No matter who wins, we lose

Walking the Beat

Every week, it seems anymore, I could fill this space with whatever controversy du jour sweeping the internet and not even scratch the surface of it. The latest: Sydney Sweeney's genes, er jeans, which are either the root of all evil apparently, or are showing the proof of the evils of those who assert their evilness in the first place.

In case you missed it – and in my case I wish I had, but the algorithms got me, putting the story in the second spot of my "Picks for You" list behind only the infamous South Park premiere, and I ain't touching that one – American Eagle just released an ad campaign featuring the blonde and famously well-proportioned actress doing a riff on the Brooke Shields Calvin Klein ads from the Eighties to market their blue jeans with her genes. 

Get it? Well the internet sure did, only it decided that it wasn't a particularly clever or funny pun, and instead decided to break itself. From what I understand it all started with (what else?) social media immediately playing the Hitler card with references to 1930s Germany, throwing around words like "eugenics," and even seeing something nefarious in her initials. And then the legacy media did what it all too often does and piled on in the hope to generate more clicks and with it revenue in the attention economy.

"Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad shows a cultural shift to whiteness," MSNBC proclaimed. "Is American Eagle really using whiteness to sell jeans?" asks the Guardian (from reading the article, not only is the answer an implied "yes," but the word "really" probably should have been in italics). "Sydney Sweeney warned she's sitting on 'toxic time bomb' by staying mum on American Eagle backlash" says Yahoo, living up to its name ("warned," really?). "Why Sydney Sweeney needs to be canceled," argued something called Charlotte's Web Thoughts ("canceled," we're back to that now? Oh right, I forgot Stephen Colbert, sorry it's already been more than a week now). Even the Gray Lady weighed in, with the New York Times reporting that "Sydney Sweeney's jeans ad is just her latest controversial project." Good to know! 

And then right on time was the backlash to the backlash. "The war on hot women: Why the woke mob hates Sydney Sweeney" railed Fox News, which of course they did. "Sydney Sweeney's jeans ad triggers liberals. She looks good. They don't," opined USA Today. "Sydney Sweeney tantrum is all about the left's rage at America's rejection" the New York Post asserted. Fox Business took a victory lap, saying "Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad shows conservatives are 'winning the culture war,'" and back to USA Today they reported that "White House calls Sydney Sweeney ad outrage 'cancel culture run amok.'" I did Nazi that coming. Oh wait, yes, I'm pretty sure I did, even coming in late to the latest game of Two Minutes Hate it was pretty obvious where it would all end up.

But where I end up is with this: This is why we lose. And I don't mean "we" on one side of the debate or the other; I don't particularly care one way or the other about the controversy in question, other than that it's example number 347 million of the old adage about how a certain three-letter-word sells stuff. No, what I mean is more akin to the "Aliens vs. Predator" line about whoever wins, we lose: We expend so much time, so much thought, so much energy, so much of ourselves in our oh-so-importantly meaningless little battles like these, driving ourselves further and further apart, and for what? I honestly don't even know. All I know is, I'm glad I don't go on social media anymore.

Now if only it would stay out of my news feed.