Icon #28 - Uncle Sam: The REAL 2nd Amendment Santa

In this edition of The Iconograph, Jack and Miles are joined by journalist/podcaster/fictive 2nd Amendment Santa, Robert Evans to talk about everybody's favorite Unc:

Uncle Sam!

They'll explore his sexy creation, his tantalizing evolution, why he's so hot and everybody wants him and so much more!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello the Internet, and welcome to this spinoff episode of
Darnelli Zeitgeist, which we're calling the Iconograph. Instead of looking
at the zeitgeis through current events vents events on Monday morning,
we're looking at the zeit guys through the powerful pop
cultural deity that are our icons. Boy, that that calling

(00:25):
someone a pop cultural deity has never felt so generous
as in this one. This week, we're talking about the
most famous human symbol for the most powerful country in
the world, the friendly face of the obvious villain of
this moment in history. He's Santa Claus for people who

(00:45):
like war and being reprimanded instead of presence and kindness.
And for some reason he, for some reason, that approach
is less popular than Santa Strap on your stars and stripes,
stovetop hats and your chin strap, white beard, and occasionally
you're stilt. For some reason, he does still do stilts

(01:09):
in honor of America. Limping into our two hundred and
fiftieth anniversary, we're talking Uncle Sam.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Samuel thrilled to be joined as always by my co
host mister Miles Gray.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Yep, yep, still you.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
I want to stop acting like a tough guy and
pretending you walked out of anger management exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:30):
I also want you to get me a piece of
polyurythane that got chunked up in the reflecting pool.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Piece of that that problem meets Ago for asking for that.

Speaker 4 (01:41):
I know, I know, flocking people up.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
I'm in DC right now and every day I'm like, fuck,
I'm fucking doing it, man, I'm gonna I was just
trying to think.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
I'm like, well, what if I go like three in
the morning while the National Guard is asleep, They're gonna
drone strike you. I know.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
The cameras are like the second I walk out of
the door to it, like, we know what you're up to, dickhead.

Speaker 4 (02:03):
Yeah s, Team six is going to bust in on
the daily guys recording you.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
Walk around the streets of DC with a pool skimmer.
They'll like shoot you for that. On site, it should
be in our third seat. That voice that you've heard
the co founder of cool Zone Media, host of Behind
the Bastard, the journalist, an author Second Amendment Santa, one
of the creative engines behind Cracked, who started out as

(02:31):
our first intern.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Welcome back to the show, Robert, Robert.

Speaker 4 (02:37):
Thank you for introducing me and kind of giving the
abbreviated version of my entire life story.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
Jack, It's great to be that's what I do. It's
what as I hit middle age with an amendment. Santa
does feel like a nickname for Uncle Sam. Yeah, this
is appropriate.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
This is who I'm picturing when I'm picturing second amendment Santa.
So i'd say Keys as opposed to Santa, who I
think we decided when we did that episode, still probably
the most famous person we've covered yet. Yeah, for sure, Santa.
Like when we're talking worldwide, nobody can really touch Santa.

Speaker 4 (03:17):
That's why they call him mister Worldwide.

Speaker 2 (03:19):
That's what that is, why he goes by that nickname.

Speaker 1 (03:22):
Three, I feel like Uncle Sam, this chopped unk who
represents America probably towards the bottom of our list in
terms of the sheer wattage of his iconography. Robert, so far,
we've done, you know, first episode was Einstein, second episode

(03:43):
was Erkle, but we've done. I'd say he's down there
with the Easter Bunny, and Lisa Frank would be like that,
you know, Lisa, Lisa Frank, the binder, the traffick keeper
does Frank is Yeah, did you know that? That esthetic

(04:03):
was powered by cocaine, a lot of cocaine.

Speaker 4 (04:05):
I assumed I knew in the sense that like like
great psychics know of the ACTA records, you know, like
I do it at it. Yes.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:15):
Brian the editor called her past del Pinochet because of
her management style.

Speaker 2 (04:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
Yeah, but I think I feel like he's in the
Easter Bunny family where part of our approach here has
to be diagnosing why it's not coming together for Uncle Sam.
Like he has some things going for him. I'd say
he's not not hot. He's like if the Quaker oats
guy took HG eight.

Speaker 4 (04:43):
Hey, that's where we're starting.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Yeah, Like he's got like looks like he would beat
your ass. He's very angular. Definitely. Has he been sold
from the beginning or has that pretty early on?

Speaker 1 (04:56):
We're going to get into the into the evolution.

Speaker 4 (04:59):
But because I feel like it's going to say a
lot about America when he's been like jacked as opposed
to when he's been skinny.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Right, Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
When he first came on the scene, he was nothing.
Then in the political cartoon hotbed of the Civil War era,
he got the look that we know today, but he
was thin.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
He looked like.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
Like a roll doll illustration of like Charlie Bucket's grandfather.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
He was like, yeah, he had some slender man, tall
slender and zeb slender man.

Speaker 3 (05:29):
He's right, he's pre super soldier serum Steve Rogers.

Speaker 2 (05:34):
Or whatever, but tall, he was always tall.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
I feel like he's definitely influenced by like people asking
what if Abe Lincoln hadn't gotten shot in the back.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Of the head.

Speaker 4 (05:45):
Yeah, but he's gotten that, Like clearly, Abe Lincoln is
kind of an influence, one of the influences here. I
also think maybe there's something to say in like young America.
He's really like this tall, skinny guy who hasn't filled out.
And then when we start doing coups in places like I.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Was a super soldier, like drawing it with like jacked yeah, yeah, yeah,
stopping the Cold War spread of communism.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
I do feel like him every once in a while,
and like more and more, i'd say, in the last
fifty years, being like, hey, what if I was ten
feet fucking tall is a sign that he's like trying
things out, Like he's like, what if I was star
spangled spin and also built like an ad at, you know, isn't.

Speaker 4 (06:33):
Possible that's some Texas cross pollination, because I know we've
got big texts down in Texas for the State Fair.
And I wonder if there was ever a point at
which like big texts made someone in DC be like, well,
we got to make Uncle Sam taller. Look at how
tall that fucking hillbilly is.

Speaker 1 (06:49):
It's just an arms race of leg length. Yeah, we
got big texts at home, right, that's right, I don't
need to go to Texas. I'd say his most relevant
update was during Kendrick's halftime show with Samuel L. Jackson,
who came out and announced himself as Uncle Sam. Ye,
but that was like mainly based on like name similarity

(07:10):
and she was wearing he there's a lot to work
with in there, you know, there's a lot to there's
a lot of room to to paint and try things
out because it's basically a hat and a name at
this point.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
Hat beard, Yeah, a beard. So yeah, we're going to.

Speaker 1 (07:26):
Go through his most iconic moments and how we got
him eventually, how he got to where he is today.
I would say his most iconic moment is the I
want you for us, for US Army, I want you
for US Army.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
That was the original.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
That's the original textas I want you for US army,
which is what happened to the the.

Speaker 2 (07:55):
Well, we hadn't had an army really, we just didn't
know how to speak about the are we hadn't.

