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

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

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.

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Hello, the internet, and welcome to this spin-off episode of Der Daily Zeitgeist! What we're calling the iconograph, instead of looking at the zeitgeist through current events. Vents. Vents. On Monday morning, we're looking at the Zaykes to the powerful pop cultural deities.

Deities. That are our icons. Boy, that calling 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 like war and being reprimanded instead of presence and kindness. For some reason, 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 your stilts for some reason. Yeah, he does do stilts a lot. He does do stilts. In honor of America, limping into our 250th anniversary, we're talking. Uncle Sam. Oh, wow. Samuel. I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co-host, Mr. Miles Gray.

Yep, yep. Who wants you to stop acting like a tough guy and pretending you walked out of anger management. Exactly. I also want you to get me a piece of polyurethane that got all chunked up in the reflecting pool. Mom, they fixed that problem. Miles, you could go to prison for asking for that now. I know, I know. They're locking people.

I'm in D.C. right now and every day I'm like, fuck, I'm fucking doing it, man. I'm going to hise it, going to heist some pages. I was just trying to think I'm like, well, what if I go like three in the morning while the National Guard is asleep? You're going to get fucking, they're going to drone strike you. Yeah, I know. The flock cameras are like the second I walk out of the door to it, they're like, we know what you're up to, dickhead.

Yeah. Seal Team 6 is going to bust in on the daily Zike guys recording. It's going to be going to walk around the streets of D.C. with a pool skimmer. They'll, like, shoot you for that. No, yeah, yeah, yeah. On site. Oh, God.

As it should be. In our third seat, that voice that you've heard, the co-founder of Cool Zone Media, host of Behind the Bastards, the journalist, an author, Second Amendment, Santa. One of the creative engines behind Cracked, who started out as our first intern.

Welcome back to the show, Robert Ebert! Robert! Thank you for introducing me and kind of giving the abbreviated version of my entire life story, Jack. It's great to be. That's what I do. It's what I do.

As I hit middle age. Second Amendment, Santa does feel like a nickname for Uncle Sam. Yeah. Like, it's appropriate. This is who I'm picturing when I'm picturing Second Amendment, Santa. Sure. So I'd say he's,

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.

That's why they call him Mr. Worldwide. That's why that is why he goes by that nickname. 305 Worldwide. I feel like Uncle Sam, this choppedunk 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 was Erkel, 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 Frank, uh?

Lisa Frank, the binder, the Trapper Keeper designer. Cocaine powered imagery. I know who Lisa Frank is. Yeah. Did you know that that, uh, aesthetic was powered by cocaine?

A lot of cocaine. I assumed, I like, I knew in the sense that like, like great, psychic snow of the Akashik records, you know? Like, I intuit it at it. Yes.

Uh, yeah. Uh, Brian, the editor called her pastel Pinochet, um, because of her management style. Dabbling it. Yeah, yeah. Uh, Lisa Frank. But I think, I, 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.

Um, I'd say he's not, not hot. he's like if the Crohn-Kerote's guy took HG8. Okay, that's where we're starting. You know? Like he's got like he looks maxing. Looks like he would beat your ass. He's very angular. Definitely some pretty...

Is that always, though? Has he been swole from the beginning? He hasn't. Pretty early on. We're going to get into the evolution. 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. Right.

Right. Yeah. 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. He looked like a rolled doll illustration of like Charlie Bucket's grandfather. He was like...

Yeah, he had some slender man by it going on. Fetal slender man. He's, right. He's pre-super soldier serum Steve Rogers or whatever Captain America's called. But tall. He was always tall. I feel like he's definitely influential. by like people asking what if ab Lincoln hadn't gotten shot in the back of the head

yeah I've always 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 that was a super soldier's like drawing him with like jack yeah yeah yeah um stopping the Cold War spread of communism. Right. I do feel like him every once in a while and like more and more I'd say in the last 50 years being like, hey, what if I was 10 feet fucking tall?

Is a sign that he's like trying things out? Like he's like, what if I was star spangled spina? And also built like an ad at, you know? Is that possible that's some Texas cross-pollination? Because I know we've got big techs down in Texas for the state. fair. And I wonder if there was ever a point at which like big techs made someone in D.C. be like, well, we got to make Uncle Sam

taller. Look at how tall that fucking hillbilly is. It's just an arm's race of leg length. Yeah. We got big techs at home. Right. That's right. You 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. Yeah, sure. But that was mainly based on like name similarities. and he 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, uh, at this point. Hat, beard. Yeah. So, yeah, we're, we're going to go through his most iconic moments, uh, and how, how we got him eventually, how he got to

where he is today. I would say his most iconic moment is the, uh, I want, you for U.S. Army. I want you for U.S. Army. That was the original. That's the original wording of that. The text is, I want you for U.S. Army, which is what happened to the, the. Well, we hadn't had an army, really. We just didn't know how to speak about the army. We didn't have a lot of experience doing it. Like, the army was not a big thing when we, like in World War I, before World War I, it was nothing. And it kind of fiddled back down to being pretty small before World War II.

