Recently, while traveling the interior of Texas, my friend Mike texted a photo of these T-shirts to me. To me this was a postcard from hyperreality: a different place with different rules of meaning that, seductively, was masquerading as reality.

Socialism Distancing? Socialism Distancing? What is that? It looks like word salad generated by a CAPTCHA gone crazy. “Socialism,” noun; “Distancing,” noun. The more I thought about it, the more perplexed I became. The noun of “distancing” should certainly be modified by an adjective.

So, the shirt designer’s intention, rendered grammatical, was to say “social(ist) distancing.” Holding that to be true, that doesn’t seem to communicate much either. What is signified by “socialist distancing” instead of:

• “capitalist distancing”
• “supply-side distancing”
• “voodoo distancing”
• “Keynsian distancing”
• “Maoist distancing”

I humbly submit that no one, including the designer or the proprietor of the establishment could tell me what the sign “socialist distancing” means vis-à-vis Merriam Webster’s definition:

socialism: noun: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods

“Socialism.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism. Accessed 8 Apr. 2021.

This word, “socialism,” as used on this T-Shirt was a message in a bottle from hyperreality that had drifted into our world. To understand what’s afoot here, I leaned on my recollection of postmodern philosophy, French Style. And for this we will turn to that enfant terrible, Jean Baudrillard and his challenging work Simulacra and Simulation.

I was walking down Broadway the other day and a trio of teen boys were talking and walking when one of them copped his best New York accent — something between the average resident of Pachogue, Long Island and Tony Soprano — and said “I got a guy.” His friends laughed, and the rest of their interaction carried on.

I think “having a guy” reveals something profound about New York City. Here we are, piled upon each other in great density. How is the customer to be served when those who can provide service e.g.:

• Those on the floor at a department store
• Those behind the glass cases at a jeweler’s
• Those across the counter at a fast-food joint
• Those pulling box after box of shoes “from the back”

face a staggering volume of customers?

The paths forward are:

• Premium service
• The living Hell of Clerktown™
• Having / Being a Guy ¹

Nostalgia is a funny thing, and it gives our memories vivid colors that reality never had. I think Paul Simon, who has said many things well, may have said it best:

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
Give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

A few lines later the narrator lets this fact seep through:

I know they’d never match my sweet imagination
And everything looks worse in black and white

During the final days of Lauren’s pregnancy, we were watching some “comfort movies,” and we decided to watch 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While I’d seen it three or four times before, it was only in this viewing that a profound truth became glaringly obvious: Richard Dreyfus’ iconic everyman encountering the ineffable, Roy Neary, is terrible.

In my Kodachrome® recollection, Neary has a Jamesian mystical experience that he can only render in sculpture (potato medium and purloined property), hunted by shadowy government officials and scientists he reaches Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, and is chosen by the extraterrestrials before he joins them to jaunt happily beyond Earth to frolic among the stars. It has the glitter and sheen of Spielberg of the early 80s: childlike wonder, lens flare, and the messy reality of family.

In black and white consideration though, the modern audience (myself included) asks: “Yeah, but what about his wife, his kids, the house he totaled?” The last they saw Dad he was in the midst of his Jamesian crisis and then he’s…gone.

As I asked myself this question, I had to ask, “why had I never thought to ask that before?” Only with some huge planetoids of socially-indoctrinated privilege could it be swallowed that Neary was a “hero” entitled to be a Terran ambassador of humankind’s best. But in the Kodachrome® memories of this film — he was. Privilege is a hell of a drug.

With the aid of critical theory (of the gender and economic kind), I’d like to unpack this movie a bit more.

Oh, and let’s just say what doesn’t need much saying: Teri Garr was criminally underused in this role.