By Jake Vest

If you care more about what the Cracker Barrel sign looks like than what the biscuits taste like, I don’t think I want to go to dinner with you. No telling what else might make you fly off the handle. 

It is troubling enough that the people who run the restaurant chain cared so much about their own billboards that they thought paying to redo about 10 million of them was a good idea. Old Uncle Herschel must have spit in somebody’s gravy for them to want him gone that bad. 

But Cracker Barrel is a private business. The public’s part of this relationship is deciding whether or not to be a customer. It’s voluntary. Unless there is one in North Korea I don’t know about, nobody is being forced to eat in a Cracker Barrel. 

That this was a bad business decision is beyond doubt or question. Irritating regular customers isn’t good strategy and the chicken-fried steak isn’t going to be more appealing to vegans just because the logo is “hip.” If you modernize an Old Country Store, it isn’t an Old Country Store anymore – it’s a WaWa with table service.  

Cracker Barrel backed off, so maybe this was a hill worth defending in the Culture War. Still, it falls way short of anything that a reasonable person might characterize as “an issue.” The key word here is “reasonable.” 

We seem to have developed this attitude that everything that is being done is somehow being done TO us. All activity is either intended to destroy our way of life or is preventing us from living the way we ought to, and that it is done on purpose, and that we are not going to stand for it!  

This is not a new thing. Three decades ago, I interviewed Fess Parker, the good old Texas boy who played Davy Crockett and Dan’l Boone. He surprised me by getting serious at one point and saying, “Jake, I wouldn’t be surprised if me and you don’t live long enough to see another revolution in this country.” 

That’s where we were then and we worked through it. I am optimistic that we will this time and that nobody will be going to the barricades any time soon. 

Besides, college football just started. Now we can get back to unreasonably hating each other for issues that really matter, like the color of shirts we wear on Saturday, whether we yell “soooooo pig” or bark at each other, make tomahawk gestures or rattle cow bells, sing Tom Petty songs or “Rocky Top.”  

It is a more civilized way to despise one another, and for the most part it is a fairly amiable hostility. We share parking lots, can sort of talk to each other, might even intermarry, and the only people anybody really wants to kill are the officials. But if you don’t think it is real hatred, you haven’t gone to many road games. 

Try it sometime. Deck yourself out in your team’s merchandise and stroll around some town attached to a foreign campus. Then you’ll see what a logo can really do to stir people up. 

Don’t have any merchandise? No problem. They sell it at your local Cracker Barrel. Say hello to Uncle Herschel while you’re there. Unfortunately, we are increasingly short of those kinds of people these days.  

It is like nothing is just done anymore, it is all being done to somebody, as in “are we going to let them do this to us?” Everything is an issue and Good Old Uncle Herschel must have spit in somebody’s gravy to make him that unwelcome.