And I don't think the country was great at talking about it. Yeah. Like it was kind of awkward for it. It's like unfurzen caveman like Frankenstein shit. It's like, oh, you for U.S. Army. Yeah, yeah, good, good. Like Buster Bluth, right? Right, right, right.

That's like when the British say, he's in hospital. Yeah, exactly. Because they don't have them. Oh, yeah. For U.S. Army. Oh, okay. Okay, thank you, uncle. Yeah.

Or did. Justin Timberlake just come through and say, drop the the, it's cleaner. Yeah, right, right, right. Usually, like, when you look at it, because I was, like, looking for an explanation, like, was this colloquially how we talked about? And it's just, people, even when they're describing the poster, like,

in a caption under the poster, we'll just fill the the, and it'll just, they'll be like, end this poster, which says, I want you for the U.S. Army. Right. Right. Because they're, like, they're altered ones that I feel like I've seen that, say, for the U.S. Army.

Or it's, like, shoehorned in, like, in a smaller font next to it. Yeah, it might have been a kerning issue, you know? I don't know, we can't fit it in. Nobody's, people will fill it in with their brain. I feel like 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 up.

Right, right. Yeah, exactly. But, so that image was drawn by a guy named James Montgomery Flagg, who famously... What's a great name? James Flagg? Jim flag. Yeah. Sure.

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 I'll have to use my own reflection. He looks in the mirror and notices for the first time. He's a goddamn 10. That's a little. I wonder, did he really have it fall through or did he engineer?

Oh, no. I have to use me. 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. Nah, this fucking guys. Yeah, that reminds me of the, and the POW flag, it's like flying above every fucking post office.

Oh, yeah. 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. And so he just like drew his son when his son was kind of sick with the flu. Oh, that's his profile in the BODW. Face of like a pretend.

Yeah, it's beautiful. That's amazing. Yeah, so he also stole it from, there was a British propaganda poster for World War I for World War I that said Britons. And then they put in Lord Kitchener's face and then said, once you. So it was kind of like one of those eye, 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, like, I wonder at some level, like, how many people responded to that poster by being like, oh, my God, what?

He wants me? He wants me? Oh, my God. Let me find out. Stop. You're being fucking crazy right now. But yeah, like, on some level, it feels like flag was like, I want people to want to be fucked by this version of the U.S. government.

You know, the development of nationalism was an uneven 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 he can't be married, is women need to think they have a chance with Hitler. Oh, they had, like, boyband conversations? Yeah, yeah. It can't see. And it must have to be here, too, where they're like, people are going to want to fuck the country, right? Like, we need to make the country hot.

Otherwise, nobody wants to, like, die for an ugly country, like an ugo country. And now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world. We are the hottest country anywhere in the world. I put another one of James Montgomery flags, uh, paintings into the chat, uh, where he's got his sleeves rolled up and he's like flexing and not even rolled up like ripped off like someone, like he got drunk in a fight and someone ripped off his suit sleep.

He could not contain him. Like he just flexed it. Fuck it. Yeah. Check this shit out. All right. Yeah, man. And he's like, he doesn't even.

The expression on his face. Yeah, that's right. It's like it's a come hither. Yeah, it is truly a come-hither. This is legitimately drawn by the same guy. Same guy. Yeah, yeah, I love it. This is crazy.

Like, you can tell he got, he got on his own, like, in his own head after the first one went through. He's like, yeah, yeah, watch. So you think Uncle Sam's cool? Watch this next one, bro. That's right. The man of dammit he's wound up doing, because there's a line from this to the people who draw Trump with like a six-pack.

Like, exactly. This made me. Yeah, what was the guy miles that we were talking about last week who is like, keeps putting Mike Rogers. Yeah. In Michigan. Senate candidate who keeps putting out like AI versions of himself

where he's like built like the rock. You know. Munch. Yeah. Which it's, the rock in Fast Five was the last person I saw. I just ripped his like shirt sleeves off. Like Uncle Sam is doing that.

And in case you think I'm reading too much sexual intent into flags paintings here. So just he was basically known for this. painting and always being in a studio full of nude women. Like, this is, um,

Art Wood, author of great cartoonists in their art, once visited Flagg Studio 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. know what that means, you freak.

It was hard to concentrate, even on James Montgomery flag. And upon his death in 1960, the New York Times subheadline stated, artist was noted for patriotic war posters and magazine drawings of women. So he's very... Just drawings. Yes. Like magazine drawings of women. Hey, this is you.