Speaker 4 (08:01):
Yeah, we didn't have a lot of experience doing it,
Like the army was not a big thing when we
like in World War One. Before World War One, it
was nothing, and then it kind of fiddled back down
to being pretty small before World War Two. And I
don't think the country was great at talking about it.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Yeah, like it was.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
It's like unfrizen cave man like frank shit, it's like
a US army.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Yeah, good, like buster blue right right right right. That's
like when the British say he's in hospital.

Speaker 4 (08:31):
Yeah exactly, because they don't have.

Speaker 2 (08:33):
Them right for us. Saw me okay, okay, thank you uncle? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Or did justin Timberlake just come through and say drop
the it's clean?

Speaker 2 (08:42):
Yeah right.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Usually like when you look at it, because I was
like looking for an explanation, like was this colloquially how
we talked about it? It's just people even when they're
describing the poster, like in a caption under the poster.

Speaker 2 (08:54):
We'll just fill the the and it'll just They'll be like,
and this poster which says I want you for the U.

Speaker 3 (09:00):
S Army, right, They're like they're altered ones that I
feel like I've seen that say for the US Army.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
Or it's like shoehorned in like in a small rough ye.
It might have been a Kerning issue, you know, like
I don't know, we can't fit it in. Nobody's will
fill it in with their brain.

Speaker 4 (09:16):
I feel like it's it's not uncommon though, like to
that everyone remembers a phrase is slightly different than it
was actually printed, sometimes because it was actually printed kind
of fucked.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
Up right exactly.

Speaker 1 (09:28):
But so that image was drawn by a guy named
James Montgomery Flag who famously name James Flag Jim Flag. Yeah,
and he used his own reflection like he had a
model who was scheduled to come didn't bother to show up.
He's like, well, I don't have any options. I guess

(09:51):
I'll have to use my own reflection, looks in the
mirror and notices for the first time he's a goddamn ten.

Speaker 4 (10:00):
I wonder did he really have it fall through?

Speaker 2 (10:04):
No, I have to no, I guess I have to
use my stunning visage. Isn't that Jimmy Flagg's face right there?
He said he had a model that fell through him.

Speaker 4 (10:19):
Yeah, that reminds me of the in the p O
W flag if you's like flying above very fucking post office.
The person who that was drawn based of the artist
based off of his son who wasn't in the military,
because he got like the flu pretty bad. So he
just like drew his son when his son was kind
of stick with the flu and the falinary face of

(10:40):
like pretind yeah, it's beautiful.

Speaker 2 (10:43):
That's amazing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:44):
So he also stole it from there was a British
propaganda poster for World one for World War one that
said Britons and then they put in Lord Kitchener's face
and then said once you.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
So it was like kind of like one of.

Speaker 1 (10:58):
Those I heart yeah you type things where they were
using pictures instead of words. So maybe that's where they
got the idea to like get a little loose with
the language. Sure, this is the first time that I
think they drew Uncle Sam as hot. Prior to this,
he had been like old and slender, like we mentioned,
and his approach is very like direct, and I don't.

(11:23):
Like I wonder at some level, like how many people
responded to that poster by being like, oh my god,
what he weren't crazy? You let me find out top
you're being fucking crazy right now. But yeah, I like

(11:45):
on some level it feels like Flag was like I
want people to want to be fucked by this version
of them.

Speaker 4 (11:53):
You know, the development of nationalism was in an even process,
so it makes sense that, like because if you read
through like some of the theorizing behind like Hitler's like
pr people, there's a lot of like we think people
need to want to fuck him, like we think like
he needs to be like that's why you can't be
married as women need to they have a chance. With Hitler.

Speaker 2 (12:12):
Was just conversations.

Speaker 4 (12:18):
To where they're like, people are gonna want to fuck
the country, right like where we need to make the
country hot otherwise nobody wants to like die for an
ugly country, like an ugo country.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
And now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world.
We are the hottest country anywhere in the world.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
James Montgomery Flag's paintings into the chat where he's got
his sleep rolled up and he's like flexing and even.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
Uled up like ripped off, like like he got drunk
in a fight and someone.

Speaker 4 (12:49):
Not contain him, Like he just flexed it fucking out
a man and he's like he doesn't even the expression
his face.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
Yeah, that's right, hit, Yes, it is truly a coming.
This is legitimately drawn by the same guy, same guy. Yeah,
it was crazy, like you could tell he got he
got on his own, like in his own head. After
the first one through, He's like, yeah, so you think
uncle Sam cool watched his next one? Bro, that's right.

Speaker 4 (13:19):
The man, damnit he's wound up doing. Because there's a
line from this to the people who draw Trump with
like a six pack.

Speaker 2 (13:25):
Like exactly.

Speaker 4 (13:26):
This made me.

Speaker 1 (13:28):
Yeah, what was the guy Miles that we were talking
about last week who is like keeps putting in Mike Rodgers, Yeah,
Michigan senate candidate who keeps putting out ai versions of
himself where he's like built like the rock you know mention, Yeah, yeah,
which it's just the rock in fast five was the
last person I saw just ripped his like shirt sleeves.

Speaker 2 (13:50):
Off like Sam was doing.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
And in case you think I'm reading too much sexual
intent into Flag's paintings here, so just He was basically
known for this painting and always being in a studio
full of nude women like this is like Artwood, author
of great cartoonists in their art, once visited Flag studio

(14:14):
and noted that it was filled with nude models. These
beautiful girls were lounging in large stuffed chairs that ringed
his studio. One was smoking a cigarette with her leg
over the arm of the chair, and the other was
reading a magazine A scene right out of a renoir
painting with similar color and similar places. I don't know
what that means, you freak. It was hard to concentrate

(14:35):
even on James Montgomery Flag, and upon his death in
nineteen sixty, the New York Times sub headline stated artist
was noted for patriotic war posters and magazine drawings of women.
So it's very just drawings. Yes, yes, magazine.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
Hey this is you what leave me alarm? But he.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
Another quote from him, is all my life. I've been
a worshiper of that beauty of human form you see
in some men and women, which again he used himself
as as the model for his most famous drawing. So
amazing for him to be like yeah, that's right. I
like beauty.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
What can I say? Do you want to come come
by my studio? That's like such weird, like early twentieth
century fuck boy shit where he's like, yeah, I drew
Uncle Sam. Right, that's right. You want to come through
the studio and come through shojo check out. You see it.
You want to see if the if the art matches
the artist. Yeah, you want to separate the art from

(15:42):
the artist. You know what he said, Oh, wow, do
you have rippling biceps like Uncle Samp Well no, not no, no,
not not no.

Speaker 1 (15:49):
To draw that, he actually had to have somebody with
big muscles come in and like put put it behind
him like they were doing fake arm.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Keep it there, keep flexing. It's hard to keep flex
this long fucking coward.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
But yeah, I mean this drawing of Uncle Sam has
had a long shelf life and you know long tail.
It was used in the ice, the joint ice today
fifty thous signing bonus uh posters, which yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
A little more desperate than it used to be.

Speaker 1 (16:24):
I feel like less direct and like I want you
and more like hey man, I'll suck your day, I
will blew out.

Speaker 4 (16:32):
You just think they are mistaken in that. Yeah, the
idea that that Uncle Sam has any kind of like
emotional hold on people these days, like he's not even
a character.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
Really really right, because I'm sure I bet there's like
like younger people who have never seen Uncle Sam and like,
what the fuck is.

