

The solution is obviously to purchase authenticity and meaning the same way one purchases marks and possession. Which is where we run into a problem, because authenticity, like big game in Africa, becomes rarer and more sought-after every year. Some manufacturers create a simulacrum of authenticity via artificial barriers to purchase; owning a new Ferrari is both a statement of your financial power and a testament to your status with the dealer. More common: what I call “the hero route”.

Children, particularly boys, need heroes. It’s common for children to imitate what their heroes do, say, wear, and own. As an old friend of mine says, it’s a way of gaining power. Want to be a great soccer player? Why not wear the number of your favorite Premier Leaguer?

I don’t know exactly when this behavior crossed over to grown men, but it’s everywhere now. 40-year-old homeowners will wear a knockoff jersey with the name of a 19-year-old illiterate on it, and encourage their wives to do the same. There’s been a lot of chuckling among Radical owners lately at the fellow who had his $180,000 new SR10 liveried like a particular driver’s Ferrari F1 car. But you get the idea. He wants to be great, like the man he is copying. There’s a whole industry making “Steve McQueen” stuff for middle managers and salesmen who think they somehow are tapping into the spirit of a fellow who… uh, once crashed a car while drunk and blamed it on his assistant?

Ah, but that’s prole shit. If you have real money, you can obtain the things that are directly linked to the man whose energy you want to imitate or absorb. Like the Rolex Submariner worn by Syria’s famous coup leader and strongman, Hafez al-Assad. It would be a $20,000 watch had it not been worn by a man who personally ordered the deaths of 40,000 people in a single incident — but now it’s up at $54,500.

Admit it. You like the idea of owning it. Because if you own and wear it, you’re not just another nonentity with an expensive watch. You’re a man with a story. It’s not your story — it’s al-Assad’s story. But you own a part of it. And it’s also a handsome watch. The man had some taste, assuming he actually chose it.

Sixty years ago, you wouldn’t be able to sell a watch like this in America, any more than you could sell a set of Goering’s plus-size MeUndies. The average man on the street had a strong sense of aversion to the things he considered loathsome, from sexual perversion to the purchase of a luxury car on time payments. But that was then, and this is now, because…

From FM to AM

I have long believed that there is such a thing as a “masculine mindset” and a “feminine mindset”, found commonly but not exclusively in the heads of men and women, respectively. These mindsets differ in many aspects, from risk tolerance to love of verbosity, but for the purposes of today’s discussion let’s talk about how they experience emotion.

Most of the men I’ve known and admired are “frequency modulated”. They are very certain about what they like and what they dislike. The more strongly they feel about something, the less likely they are to change their minds from “pro” to “con” or vice versa. They are not always “in touch with their feelings” in the sense that they may not truly understand just how important something is to them until an event or decision point forces them to understand it.

By contrast, the majority of the women I’ve known are “amplitude modulated”. They are often not that certain how they feel about something or someone, but they are very aware of how much they feel about that something or someone. Ask any experienced co-respondent and he will tell you: the woman who hates her husband won’t sleep with you, but the woman who has lost interest in her husband is an easy mark.

A hundred years ago, Western society was “masculine” in the sense that one could be disgraced out of it. People were diligent in protecting their reputations. Your reputation and public character were critical aspects of your life, dictating everything from your employment to your bank loan rate. Those of you who know me have probably heard the tale of the fast-food millionaire who was permanently denied entry into a Columbus, Ohio golf club — not because he was a bad person, but because he played a bit of a genial buffoon in the company’s TV advertisements. That was the society that thought “actress” and “prostitute” were synonymous, in a bad way.

No longer. We live in the feminine world, where Oscar Wilde’s aphorism — “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about” — rules. We now measure people by the amplitude of their fame, not the nature of it. This is the era of social media, reality TV, YouTube clowns. Everyone around you is trying to be famous to some degree, even if it’s only within a subculture on the Internet.

And that is why Hafed al-Assad’s Submariner will sell for a price that is more than twice what a dealer could get for, say, the Rolex Daytona awarded to the 2005 Grand-Am GT winner at the 24 Hour. Because al-Assad is indisputably a bigger and more important person than the man who actually got in a race car and won a race. (The watch would have belonged to Wolf Henzler, Dominik Farnbacher, Perre Ehret, and Shawn Price. Only two of them even merit a Wikipedia entry.) The fact that he killed tens of thousands of people and ruled his country with a bloody hand… that’s positive!

This mindset is so instinctive to us now — but a middle-class American businessman in 1923 would have recoiled at it. You mean that a dictator’s watch is worth more than a race winner’s watch? How can that be? Given the choice, our 1923 fellow would have taken the Daytona. But if you’d given him another choice, that of having his own name engraved on the watch for transfer to his son in the future, he would have picked that over either of those watches associated with other men. Because he didn’t grow up in a culture where grown men fawned over other grown men.

What can we do?

This idea of evaporating or disappearing male identity doesn’t feel as urgent as, say, the situation in the Middle East — but it’s worth thinking about it in the context of “weak men make hard times”. One wonders, as well, about Bashar al-Assad. He’s been told to stay out of the current mess… but he was also told to step down, or step aside, a long time ago. He proved to be stronger than the United States or its intermediaries. He is the master of his own fate. I’m sure he’d like to own his father’s watch, but it doesn’t really matter that much. When you inherit your father’s iron-man strength and determination, who needs a stupid sexy Submariner?