What? Leave me a horror movie title. Creep. But he, another quote from him is, my life, I've been a worshipper 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. What can I say? Do you want to come by my studio? That's like such weird, like, early 20th century fuckboy shit where he's like,

yeah, I drew Uncle Sam, right? That's right. You want to come through the studio and come to Shoojo, check it out. You want to see it? You want to see if the art matches the artist? Yeah. You want to separate the art from the artist? She's like, oh, wow, do you have rippling biceps? Like Uncle Sam, well, no, not, not in the least.

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 arms thing. Fucking keep it there. Keep flexing. It's hard to keep flexing this long. fucking coward. Um, but yeah,

I mean, this drawing of Uncle Sam has had a long, uh, shelf life and, you know, long tail, uh,

it was used in the ice, the joint ice today, $50,000 signing bonus, uh, posters, um, which, a little more desperate than it used to be.

I feel like, less direct and like, I want you and more like, hey, man, I'll suck you. I will I will,

I will, I 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, really. Right. Because I'm sure, I bet there's like, like younger people

who've never seen Uncle Sam and we're like, what the fuck is this shit? I thought there's just a guy in an America suit. Is that not a live streamer? Yeah. That's Chud the builder,

right? Yeah, yeah. No? Oh, Oh, fuck. Who's that then? Doesn't that guy punch people on the internet for money?

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, if you're, uh, Mr. Nass. Yeah, Mr. Nass. Who, are you guys familiar with Thomas Nass? Does there anything to do with Condi Nass? No.

Okay. But he ended up dying, like, like kind of penniless in, um, uh, I forget, Ecuador maybe of yellow fever. Um, 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 going to put a picture of him in the chat. Um, he's kind of giving like John Favro in a civil war disguise or like Colonel Sanders's warrior a little bit. Yeah.

Um. It's got the big crazy civil war. Yeah, with the whatever you call that big ass chin under spike. That thing's fucking healthy, man. It's kind of impossible to understand his impact today because 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,

uh, which like makes him sort of a gonzo photo journalist. Yeah, yeah. Like that's the, that was that age equivalent of like fucking shown up to a riot on Twitter or something like that, right? Right, right.

Live streaming it, right? Except back then you're just like laboriously drawing corpses in a field and mailing it. Yeah. Yes. Exactly. Crazy stuff. Um, Abe Lincoln said he is his best recruiting general, um,

by the end of the war. Um, 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 at a time when most people are illiterate, you know, but so the, 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 is so weird. You're just like, writing words on images and like telling people what everything represents.

But it was wildly impactful at the time. So Uncle Sam is a phrase before the 1800. I think the phrase is first used in 1810 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 1870s and Thomas Nass draws him for the first time in 1874. and the look is immediately kind of where it ends up being. Like prior to this, it's just like sort of a doughy 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 beards, like kind of everything that you expect, uh, that you picture with Uncle Sam. And wait, what's, what's this first? It's like an anti-communism thing? Yeah, it's anti-communism. it's saying 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 with a mustache there's a big dumb mustache and its eyes are like close together I love the communist of mushroom

yeah I love the communism hell yeah and then in case you don't get or angry striped pants guy. Pick one America. Also, just in a... It's not a mushroom.

It's not a mushroom. It's labeled a foreign and poisonous weed. That's a mushroom. That's a mushroom. People were illiterate. People were illiterate, Robert. They didn't even know a fungi was. There's no shit.

Yeah. Great signature, though. My God. Look at that. Oh, yeah. He spent most of his time. A lot of them. On his signature.

Way more than he spent drawing Uncle Sam in this one. It's a nast joint. Yeah. Yeah. But Nass, in addition to 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. Oh, man, this fucking guy.

Yeah. He was, so 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 Santa Claus in like stars and stripes. So it's like another white beard guy with a star spangled clothes, which has led a lot of like the um actually crew to be like actually this is why people think Nast created Uncle Sam. But the real,

Oh, referring to the Santa image. The Santa thing. Right. But it's just like, no, he just actually like created the look of both of these people. And like he, yeah, if you look at any drawings. before like he just doesn't really look like why do you go to Ecuador the fuck was he doing out there when he died I wonder

yeah he was apparently hard to work it couldn't have been good you guys didn't go to Ecuador to die for good reasons back there it was kind of like yeah yeah um but let's uh let's take a quick break and we'll come back I want to talk a little bit more about Nast

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and what that might look like? No, I didn't want to manifest that. I was trying to manifest success. Every family has its secrets. But what happens when you discover that your dad has been living a double life? That is not the look of an innocent man. This is going to change my life and my family dynamic forever,

because everything that had existed prior in my reality is now untrue. Listen to Deep Cover the Family Man on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And yeah, so Thomas Nass, 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. He used it as like their voter base. This sucker was tapped into something in the American psyche.