Speaker 4 (16:50):
This just a guy in an America suit? Is that
not a live.

Speaker 2 (16:53):
Streamers the builder?

Speaker 1 (16:58):
Right?

Speaker 4 (16:58):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (16:58):
Yeah, no, oh fuck doesn't that guy punch people on
the internet for money?

Speaker 1 (17:04):
So that's how we got the most iconic image. But
he did not create the look or the outfit that
was created by a guy by the name of Thomas Nast,
Tommy Nasty.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
If you're a familiar who are you guys familiar with
Thomas Nast? Does anything with Conde Nast? No, But he
ended up.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
Dying like kind of penniless in I forget Ecuador, maybe
of yellow fever. But at his height, he was like
one of the most famous people on the planet. He
was a political cartoonist who I'm just gonna put a
picture of him in the chat. He's kind of giving,

(17:51):
like Jon Favreau in a Civil War disguise, or like
Colonel Sanders's.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Warrior a little bit. Yeah, it's got the big crazy
yeah with the whatever you call that big ass chin
under spike. That thing's fucking healthy.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
Man. It's kind of impossible to understand his impact today because.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
We no longer have a thing like this, But people
usually go to like George W. Bush era John Stewart
to put him in perspective. But he starts out as
essentially a war correspondent, where he's like drawing pictures of
Civil War battlefields and like drawing and carving them into
like woodblock, which like makes some sort of a gonzo

(18:36):
photo journalist.

Speaker 4 (18:37):
Yeah. Yeah, like that's the that was that age equivalent
of like fucking showing up to a riot on Twitter
or something like that, right right, streaming it right then
you're just like laboriously drawing corpses in the field and
mailing it.

Speaker 1 (18:49):
Yeah, yes, exactly crazy stuff. Abe Lincoln said. He is
his best recruiting general by the end of the war,
and he has a huge impact on Grant and Grant's
political career. He writes a lot of like or creates
a lot of pro Grant propaganda. He is coming along

(19:10):
at a time when most people are illiterate, you know.
But so the most impactful thing you can do for people.
Like that's why, like I look at political cartoons and
I'm like this, this sucks, Like this, this is so weird.
You're just like writing words on images and like telling
people what everything represents. And but it was wildly impactful

(19:36):
at the time. So Uncle Sam is a phrase before
the eighteen hundred. I think the phrase is first used
in eighteen ten. As we'll get into there's a guy
who like takes credit for being the reason that we
got Uncle Sam. But political cartoons start using him in
the eighteen seventies and Thomas Nast draws him for the

(19:58):
first time in eighteen seventy four, and the look is
immediately kind of where it ends up being like prior
to this, it's just like sort of a a doe
guy who looks like it could be like based on
Ben Franklin. And then he comes through with like the
striped pantaloons, the top hat, the beard, like kind of

(20:18):
everything that you expect what that you picture with Uncle Sam, And.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Wait, what's what's this first dip? It's like an anti
communism thing.

Speaker 1 (20:27):
Yeah, it's anti communism. It's say, uh so there's a
a yeoman farmer with a with a hoe in his hand.
It says, in our noble order, there is no communism
and no agrarianism. And then there's a big dumb looking
mushroom that says communism a big dumb mustache. It's eyes

(20:51):
are like close Togethernism.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah yeah yeah, and then or angry strike pants Sky
you pick one America.

Speaker 4 (21:02):
Yeah, also just an act. So it's not a mushroom
a weed. It's a mushroom. It's labeled a foreign and
poison in this weed not a mushroom, sugar orliterate Robert.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
They didn't even know what funk guy was. But no ship. Yeah,
great signature though, my god, look at that. Oh yeah.
He spent most of his time his signature.

Speaker 4 (21:23):
Signature, way more than he spent drawing Uncle Sam in
this one.

Speaker 2 (21:25):
It's a nasty joint. Yeah, but uh nast In addition to.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
Drawing Uncle Sam in you know, creating the look, basically
designing the modern look of Uncle Sam is most famous
for creating the modern image of Santa Claus.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
This guy yeah he so.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
During the Civil War, he created a lot of pro
Union propaganda that would show Santa Claus coming through like
with like One of his most famous images has ana
clause in like stars and stripes, so it's like another
white beard guy with a star span like star spangled clothes,

(22:08):
which has led a lot of like the actually crew
to be like, actually, this is why people think Nast
created Uncle Sam but the real referring to the thing,
but it's just like, no, he just actually like created
the look of both of these people, and like, yeah,
if you look at any drugs before, like he just

(22:28):
doesn't really look.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
Like what was he doing out there when he died?
I wonder he Yeah, he was apparently hard to work.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
It couldn't have been good. He didn't go to Ecuador
to die for it was a yeah, but let's uh,
let's take a quick break and we'll come back.

Speaker 1 (22:49):
I want, I want to talk a little bit more
about Nast and his power and why he died in Ecuador.

Speaker 2 (22:55):
We'll be right back, and we're back and yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
So Thomas na Adam Gopnik describes him as not a
great artist, which I agree with, but calls him America's
greatest image maker. In addition to Santa Claus and Uncle Sam,
he also popularized the donkey and elephant and kind of
was the first person to draw the elephant as like
the Republican parties.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
He used it as like their voter base.

Speaker 4 (23:34):
This fucker was tapped into something in the American psyche.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
He really was.

Speaker 4 (23:39):
Take that away from.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
Him, legendary American ship poster.

Speaker 4 (23:43):
Yeah, sometimes some guys just tapp into a fucking vein,
you know, the gift. YEA, yeah, it's not it's not
it's not even a gift necessarily, because I'm not going
to say this is good work, but it clearly was
effected this.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
I'm feeling this. They're like everyone along.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
There's so much ship that you like come across just
in reading about him, where you're like, well, mama, this
makes any sense to anyone anymore. But like you know,
Uncle Sam and Santa Claus are like big, load bearing
guys with white facial hair who represent like how we celebrate,
like the two types of celebrations. I feel like, yeah,

(24:24):
so his his main thing that he was known for
at the time. Oh so he was a racist, which
a cartoons chose the best racism. He was racist against
Irish people. He was like very progressive with like black
people and Chinese immigrants. He was he was really like

(24:49):
hated the Irish, just like shat all over the Irish,
but he would use.

Speaker 2 (24:54):
There's a character he may called John Chinaman. No really, yeah,
that's what it is.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
It is a Chinese immigrant caricature. That's probably opportunity.

Speaker 4 (25:07):
What is he saying, though, was he because this was
like the era where there were literally mass murders of
like Chinese immigrants, Like is he on the side of that? Like,
what do we know about his John Chinaman years?

Speaker 2 (25:18):
Yeah, I'm trying to look at the liner notes from
that album.

Speaker 1 (25:24):
His uncle Sam, Like he had one of those Uncle
Sam's Thanksgiving dinner, which depicts people of varying races, ethnicities,
and religions around a conventional American Thanksgiving table. So like
it was, yeah, I guess egalitarian for the time. He
even had kids at the same table, so he was
egalitarian down to not dividing the kids table.

