What's your brand?

There was a time, not so long ago, when the intended response to the question, "What's your brand?" was "Marlboro" or "Parliament Lights" or "Virginia Slims".   I had never heard it asked outside of the context of cigarette smoking.  The idea of a personal brand, other than a literal branding of the skin in certain sub-cultures, pretty much didn't exist.  

Don't get me wrong; marketing, in particular the psychological juggernaut that convinces people to desire what they do not need and create a culture in which not to have what everyone else has is a lonely, desperate place (truly lonely and desperate with actual physical effects of depression, not just those alleviated by Abilify in conjunction with your regular antidepressant), is America's greatest contribution to world culture. Let's get Godwin out of the way and point out that Hitler and Goebbels went to school on the Liberty Bond drives of WWI, marketed erroneously as "The War to End War".  Just ask Jeremy Pivin, now chewing the scenery over at PBS with the story of how Harry Selfridge single-handedly introduced the idea of American marketing and the shopping culture to England (surely an exaggeration).  God only knows what the Dowager Countess Grantham would have made of it, but I'm certain she never would have gone to Selfridges; Lady Edith, poor dear, on a lark, perhaps.

Personal identity, always an American obsession, primarily because we have no ironclad traditions to fall back on, has always been part of our culture.  We make it up as we go along and hope for the best.  As a multi-generational child of the American West (while your ancestors were at Ellis Island getting the consonants removed from their names mine were cutting down trees and operating steamboats in Washington Territory), I was brought up not to ask too many questions about people's pasts.  I think this was in part because my parents were young during WW II, when every question about how the family was doing was freighted with the possibility of the worst possible news about Uncle George, but also because one of the reasons people came West was to make a fresh start.

We are determined not to be defined by who our parents are and what they did.

We move to express our freedom and to get away from the communities that stifled or nurtured us.

We can all grow up to be president.

We are all individuals!

But, the point made by hushing of the lone voice in the crowd in "Life of Brian" who cried out "I'm not!" when Brian tells the crowd they are all individuals to great cheers, the truth of the matter is that while we are all individuals, we take comfort in being members of a group.  So we take short cuts to individual expression by identifying with groups.  This starts out small (son, neighbor, Cub Scout) and ends up big (Democrat, Libertarian, Notre Dame fan).    These identifications all become part of our personal brand.

Some of these identifications we chose freely, some are thrust upon us, but all of them are manipulated by that other great invention, the limited-liability corporation with all the free speech rights of the individual.  In the ever-more apparent second Gilded Age of the American experiment, are we truly free, or is our personal brand as permanent as the kind inflicted on our animals as a short-cut to identification: free to roam the range until our brand condemns us to the slaughterhouse.

My brand is skeptic, American, Giants fan, California native, scientist, engineer, brother, son, and uncle, Caltech graduate, former Austinite (it was better back in my day, man), gay man, cycling fan, and lover of police procedurals: the worst (NCIS: LA; you have to work hard to make the exposition that painful and wooden) and the best (Southland; man, what I'd give to be the guy who gives John Cooper a smile).  I live in San Francisco, where today the sun shines and the sky is blue after a horrible week for the country.  It's the city of Saint Francis, I always tell people who complain about the homeless, or the dogs, or the relentless do-goodery.

My hope is that we can set aside our brands and learn to work together, and recognize that an individual belief, identification, or surety about the superiority of our way over the other guys' leads to smugness, violence, pain, and a lifetime of regret, anger, and vengeance.