Exactly. You could take that away from him. Legendary American shit poster. Yeah. Thomas Nast. Sometimes some guys just happened to a fucking vein, you know. They got the gift. Yeah.

Yeah, 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 affected. He was just like, ah, this, I'm feeling this. They're like, it's like, everyone's so long. There's so much shit that you, like, come across just in reading about him,

where you're like, well, none of this makes any sense to anyone anymore. Right. 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. Right.

Yeah, so his main thing that he was known for at the time. Oh, so he was a racist, which, okay. No,

the guy doing American propaganda cartoons. He was 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, hated the Irish.

Okay. Shaddle over the Irish. But he would use... There's a character he may call John China Man. No. Really? Yeah. That's under his propaganda

greatest hits is a Chinese immigrant caricature. Oh, that's probably one of one of one. So he was equal opportunity. He was in an opportunity. What was 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? Yeah. I'm trying to look at the liner notes from that album. He would use 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.

Okay. 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. So he mostly should really hated the Irish, specifically. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. Gotcha. But yeah, that's so funny that he had interesting called John Chinaman because like when you read people writing about him, they're like, this guy was fucking progressive as hell. Yeah. He was writing something about like being against the Chinese Exclusion Act. Yeah. Like your depiction of the of the Chinese person, you're like, gu. John China.

But he's doing it like John, or Johnny English or whatever, right? Right, right, right. That was a thing people did back then. For the time, I guess, woke. Yeah, I get, I mean, if he was against the Chinese Exclusion Act, then yeah, he definitely counts on the woke side of that issue. For sure. Right.

Oh, God. They're just reading, John Chinaman minstrel songs from the 1850s presented Chinese men is effeminate and unmanly. Such songs frequently revolved around John Chinaman's failed pursuit of white women. But that was not him writing that. That's like a cultural thing. That was like history. He was trying to get off the ground like Uncle Sam.

Right, right. Like, what about? Yeah. Yeah. It's just like a tendency to do like, yeah, John Bull, right? For like the English and stuff. Right, right, right. Like, it was just like this kind of national caricature, but.

Yeah, and they were in the name John meant something. Yeah, there was another American, attempted 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. Yeah. But I am, Robert, like you're talking about sometimes people. just like have this, you know, a connection with the zeitgeist. And also, like, 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, Buddha in India and like all like all. lived around the same time. A lot of the Greek thinkers were like, you know, Plato 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 the history of like Western cinema. And they were both like written at the same time, like in, by the same literary scene.

in the late 1800s. 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 to, like, have these symbols or, you know, it's like, the 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. I mean, I think a lot of what's happening is very simply the reaction of, like, new technologies being introduced. That's oftentimes, 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, I always forget the fucking Duder wrote, uh, Sherlock Holmes. But, like, why those, you know, were created around the, Conan Doyle around the same time is that, like, mass marketed like fiction was like had just suddenly became a thing like fairly fairly rapidly books went through 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 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 into meet it and in the opening minutes of that era like a lot of really influential stuff it's 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 of what comes after it is always sort of derivative of some of

the original work. 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 that that makes to me. Yeah, right. It was like the light bulb was all like invented four different times around the world at the same time, yeah.

And shit, that must have been, I mean, because we know that like bow and arrows were invented a bunch of different times independently around the world. Like shit like this goes back. We just don't have a lot of documentation, maybe. Right. To the closest now feels like when people get in early on a new social media platform and like because they're just like kind of first to it. You're like, and King Vader and King Batch.

And Harry and Vineyard. And that's. and then drill said, yeah. Yeah. In 300 years, they're going to be like, did you know Mr. Beast and I Show Speed were contemporaries? They came out at the same. They were like operating at the same time.

It's crazy. Nass's thing that he was most famous for during his life was taking down boss tweed. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. I didn't realize was that guy. My God. Okay, cool.

Yeah. So more than 140 political cartoons targeting boss tweet. A cartoon disaster death. Like, like, yeah. In other times was just like

writing all these articles being like, here he is like doing the most corrupt shit you could possibly imagine. He was like, yeah, yeah,

they can keep writing that. Nobody, nobody votes for me can read. But like these cartoons are really fucking me up. He drew a picture. Ah,

we're screwed. Yeah. It says, it's basically implying I'm a liar in this cartoon. Yeah. Look at how fatty drew me.

My God, we're going to lose. He drew a, him with just the fattest, like, upper pelvic area that just, the, the drawing is... Like a ball often. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Like a logeatheed cartoons.

Like a logg just ball. Yeah. Yes. Right. And with a money bag for a head. Yeah. We're still trying to figure out what he meant by that. Yeah.