Speaker 4 (25:42):
So he hated the Irish specifically, Okay, yeah, okay, okay, gotch.

Speaker 1 (25:48):
But yeah, that's so funny that he had interested in
called John Chinaman because like when you read people writing
about him there like this guy was fucking progressive as hell.

Speaker 3 (25:59):
Yeah, his hatred it seems like, yeah, he was writing
something about like being against the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
Yeah, like your depiction of the of the Chinese person.

Speaker 4 (26:09):
You're like China, but he's it's he's doing it like
John Mayor or Johnny English or whatever, right like that, right,
that was the thing people did for the time.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
I guess woke, Yeah, I get.

Speaker 4 (26:20):
I mean if he was against the Chinese Exclusion Act,
then yeah, he definitely counts as on the woke side
of that issue for sure.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
Oh god, they're just reading John Chinaman minstrel songs from
the eighteen fifties. Person and Chinese men is effeminate and unmanly.
Such songs frequently revolved around John Chinaman's failed pursuit of
white women.

Speaker 2 (26:37):
But that was not him writing that. That's like a cultural.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
He was trying to get off the ground like uncle
Sam right right, right, Like what about Yes.

Speaker 4 (26:46):
See this guy, it's just like a tendency to do
like yeah, John Bull right for like the English and
stuff like there's just like this kind of national caricature.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
But yeah, the name John meant something.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yeah, they're there was another American attempt at an American
one that will will come and do later. That was
like kind of a Bart Simpson character. So they kind
of fucked up. They should they should have stuck with
that guy. But I am Robert, I like you you're
talking about sometimes people just like have this you know,

(27:20):
connection with the zeitgeist. And yeah, also, like there something
we've talked about before is this theory of history, like
the axial age theory of history where this guy I
think he's a German theorist who like went back and
was like, it's crazy that all of like these great
thinkers like Confucius in China and like the you know,

(27:44):
Buddha in India and like all like all lived around
the same time. A lot of the Greek thinkers were like, uh,
you know, Lado and Homer and stuff were all kind
of coming together at the same time. And we've talked
before about it in the context of Sherlock Holmes and
Dracula were the are the two most filmed characters in

(28:09):
the history of like Western cinema, and they were both
like written at the same time, like by the same
literary scene in the late eighteen hundreds. And just like
I'm wondering, like how much of it is there's this
great person who's like able to tap into something, and
how much of it is just like everybody was ready

(28:30):
to like have these symbols or you know, it's like, yeah,
it's a historical like firmament at the time needed big
load bearing images that people could just come back to
and that would like fill in a lot of meaning
in their illiterate minds or something.

Speaker 4 (28:47):
I mean, I think a lot of what's happening is
very simply the reaction of like new technologies being introduced.
That's right at times not necessarily and I'm certainly less
familiar with like at what age different like Greek ancient
Greek thinkers you know, came about. But a lot of
why you tend to see stuff like like I suspect
a big part of why Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and uh,

(29:10):
I always forget the fucking dude who wrote Sherlock Holmes,
but like why those you know are created around this
Conan Doyle around the same time, and that like mass marketed,
like fiction was like had just fairly, very fairly rapidly.
Books went from expensive luxury objects to something that like
any asshole could pick up on, and there was a
massive market and selling books to any asshole, right, and

(29:33):
so suddenly you got a lot of as soon as
the opportunity exists, you have these people who's you know,
are kind of sailing in to meet it, And in
the opening minutes of that era, like a lot of
really influential stuff gets laid down like that. There's a
there's a reason why so much of that stuff tends
to stick with us, including the fact that a lot

(29:54):
of what comes after it is always sort of derivative
of of some of the original works. So it makes
sense to me. I think like technology has a lot
to do with why you see these like seeming waves
and like why did all of these ideas come around
the same time? Well, because maybe they were all enabled
by the same technological breakthrough and oftentimes that's meeting like
a social movement, you know, I don't know. I guess

(30:17):
that that makes sense to me.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
Yeah, right, that's why my light bulb was all like
invented four different times around the world at the same time.

Speaker 4 (30:24):
Yeah, and shit must have been I mean, because we
know that like bow and arrows were invented a bunch
of different times independently around.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
The world, Like shit like this goes back. We just
don't have a lot of documentation.

Speaker 3 (30:33):
Maybe right closest now to the closest now feels like
when people get in early on a new social media platform.

Speaker 2 (30:40):
Ye like yeah, because they were just like kind of
first to it. You're like and King Vader and King
Batch inher's.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
And then Drill said, yeah, yeah, in three hundred years
they're going to be like, did you know Mister Beast
and I Show Speed were contemporaries. They came out at
the same I'm reading at the same time. It's crazy nast.
Thing that he was most famous for during his life
was taking down Boss Tweed, who.

Speaker 4 (31:09):
I didn't realize was that guy, my guy, Okay, cool.

Speaker 1 (31:12):
Yeah, forty political cartoons targeting Boss dis was just like
writing all these articles being like here he is like
doing the most corrupt ship you could possibly imagine. He
was like, yeah, yeah, they can keep writing that nobody
nobody votes for me can read.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
But like these cartoons are really.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
With screwed.

Speaker 3 (31:36):
Yeah, it says it's basically implying I'm a liar in
this cartoon.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
Look at how Faddy drew me. My God, we gotta lose.
He drew him with just the fattest like upper pelvic area.
That just the drawing all often.

Speaker 4 (31:54):
Yeah, my Boss Tweed cartoons like aous.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
Ball Yeah, and with money bag for a head. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:01):
We're still trying to figure out what he meant by that,
but yeah, Boss Tweet eventually tried to bribe him, offered
him five hundred thousand dollars to just like go and
do art in Europe, and he turned it down, which was.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
Many olive art gives you a hey man, you want
to go to live in Europe and do art?

Speaker 1 (32:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes please, I'm out. I'm out.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
Wait So then how did how did that lead to
his downfunk? Like he hit that those cartoons.

Speaker 4 (32:32):
Treated he was so good at it that people just
were like, I guess we don't want to have this
corupped asshole in charge.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
We're done with machine politics.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
Yeah, it was like he he also was so mean
to somebody who was running I think against Grant in
one presidential election that the person like had a nervous
breakdown and people were like, ah, this guy's kind of
like it sort of like sent his career on a
downward trajectory. And then he eventually took a like patronage position,

(33:05):
kind of being like a lower level diplomat in a
country that hen like immediately got yellow fever and diet in.

Speaker 4 (33:14):
You got to think of this kind of stuff like
these different I mean technologies, because technology is a part
of like why political cartoons are spreading, right, is like
you've got newspapers and stuff in everybody's house, and you
could actually like distribute this stuff cheaply, and there's this
degree to which it almost works the way like a
disease does. And in that you've got this very powerful

(33:36):
political machine. And then this new kind of technology comes
in and the machine is completely optimized to deal with
threats a variety of other threats, but it has no
immun for specific kind of messaging, and it's just nia
in much the same way you could even look at
like twenty sixteen, right twenty four you can look at

(33:57):
like the massive political shifts that we've had is kind
of a version of the same consequence of these these
political parties. And I'm including the pre Trump Republican political Party,
which was annihilated by Trump largely because like, oh, they
didn't understand like social media, they didn't realize how much
it changed. And now Jeb Bush has no more future
in the Republican Party. And Donald Trump is the fucking

(34:19):
president right, like this ship keeps happening.