Yeah. But, um, yeah, boss tweet eventually tried to bribe him, offered him $500,000 to just like go and do art in Europe. And he turned it down. which was, uh, man,

and his day and is, I'd be like, oligart gives you, hey man, you want to go to live in Europe and do art? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, thanks.

Yes, yes, please. I'm out, I'm out, I'm out, I'm out. Wait,

so then how did, how did that lead to his down fog? Like, he hid that those cartoons that created the environment, which people were, he was so good at it, that people just were like,

I guess we don't want to have this corrupt asshole in charge of everything. We're done with machine politics. Yep. Yeah. It was like 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 kind of being like a lower level diplomat in a country that he then like immediately got yellow fever and died in. You gotta 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? It's like you've got newspapers and stuff in everybody's house and you

could actually like distribute the 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 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 immunity to this specific kind of messaging. And it's just in nigh, in much the same way, you could even look at like 2016, right? 2020, 204, you can look at like the massive political shifts that we've had is kind of a version of the same consequence of 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 president, right? Like, this shit keeps happening. I'm still holding out hope for Jeb. I think Jeb's going to pull it back, man. He's in the lab. He's in the lab to Jeb's ears. Yeah, he's, he's cooking one up. Jeb and Eminem are putting out quite a track. They're really going to be the final word on MMS's after-Math records. Yeah. But yeah, he was basically just like so massive during his career. People like what were out on him and he couldn't get hired anywhere and eventually like

had to resort to patronage and that was the end of, uh, yeah. And then just like caught a fucking terrible break. Boss tweeds offer not looking so bad now is it? You know what? I had the thought. I was like, man, he should have taken that bribe, bro. Always take the bribe. You don't have to do what they ask you.

So they opened at $100,000. They opened at $100,000 and then eventually, like, got up to, he was like, I was just like, fucking with him to see how high I could get them. But it was the equivalent of $5 million to just, like, go be an artist. I don't know, man, but. Good for him. Jack, have you never tried dying of a tropical disease? You know, maybe that's a lot better than having $5 million in Europe. That's right.

I didn't realize I was just reading that basically Tamini tried to flee to Spain like when he was about to yeah Boswit

tried to flee but he was identified through the cartoons in Spain he was so popular it was so popular it was like everyone knew what he looked like

in Spain based on it was so cartoon dollar face guy get him get him it's like if Homer Simpson was a real guy who committed

serious crimes I'm trying to go off the way. They're like, it's fucking Homer. Get him. He's drooling over the donuts in the same way as the cartoon. Ah, man. 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 bribe. I don't want to, like, like this guy did a good thing in spite of his weird racist. It just seems to the Irish. It seems so foreign.

Like, we were just talking about this story on Zykeist about, you know, them killing this AI, open AI movie. and like how even A24 has like connections to open AI. And it's just like you have to be willing to turn down money to in order to like have any sort of like you just. Not have a creative vision compromise. The world will make you turn down money over and over and over again unless if you are going to like try and have an honest vision or like be honest about the world.

and he was willing to do it. So shout out to Tom Nasty. Yeah. Tom Nassed. 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 a racist guy would have made that drawing. Yeah, we didn't know. We didn't know.

We didn't know. We were wrong, Tom. You were not racist except for that one major exception that you were definitely racist. And that old time you way, that was normal, actually. Right. Yeah. I'm like, that's not even that racist. Look at this guy.

That's like how they, it's amazing. I mean, you do have to, yeah, you read a lot of like abolitionists, you know, from the civil war. It's like, oh, wow, okay, this guy was on the right side of, oh, whoa, but the things he actually believed were not, you know. Yeah. Still, doesn't matter. He was on the right side here.

He was on the right side. They got there somehow. Big tent, big tent. Well, we're going to take a quick break. And then we're going to 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. It used to. Design of Uncle Sam.

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circuses, Robert. I've just dated a lot of circus people over the years, Jack. A lot of circus people. So have you guys heard of Dan Rice? This is another like Thomas Nast person who hugely influential in his time during late 1800s would have been a contemporary of Nast. Nast never addressed the connection. But it's probable that he was unconsciously patterning Uncle Sam off of Rice who like

wore a striped and like clowns generally wore stars on 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 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. So like the salons of Paris. If they had open mic night. I guess if my if there was a mouse in my house that like owned several million human beings, I would probably burn my house. If I couldn't take care of it

any other way, that mouse is out of box. But everyone else is okay except the house. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's just the mouse down. Right, right, right. I don't know how we fit people into my house. It's not very big. Anyway, sorry. So circuses at the time were geared towards adults. They were teeming with sex and full of political humor.

Sex in what way? What do we know? What do you mean? Like, when they're saying the circus was teeming with sex, like you were watching like a voyeur-ish sex show? 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 their talent, but also for their ability to brawl.

One extreme incident was the hippodrome war in 1853 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. Oh my God. So it was like a gang that was down to brawl and they're like, what's up, bro? Ringling brothers. Ringling me. Yeah, exactly. Fucking find out. It was just a place where people went to get drunk and fight whoever they saw there. Make so much more sense when people are like, man, that place is a circus. If you think of it

in that sense, you know, when people are like, a place was fucking chaotic. You're like, no, no, no, because there's, yeah, the circus is in town. And then there's people just beating the shit out of each other. Right. Yeah.

Robert, you're a student of history. I feel like this is something we sometimes see that fist fights were kind of the great American pastime. Just everyone was constantly beating the shit out of each other. 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?

Yeah. Um, fist fights is just, it's a beautiful, way to solve a problem that has no downsides. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just keep a fists, man. Keep a fist. Keep a fist. Keep a weapons. That's what I always. Nope. Nope. You have always said that. Pass. Yeah. You don't, you don't like to go on the record for some reason saying that, but you do always say that. I do always, yeah, I have said it a lot.

Yeah. And then, yeah, we don't always love to picture it because everyone was pretty ugly back them, but everyone was also desperately horny and, like, fucking each other all the time. This is a quote, you could go to the circus and see near nude men and women and claim you were merely admiring the human form. Aside from off-color 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 some basis, in fact, for all its cotton candy image, the circus has always peddled sexual allure. Dude, that makes sense to him. ran off with a circus performer.

Also, was just like, yeah, like, they met someone hot, and they just fucked off with the hot person. They were banging at the circus. Yeah. There you go. Everything makes so much more sense in my family. At the center of this, just sexual, violent bacchanalia 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 Luke that Uncle Sam was serving. so but there had to be the name Uncle Sam to exist so uh Nass gave him the look the outfit but people the first people to use Uncle Sam there's a famous uh origin story that uh the real life meat packer Samuel Wilson of Troy New York supplied barrels of beef to the United States army during the war of 1812 bearers it must be so I'm just imagining very relaxed gelatinous. Yeah.

Like you open it and it's like the consistency of jello. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How the fuck did anyone ever just not shit themselves to death? A lot of people did. They did. A lot of people did. That was a significant number of deaths. Not everybody did. Yeah. Yeah. So many of the Civil War deaths were people shitting themselves to death. You'll be shocked at how much you can

shit without dying. That's a, I guarantee. This one died of barrel beef. Yeah. Ah. Another one. I've been amazing myself in that regard. how much you can shit without dying in the past, not feeling great. Yeah.

So you don't eat that barrel beef. I know. Too much barrel beef. I just keep a barrel open in my kitchen. Grab a spoonful of the old beef jello. I kept the lid on. It's 85 degrees outside. Yeah.

He keeps the lids off. Rats get in it. Then you get more protein. The jelly just takes them. It attracts the rats. It's infinite. You got more of a barrel. meat.

More meat near meat. A variety of barrel meat. It solves a lot of problems. Yeah. You know, if you really want a carbon neutral diet. Yeah. So the story goes, soldiers began referring to the meat as Uncle Sam's owing to the U.S. stamp on the outside.

Ah, okay. And there was a prankster employee of Wilson's who cheekily 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 claim that they're the home of Uncle Sam. Of the real Uncle Sam. Yeah. erecting a statue of the real Uncle Sam, which I'm going to show you both.

Is it a union soldier having diarrhea in a battlefield? So that's what he actually looks like. And then this is the image that they've, the statue that they've created. created. They're really like making them a lot harder. Yeah. First off, they really had an amazing glow up.

They gave him Mar-a-Lago face, kind of. Yeah. They did good, what, 20 centimeters off of his waistline, something like that. Yeah,

chiseled those cheek bones out. Bachela, yeah, complete. It's like they get everybody, eight inches of hair. Yeah.

They put the mega-chad filter on him. Yeah. It's really funny. He's very angular. Trying to make Uncle Sam hot, like, from the start. They're just like, ah. We simply cannot abide a non-sexy Uncle Sam.

Yeah, good sign of, uh, jingolistic propaganda. Like, you need to fuck the thing. And that's the thing is if you really wanted Uncle Sam to be a character, like an actually endearing character, you wouldn't want him to be hot, you'd want him to be interesting. You'd want him to look like Stephen Root, you know, something you can really sink your teeth into, right? Yeah. You know, I'll watch Stephen Root for a while.

Oh, shit. Um, so the Congress just, in keeping with this being all very sane and making a lot of sense, Congress demanded that this become the official origin story of Uncle Sam in 1961 because they wanted to declare that Uncle Sam was real because they believed it would help, quote, ensure successful resistance against communism. Of course. Sure.