Speaker 1 (34:21):
I'm still I think Jeb's gonna pull it back. Man.

Speaker 4 (34:26):
He's in the lab, Jeb's ears. Yeah, he's a he's
cooking one up. Jeb and eminem are are putting out
a quite a track that is going to be.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
Records.

Speaker 1 (34:41):
But yeah, he was basically just like so massive during
his career, people like what we're out on him, and
he couldn't couldn't get hired anywhere, and eventually like had
to resort to patronage and that was the end of Yeah,
and then just like caught a fucking terrible break, like boss.

Speaker 2 (34:59):
Tweeds offer not looking so bad now, you know, I
had the thought, I was like, he should have taken
that bro.

Speaker 4 (35:06):
Always take the bro.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
What they ask you.

Speaker 1 (35:12):
Hundred thousand dollars, they opened one hundred thousand dollars and
then eventually like got up to he was like, I
was just like fucking with them to see how high
I could get them. But it was the equivalent of
five million dollars to just like.

Speaker 4 (35:27):
I don't know, man, but for him, Jack, have you
never tried dying of a tropical disease? You know, maybe
maybe that's a lot better than having five million dollars
in Europe.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
Yeah, I didn't realize just reading that. Basically, be Tammany
tried to flee to Spain like he was from Watch
Tweet tried to flee, but he was identified through the cartoons,
and I guess he was.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
It was like everyone knew what he looked like in Spain.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
Basic guy.

Speaker 4 (36:04):
It's like if Homer Simpson was a real guy who
committed serious crimes or.

Speaker 2 (36:10):
Get him.

Speaker 3 (36:11):
We're screwing over the donuts in the same way as
the cartoon man.

Speaker 4 (36:16):
I mean, it's good that he, like we were just
joking about should have taken the bribe. It's like good
that he didn't take the brown I don't want to.
It's like like this guy did a good thing in
spite of his weird It.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
Seems it seems so foreign. Like we were just talking
about this story on Zegeist about uh, you know, them
killing this Ai Open Ai movie, and like how even
A twenty four has like connections to Open Ai. And
it's just like you have to be willing to turn

(36:46):
down money in order to like have any sort of
like you just romise the world will make you turn
down money over and over and over again, unless if
you were going to like try and have an honest
vision or like be honest about the world, and he

(37:07):
was willing to do it.

Speaker 4 (37:08):
So yeah, shout out to uh Tom Nasty. Yeah, Tom Nasty.
Outside of that one weird thing, you seemed like a
pretty okay guy. Actually, sorry we made fun of you
at the start because it really did seem that like
the racist guy would have made that dry.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
But yeah, we didn't know. We didn't know, we didn't know.
We were wrong, Tom.

Speaker 4 (37:26):
You were not racist except for that one major exception
that you were definitely racist him in that.

Speaker 2 (37:31):
Old timeyway that was normal. Actually right, people like that's yeah,
not even that racist. Look at this guy. That's like
how they it's amazing.

Speaker 4 (37:41):
I mean you do have to. Yeah, you read a
lot of like abolitionists, you know, from the civil wards
like oh wow, okay, this guy was on the right
side of oh whoa, but the things he actually believed
were not you know.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, still doesn't matter.

Speaker 4 (37:56):
He was on the right side here.

Speaker 1 (37:58):
They got that somehow big TI Well, we're gonna take
a quick break and then we're gonna speak in a
big tent. We're going to come back and talk about
the influence of the circus, which used to be incredibly
violent and full of sex on the design design of
Buncle Sam. We'll be right back, and we're back. I

(38:31):
guess I'm not going to the right circuses, Robert.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
I've just dated a lot of circus people over the years.

Speaker 4 (38:36):
Yeah, a lot of circus people.

Speaker 1 (38:39):
So have you have you guys heard of Dan Rice?
This is another like Thomas Nast, person who hugely influential
in his time during like during late eighteen hundreds, would
have been a contemporary of Nast. Nast never addressed the connection,
but it's probable that he was unconsciously patterning Uncle Sam

(38:59):
off of Rice, who like wore a striped and like
clowns generally wore stars and stripes, and he wore a
top hat and he just he would like go and
like they would talk about he would like do like
bars where I don't even like have examples, but it
would be like political poetry that kind of sucked. But

(39:24):
it was it was again like he was John Stewart
like coming through and he did this one where he
was like, I don't think we should like be fighting
this war. It's like trying to get a mouse out
of your house by burning the house down. About the
Civil War, people like fucking bars Man amazing point.

Speaker 2 (39:43):
So like the salons of Paris is open.

Speaker 4 (39:47):
I guess if if if there was a mouse in
my house that like owned several million human beings, I
would probably.

Speaker 2 (39:53):
Burn if I couldn't take care of it any other way.
But everyone else is okay except the house. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it's right, right right.

Speaker 4 (40:04):
I don't know how we fit people into my house.
It's not very big anyway.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Sorry.

Speaker 1 (40:10):
So circus is at the time were geared towards adults.
They were teaming with sex and full of political humor.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
Sex and what way?

Speaker 3 (40:17):
What do we know?

Speaker 2 (40:18):
True?

Speaker 3 (40:19):
What do you mean like when they're saying this, the
circus was teeming with sex, like you were watching like
a voyeurish.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
Yeah, if you have the same question as me, what
the fuck does it mean that the circus was full
of sex and also violence. So on the violence thing,
there was gambling outside the tents and plenty of alcohol.
It was rare if there was a show without a fight,
a circus had to be, in the words of one
circus veteran, an efficient fighting unit. Performers were hired for

(40:45):
their talent, but also for their ability to brawl. One
extreme incident was the Hippodrome War in eighteen fifty three,
in which a circus outfit was unable to leave Somerset,
Ohio for two days because of ongoing fighting with locals.
Many people were seriously injured and some killed.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
Oh my god, So it was like a gang that
was down to brawl and they're like, what's up, bro wringling,
brothers wringling me?

Speaker 1 (41:11):
Exactly fucking find out it was just a place where
people went to get drunk and fight whoever they saw there.

Speaker 3 (41:19):
Makes so much more sense when people are like, man,
that place is a circus.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
If you think of it in that sense, you know
what people are like, the place was fucking chaotic.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
You're like, no, no, no, because it's there's a circus
and then there's people just beating the ship out of
each other. Yeah, Robert, you're a student of history. I
feel like this is sharing. We sometimes see that fist
fights were kind of the great American pastime. Just everyone
was constantly beating the ship out of each other.

Speaker 4 (41:42):
I mean shit, look at there's a number of different
like congressional and uh, parliamentary bodies around the world today.
That still solve a lot of issues via fist and
or cane fights. And we're talking like modern nations, you know,
fist fights. It's just it's a beautiful way to solve
a problem that has no downs.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Just keep a fist, man, keep.

Speaker 4 (42:02):
A fist, keep the weather. That's what I always want.