They're doing a miracle on 34th Street for like anti-communism. Don't do that commie 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. That's so fucking dumb. Like that's really, that's the secret. He has to be fucking real. He has to be real.

Fucking admit it. Admit he's real. It's always a little depressing to realize America has just always been this completely fucking. I'm fucking insane, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, 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 to do things. They just need to believe this fucking lanky fuckers real, man. Yeah. And they'll fucking turn their brains off. It's that fucking easy. 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 solve it for us.

It's called the 50 shades of gray. Theory. Yeah. In recent years, people have pointed out. So he said this was all around the war of 1812. There are journal notes from like naval midshipmen that exist in museums where they specifically refer to Uncle Sam. So like in 1810, so two years before this guy ever had a contract with the military. So it seems like 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 going on I'm so fucking bored I'm going to make up a little pointless code word I'm shitting my brains out because of this beef says US Can't move from this hole in the dirt that I'm shitting into So I literally only seen 40 people in my entire life And I will never see any other people like yes

well you know we call him uncle Sam because of US why why what's that because it's the same same initial it's kind of like

cock cockney rhyming slang you know yeah yeah sure sure but you're just using the the letters to give you something stuff yeah uncle Samnan it's interesting that also like I feel like people don't all have

like the best uncles either. So is that really the best marketing? You know what I mean? Yeah, it could have been like Father Washington or something like that and instead they went with like Uncle. Yeah. Luckily, I'm batting roughly over 500 with the uncles I have. There's a couple that I'm like, 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. I'll say when people people tell me about their uncles. It's a good story about half the time. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Or just crying into the darkness. My uncle. People talk about their aunties? Nearly always a positive story. A story where they get hit, but still usually a positive story. Right. So was the maybe the misstep here is that it should have been auntie, Sam? They had an aunt Sammy at one point who no, no. There's no way for that to be racist. Oh, boy. Yeah. She just like gave people.

people recipes during the war. Uncle Sam. Oh my God. Yeah, Aunt Sammy, who created by the Bureau of Economics of the U.S. I guess so we know Uncle Sam wasn't gay. I'm like he's got to have a wife. We got to close down that line inquiry. Yes, it was unclear if it was his wife or sister in famous closeted man fashion.

Like he's always with that woman. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Must be straight. I heard it's his sister. Oh, no. Uncle Sam. Uncle nasty.

But yeah, they tried other, like he was the third option. Like they had Columbia, 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 logo killed this one off. But before that, she was like very popular and like kind of where the statue of liberty comes from right um 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 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 what about a white guy what about a scold of an old white guy i'm also curious like what the

the stilts have to do because when you mentioned up top you do i also always think of a way too tall Uncle Sam. Like fucking walking around. But again, that might just be like a nice sort of metaphor for America where it's like, oh, yeah, we're this big. No, we're walking on sticks. Don't look under my pant legs. I'm not this big.

It is a good matter. Yeah. It's a guy in lifts, you know? Yeah. Yeah, he's like, I don't know. Don't ask too many questions. Sure. But yeah, they tried Columbina at first, which makes you think of expect her to be like as

tall as a thumb, but she's, uh, she then grew to a normal size and just went away because she's not, I guess, not a fit for the country. There was also brother Jonathan, a character who represented post-revolution America and was a giant asshole, was like, he was like made by the British to represent America as a bore, a braggart, a ruffian, a bigot, a hicc, and a crickster. And then America I was like, we're going to actually take that back. We're going to 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 going to need less personality here. We're going to need something that's just more a thing that we would vote for in our government. Somebody who's old and man and kind of Old Testament God. God. Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam, man. Canada tried their own.

They got Johnny Canuck. Oh. Yeah. So it could always be worse. A younger cousin, they pitched him as a younger cousin of Uncle Sam. Is there a version of this for Mexico?

Because that guy sounds cool. Johnny Mexico sounds like a cool-ass dude. They have like Aztec gods. You know what they're like, those are cool too. Yeah. Yes. I just want to know Johnny Mexico.

you're like, ah! But yeah, I don't have an explanation for why. Like, I try, I googled, like,

when did Uncle Sam start going on stilts? And, like, why stilts? And, I mean, it could be the, like,

early circus kind of link. Right. Because it's got, like, kind of carnival circus things, but I think it's just them being like, I don't know, we got to,

we got to take another whack. We got to make this guy seem like he could play in the NBA. 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 Mesoamerican, like, indigenous culture where they can like call upon these like really interesting figures from their culture. We're here. It's like, I don't know, man. There's fucking Uncle Sam. Pants that looked like the flag.

Yeah. You know who I saw at the fuck circus? A guy who could be the new God of America or his sister or wife. I don't fucking know. He's got a beard like God. Yeah. He's like the guy from polter guy. but I think we could make him look like he's on HGH a little bit.

A giant feathered winged serpent does seem cooler. Yeah, exactly. D.C. 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. Oh, my God. And he battled crime and, like, fascist leaders. It feels like the 80s of the 90s, D.C. I think it was after World War II, because it was, he,

exist in a parallel dimension where the allies lost World War two. Okay. All right. Yeah. And then he had to fight these. What good was the founding father's evil magic then? Yeah, right. If we fucking lost, man, get this guy out of here. You fought crime along a guy called Elongated Man. Did you know that that was? I guess we know what his power was. Yeah. Yeah. So on that they're just like, I don't know, we, our Mr. 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 them other than Let's move along let's go let's go to our indigenous history and find some That's what it's sticky You know or like the US is like let's dig into our indigenous history like well hold on now I just replace the flag with a note that says we're sorry we're sorry we're still trying to figure some stuff out. And that should buy us like 15 years. Yeah. Be back in 15 minutes. Yeah, exactly. Don't come a bit. We'd be back in 15 minutes. We're trying to figure something out.

Robert Evans. Such a pleasure having you on the Daily's Lighthouse on the iconograph, as always. Where can people find you, follow you, hear you, all that good stuff? These are great questions, Jack. 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. happening 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. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Go listen if you're not already, although I feel like there's a lot overlap. Amazing. Miles, where can people find you? That Miles of Gray everywhere and the other shows

that you're already subscribed to because you're fucking cool. Thank you. You better be. I want you to rate and subscribe. Oh man, we should do that. It's worked so well. Yeah, I'm your uncle. They printed five million copies

of that poster. That's how well that shit worked back then. They didn't even have a the in it. And they fucking printed five million copies. All right. I'll be back in a moment with the notebook dump. No book dump. Bye.

All right. That was our episode. Thanks to Robert Evans, Rob Evans. Thanks, as always to Miles Gray, to Brian the editor for engineering and editing. I don't think we capture 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 mind's eye. Thanks to Jay Mn McNabb, who did the 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 need for this character to be wemby-sized, I think Miles nailed it. I like his theory. It's America overcompensating.

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 from Zins, 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 10 feet tall once the actual character of our nation began to shrink and slouch. Yeah, 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 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. 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 Dr. Fate, Sandman, and Superman of Earth 2 are rescued from attacking German soldiers by the freedom fighters, the last surviving superheroes of this world. Doll man, Phantom Lady, Human Bomb, Black Condor, the Ray, and Uncle Sam, rounding it out. 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. Dollman, by the way, was the first character with the ability to shrink. They were like, what's a small human? A doll, 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. It was 1939, so it makes sense. 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 could turn Uncle Sam into like a superhero, you know, eternal life-having vampiric type superhero whose power is essentially the long memory of U.S. history, like a historically accurate memory of what has worked and what has broken the 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 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, 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 of this character, of the Uncle Sam character, I'm really picturing a guy in a used car lot or a local mattress ad telling me about a crazy patriotism-tinged sale. that's probably the use I've encountered Uncle Salmon the most in my lifetime is sort of open source consumerism mascot 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 at selling oatmeal, Barry Brothers furniture oil, 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 pitchman for Edison's phonograph. And this is, of course, around the same time that he's selling the World War I so successfully that they printed four to six million copies of that. 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 consumerist symbol, I think makes sense when you think about his lineage,

his designer, Thomas Nast, Tom. Tom nasty. And the historical 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 has, he's making these for the newspaper. So he's making so many images every day about how to like communicate ideas 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, 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 one, Santa obviously being a little bit more omnipresent. but, you know, Thomas Nast being tapped into the vein of the American zeitgeist means 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 Flagg. I got to learn that the circus used to be a roving, fucking and fighting, Bacchanalia,

uh, that sometimes broke out into a small civil war, uh, called the Hippodrome War. Um, that one, by the way, turned into a gun battle as well.

I probably could have spent more time on the hippodrome war. Maybe we'll, maybe we'll come in, into contact with that one again in maybe a circus, maybe a P.T. Barnum episode down the road. Uh, but ultimately, Uncle Sam is,

I think the character that we deserve. He represents the U.S. government and is an old white guy in a country that can't stop electing old white guys. You know, he came around in the 1850s, 1860s, looking like an old white guy and kind of told us everything we needed to know about the future of the U.S. government. Our president presidents have been an unbroken stream of old-ass whites ever since. Old-ass white men. They were like, we got to replace this Columbia lady. She's trouble. Can't trust her. All right. We've got a 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, and possible alien, who's one of the coolest

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