Speaker 2 (42:05):
No, I've always said that, Pats. Yeah, you don't.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
You don't like to go on the record for some
reason saying that, but you do always say I have
said it a lot. Yeah, and then yeah, we don't
always love to picture it because everyone was pretty ugly
back then, but there everyone was also desperately horny and
like fucking each other all the time.

Speaker 2 (42:23):
This is a quote.

Speaker 1 (42:24):
You could go to the circus and see near nude
men and women and claim you were merely admiring the
human form. Aside from all colored jokes and scantily closed bodies,
there were stories and songs about people who had run
off with circus performers, and, though there are no records
proving it, suggestions of prostitution at the circus must have
had some basis. In fact, for all its cotton candy image,

(42:47):
the circus has always peddled sexual allure.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
That makes sense to him, just ran off with a
circus performer.

Speaker 3 (42:54):
Also was just like, yeah, like they mess someone hot
and they just fucked off with the hot person they
were banging at the cirt because yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:02):
There you go.

Speaker 1 (43:05):
At the center of this just sexual violent bachanalia is
this guy Dan Rice, who is the most famous person
in America at the time and kind of looks like
Uncle Sam. So there's almost no way that he wasn't
an influence on the look that Uncle Sam was serving.

(43:26):
So but there had to be the name Uncle Sam
to exist, So Nast gave him the look the outfit.
But people the first people to use Uncle Sam. There's
a famous origin story that the real life meat packer
Samuel Wilson of Troy, New York, supplied barrels of beef

(43:48):
to the United States Army during the War of eighteen twelve.

Speaker 4 (43:52):
Must be so I'm just imagining latinous. You open it
and it's like the consistency of jello.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
Yes, how did anyone ever just not shipped themselves to death?

Speaker 4 (44:05):
A lot of people did?

Speaker 2 (44:06):
They did, a lot of people.

Speaker 1 (44:08):
The fact it's not everybody. Yeah, yeah, so many of
the Civil War deaths where people should.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
You'll be shot at how much you can ship without dying.
And this one, this one died of barrel beef. Another one.

Speaker 1 (44:23):
I've been amazing myself in that regard of how much
you can ship without dying in the past.

Speaker 2 (44:28):
Not not feeling great. Past. You don't eat that barrel
beef too much barrel beef.

Speaker 4 (44:37):
Grab a spoonful of the old jell degrees outside, then
you get more protein. The jelly just takes them.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
It attracts the rat. It's infinite. You got barrel meat
for a variety of baryl meat, you know, if you
really want a carbon neutral diet.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
So the story goes, soldiers began referring to the meat
as Uncle Sam's owing to the US stamp on the outside.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
Okay, And there was a prankster.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
Employee of Wilson's who chiekily told people that the food
was coming from Uncle Sam Wilson and the town of Troy,
New York, where he lived at the time, has really
seized on this and they claimed that they're.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
The home of Uncle Sam, the real Uncle Sam.

Speaker 1 (45:36):
Yeah, erecting a statue of the real Uncle Sam, which
I'm going to show you.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
Is it a Union soldier having diarrhea in a battlefield.

Speaker 1 (45:46):
So that's what he actually looks like. And then this
is uh, the image that they've the the statue that
they've created.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
They're really like.

Speaker 4 (45:58):
Up, Yeah, an amazing alago face kind of yeah good,
what twenty centimeters off of his waistline something like that.

Speaker 2 (46:08):
Yeah, those cheek bones, yeah, complete.

Speaker 4 (46:15):
Eight inches of hair.

Speaker 1 (46:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
They put the Mega Chad filter on him, Yeah, to
make it funny.

Speaker 1 (46:21):
He's very trying to make Uncle Sam hot. Like from
the start, there's just like.

Speaker 4 (46:26):
God, we simply cannot abide a non sexy Sam.

Speaker 2 (46:31):
Yeah. Good sign of jinguistic propaganda, Like you need to
fuck the thing.

Speaker 4 (46:35):
You know the thing, because if you really wanted Uncle
Sam to be a character, like an actually endearing character,
you won't want him to be hot. You wanted to
be interesting. You want him to look like Stephen Root,
you know something you can really sink your teeth into. Right, Yeah,
you know, I watched Stephen Root for a while.

Speaker 1 (46:52):
So the Congress just in keeping with this being all
very sane and making a lot of sense, uh, Congress
and died that this become the official origin story of
Uncle Sam. In nineteen sixty one because they wanted to
declare that Uncle Sam was real because they believed it
would help quote ensure successful resistance against Communiism.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
Of course.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
They're doing a miracle on thirty fourth Street for like
anti communism, the commedy shroom that favorable congressional Act was
needed to ensure successful resistance against communism. But what makes
Uncle Sam important and vital and compelling, he said, is
that Uncle Sam is real and the world needs to
know that he is real.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
That's so fucking dumb, Like that's that's the secret. Yes,
fucking real, have to be real. They fucking admit it.
He's real.

Speaker 1 (47:50):
It's always a little depressing to realize America has just
always been this completely fucking insane.

Speaker 3 (47:55):
You know, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's just
it's just great too that they're like, this is the
fucking way we're going to fight communism. Fuck all the
like objective comparisons from a policy level that might lead
someone to believe that this might be a better way.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
To do things. They just need to believe this fucking
lanky fucker's real, man, Yeah, and they'll fucking turn their
brains off. It's that fucking easy.

Speaker 4 (48:17):
Yeah, all we have to do is convince them that
like a kind of hot guy in a suit doesn't
want them to have this political system, and that'll that'll
solve it for us.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
It's called the sorry guy like this. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
In recent years people have pointed out so he said
this was all around the War of eighteen twelve. There
are journal notes from like naval midshipmen that exist in
museums where they specifically refer to Uncle Sam. So like
in eighteen ten, so two years before this guy ever
had a contract with the military. So it seems like

(48:55):
it just kind of comes about for the same reason
so many things in history come about, which is like
sheer stultifying boredom. Yeah, not like going on, I'm so
fucking bored. I'm going to make up a little pointless
code word.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
Because of this. Beef says us can't move from this
hole in the dirt that I'm shitting into.

Speaker 4 (49:16):
So I've literally only seen forty people in my entire life,
and I will never see any other people like yes.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Well, you know we call them uncle Sam because of us.

Speaker 2 (49:28):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (49:30):
Wow, you know, like because it's the same same initial.
It's kind of like cockney rhyming slide.

Speaker 3 (49:38):
You know, yeah, yeah, yes, or sure, but you're just
using the letters to give your something suff old uncle
sim Then it's interesting that also, like I feel like
people don't all have like the best uncles either.

Speaker 2 (49:53):
Is that really the best marketing, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 (49:57):
Yeah, it could have been like father Washington or something
like that, and it was like uncle unk.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
Yeah. Luckily I'm batting roughly over five hundred with the
uncles I have. There's a couple that I'm like, yeah.

Speaker 4 (50:11):
Yeah, I've had pretty good uncles, solid uncles. But you know,
I've also I hear uncle stories and they're not positive
more than half the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Say when
people tell me about their uncles, it's it's a good
story about half the time.

Speaker 2 (50:26):
Yeah sure, sure, sure, sure yeah, or just crying into
the darkness.

Speaker 4 (50:31):
People talk about their aunties nearly always a positive story.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
The story where they get hit, but still usually a
positive story, right, So is that maybe the misstep here
is that it should have been Auntie Sam.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
They had aunt Sam at one who.

Speaker 4 (50:48):
To be racist.

Speaker 1 (50:49):
Yeah, she just like gave people recipes during the war.
Uncle my God. Yeah, an Sammy who created created by
the Bureau of Economics of the us.

Speaker 4 (51:04):
Uncle Sam wasn't gay, like he's got he's gotta have
a wife, got close.

Speaker 2 (51:08):
Down that line.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
Yes, it was unclear if it was his wife or sister,
famous closeted man fashion.

Speaker 2 (51:16):
Like he's always with that woman. Yeah yeah, yeah, must
must be his sister. Oh no, uncle Sam, I'm nasty.

Speaker 1 (51:27):
But yeah, they tried other like he was the third option,
Like they had Colombia, which was a very famous It
was a goddess draped in neoclassical gown and holding a sword.
Oh yeah, from the Columbia picture. So basically Columbia pictures
using her as their uh logo killed this one off.

(51:50):
But before that, she was like very popular and like
kind of where the statue of liberty comes from.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
And she's the one who's always got like the flag
draped like in flowing robes kind of look, and yeah yeah,
yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
And they were just like, I don't know, man, We're
never gonna elect a woman. We better get her the
fuck out of here.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
What about a white guy? What about a scold of
an old white guy.

Speaker 3 (52:13):
I'm also curious, like what the stilts have to do,
because when you mentioned up top, you I also always
think of a way too tall, Uncle Sam, Yeah, fucking
walking around. But again that might just be like a
nice sort of metaphor for America where it's like, oh.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
Yeah, we're this big, Oh we're walking on sticks, don't
look under my pant legs. Is a good metal Yeah,
it's a guy on in lifts. You know.

Speaker 1 (52:41):
He's like, I don't know, don't ask too many questions.

Speaker 2 (52:43):
Sure, but yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
They tried Colombina at first, which makes you expect her
to be like as tall as a thumb, but she's uh,
she then grew to a normal size and just to
think that a way because she's not, I guess, not
fit for the country. There was also Brother Jonathan, a
character who represented both Revolution America and was a giant

(53:07):
asshole and was like he was like made by the
British to represent America as a bore, a bragger, a ruffian,
a bigot, a hicic, and a brister, and then America
was like.

Speaker 2 (53:19):
We're gonna actually take that back.

Speaker 1 (53:21):
We're gonna make that our thing, which seems a little
bit more fun, I guess, I don't know. Yeah, Like
they could have had Bart Simpson, they could have had
the Bride from kill Bill with Columbia, and they were like, nah,
we're gonna need less personality here. We're gonna need something
that's just more a thing that we would vote for

(53:43):
in our government. Somebody was old and man and kind
of old Testament goddish.

Speaker 2 (53:50):
God, Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam man their own.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
They got Johnny Canuck. Oh yeah, it could always a
younger cousin. They pitched him as a younger cousin of
Uncle Sam.

Speaker 2 (54:06):
Is there is there for Mexico because that guy sounds cool.

Speaker 4 (54:10):
Mexico sounds like a cool.

Speaker 1 (54:11):
I have like gods, you know, yeah, quadle You're like,
but yeah, I don't have an explanation for why.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
Like I try.

Speaker 1 (54:24):
I googled, like when did Uncle Sam start going on stilts?
And like, well why stilts? And I mean it could
be the like early circus kind of link because it's
got like kind of carnival circus things. But I think
it's just them being like, I don't know, we gotta
we gotta take another whack. We got to write this
guy seemed like he could play in the NBA.

Speaker 3 (54:45):
Right, But I guess like yeah, to like Robert's question
of like they're like, yeah, what's like the Mexico version,
like they still have a connection to like their meso
American like indigenous culture where they can like call upon
these like really interesting figures from their culture.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
We're here. It's like, I don't know, man's pants.

Speaker 4 (55:04):
That looked like the flag.

Speaker 2 (55:05):
Yeah, you know who I saw the circus. A guy
who could be the new God of America or his
sister wife.

Speaker 4 (55:13):
He's got a beard like god.

Speaker 1 (55:15):
Yeah, he's like the guy from Poultergeist. But I think
we make him look like he's on hgh.

Speaker 4 (55:21):
A little bit giant feathered winged serpent does seem cooler, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (55:27):
DC tried to like make him a superhero. They made
him a spiritual entity created through an occult ritual by
the Founding Fathers of the United States. He battled crime
and like fist.

Speaker 4 (55:40):
It feels like the eighties of the nineties DC.

Speaker 1 (55:43):
I think it was after World War Two because it
was he existed in a parallel dimension where the Allies
lost World War Two.

Speaker 2 (55:52):
Okay, alright, yeah, and then he had to fight these
was the Founding Father's evil magic then yeah, right, if
we fucking lost me, get this guy out of here.

Speaker 1 (56:03):
Fuck crime along A guy called Elongated Man.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
You know that we know what its power was. Yeah, yeah,
so on that they're just like, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (56:14):
We our mister fantastic will be called elongated man Elon Musk. Yeah,
that's about That's about it for Uncle Sam. You know,
I don't I don't have great ideas for for how
to save him other than let's move along. Let's go,
let's go to our indigenous history and find some.

Speaker 2 (56:37):
Y you know, or like the US is like, let's
dig into our indigenous history, like, well, hold on now,
we just replaced the flag with a note that says
we're sorry.

Speaker 4 (56:47):
We're still trying to figure some stuff out, and that
should buy us like fifteen years.

Speaker 2 (56:51):
Yeah, be back in fifteen minutes. Yeah, exactly. Don't come back.
We'll be back in fifteen minutes. We're trying to figure
something out.

Speaker 1 (57:00):
Robert Evans, such a pleasure having you on happy days
like gust on the iconograph as always? Where can people
find you? Follow you, hear you, all that good stuff?

Speaker 4 (57:09):
These are great questions.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
Jack.

Speaker 4 (57:10):
You can find me on the podcast Behind the Bastards,
where I talk about the worst people in all of history.
And you can also find me on the podcast It
Could Happen Here, which is a daily news show where
I and several colleagues, including James Stout, Mia Wong, Garrison Davis,
and a bunch of other wonderful people report on stories
from all around the world.

Speaker 1 (57:28):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, go listen if you're not already, although
I feel need to to overlap Amazing Miles Where Can
People Find You?

Speaker 3 (57:37):
Not Miles of Gray Everywhere, and the other shows that
you're already subscribed to because you're fucking cool.

Speaker 2 (57:43):
Thank you, you better. I want you to rate and subscribe.

Speaker 1 (57:48):
Okay, we should do that. It's worked so well. Yeah
they I'm your uncle. They printed five million copies of
that poster. That's how well that shit worked. Back then,
it didn't didn't even have a in it, and they
fucking printed five million copies. All right, I'll be back
in a moment with the notebook dump.

Speaker 2 (58:13):
All right. That was our episode.

Speaker 1 (58:15):
Thanks to Robert Evans rub Evans, Thanks as always to
Miles Gray, to Brian the editor for engineering and editing.
I don't think we captured video on this one, but
all four of us were wearing Uncle Sam costumes for
the entire recording, so you can just put that in
your minds. I thanks to Jam McNab, who did the

(58:38):
research for this one, in an Uncle Sam costume as
well on Stilt. I told him that seemed like a
lot of extra work. He insisted destroyed multiple laptops. Yeah,
I guess we never got the official answer on why stilts.
I think shared DNA with the Circus and Carnival. Probably
as good a guess as any. And as for the

(58:59):
knee for this character to be wemby sized, I think
Miles nailed it. Like his theory, it's America over compensating,
like Ron DeSantis wearing lifts. You know, America evolves based
on the lies that it needs to tell itself to
sleep at night. You know, one of my favorite ideas

(59:21):
from Zen's The People's History of the United States is
that America changed from the War Department to the Department
of Defense. They renamed the Department once they started waging
offensive wars, and Uncle Sam got ten feet tall once
the actual character of our nation began to shrink and slouch. Yeah,

(59:47):
our modern version of Uncle Sam giving off some pretty
profound small dick energy. I fear, and I'm not sure
I've got a way to fix him. We had a
pretty clear fix for the Easter Bunny. I feel like
acknowledge that the Easter Bunny is a symbol of fertility
and the sacred feminine and stop making her a boy

(01:00:07):
with a bow tie voiced by Russell Brand. Pretty simple,
But with Uncle Sam, I don't know. People have taken
some swings at an Uncle Sam reboot that at least
have some good ideas in there, like the off Brand
National Comic Superhero version who had a child sidekick for
some reason wasn't great. His power seemed to be lecturing people,

(01:00:31):
but then DC adopted him. And first I do just
want to read from the description from the DC fandom
wiki Batman, Green Arrow and elongated Man again, great name
for that character. Together with Doctor Fate, Sandman and Superman
of Earth two are rescued from attacking German soldiers by

(01:00:52):
the Freedom Fighters, the last surviving superheroes of this world,
doll Man, Phantom Lady, Human Bomb, Black Condor, The Ray,
and Uncle Sam.

Speaker 2 (01:01:03):
Rounding it out.

Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
The fact that they came around to Uncle Sam at
a time that they were scraping the bottom of the
barrel for ideas like doll Man is pretty telling. Doll Man,
by the way, was the first character with the ability
to shrink. They were like, what's a small human?

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
A doll?

Speaker 1 (01:01:20):
Of course that will capture everyone's imagination. But the fact
that Uncle Sam's first issue has him taking on a
dictator is interesting. That was nineteen thirty nine, so it
makes sense they had they were having a bit of
a dictator problem back then. But we've got one of
those again. We've got another dictator problem happening. Maybe you

(01:01:43):
could turn Uncle Sam into like a superhero, you know,
eternal life. Having vampiric type superhero whose power is essentially
the long memory of US history, like a historically accurate
memory of what has worked and what has broken the

(01:02:06):
country would be kind of a fun an interesting superpower.
Maybe he shows maybe he has extendo legs also, but
you know, maybe he shows the current crop of oligarchs
and fascists how the Founding Fathers would have actually felt
about them. Maybe he's played by Uncle Sam Jackson like

(01:02:29):
in the super Bowl halftime show, and he can also,
you know, have the long memory to point out that
the Founding Fathers were racist as hell. But really, when
I close my eyes, what one thing that we didn't
get to that I think is essential to Uncle Sam?
When I close my eyes and picture the platonic ideal

(01:02:52):
of this character, of the Uncle Sam character, I'm really
picturing a guy in a used car lot, a local
mattress ad telling me about a crazy patriotism tinged sale.
That's probably the use I've encountered Uncle Sam in the
most in my lifetime is sort of open source consumerism mascot.

(01:03:18):
And that was actually true right away. Once Nast made
him sort of a recognizable character with the you know,
stovetop hat and the stars and stripes and shit, companies realized, oh,
he's basically a free mascot that anyone can use, and
so he started ad selling oatmeal, Barry Brothers furniture oil,

(01:03:43):
of course, pianos, and piano the eventual replacement of pianos,
the phonograph. Don't even have to learn to play one
of those. But yeah, he was an early pitchment for
Edison's phonograph. And this is, of course, around the same
time that he's selling the World War One so successfully
that they printed four to six million copies of that

(01:04:05):
horny I want you poster. I don't know if I
convinced you, but you're not going to be able to
convince me that that poster isn't on some level a
little bit horny, but him being a consumer as symbol,
I think makes sense when you think about his lineage,
his designer, Thomas Nast, Tom Tom Nasty, and the historical

(01:04:26):
moment of mass media aimed at a largely illiterate audience
kind of all comes together and create this moment where
like a genius is thinking intensely every day. You know,
he's making these for the newspapers, so he's making so
many images every day about how to like communicate ideas

(01:04:49):
through basic iconic images. He's just like focused on this,
getting so many repetitions of like how to grab the
human brain and like be grabbed by it, like create
these images that communicate big ideas and wishes and desires,
and he becomes this image factory of powerful, deeply nostalgic images,

(01:05:15):
create Santa Claus, our most famous icon Uncle Sam, and
in America, powerful images like that are always going to
be used for hyperconsumption. The more successful in Santa obviously
being a little bit more omnipresent. But you know, Thomas Nast,
being tapped into the vein of the American zeitgeist means

(01:05:36):
being tapped into our one true national pastime, which is
selling shit that will fill up landfills of the future.
I think that's it. I think that's all I got
for you, Uncle Sam. Not all icons will be cool.
I am glad we did this one. I learned about
Thomas Nast, I got to meet James Montgomery Flag, I

(01:05:59):
got to learn that the circus used to be a roving,
fucking and fighting bachanalia that sometimes broke out into a
small civil war called the Hippodrome War. That one, by
the way, turned into a gun battle as well. I
probably could have spent more time on the Hippodrome War.

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
Maybe we'll maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:06:18):
We'll come in into contact with that one again in
maybe a circus, maybe a P. T. Barnum episode down
the road. But ultimately, Uncle Sam is I think the
character that we deserve. He represents the US government and
is an old white guy in a country that can't
stop electing old white guys. You know, he came around

(01:06:41):
in the eighteen fifties eighteen sixties looking like an old
white guy and kind of told us everything we needed
to know about the future of the US government or
presidents have been an unbroken stream of old ass whites
ever since asked white men. They were like, we got

(01:07:02):
to replace this Columbia lady. She's she's trouble, can't trust her.
All right, We've got to rerun next week and then
back the following week with an icon who is extremely cool.
Not the icon we deserve, like Uncle Sam, but an
icon to aspire to. We've got prop coming in also
from cool Zone Media to talk about an artist, musician,

(01:07:26):
and possible alien who's one of the coolest icons we've
covered so far on the Iconograph.

Speaker 2 (01:07:32):
It's pure and yeah, we will talk to you soon
by The.

Speaker 4 (01:07:38):
Daily Zeit Guys is executive produced by Catherine

Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
Law, co produced by Victor Wright, co written by jam McNabb,
and edited and engineered by Brian Jeffries.