The American Dream, revised, is sim­ple: sell out.

Startup busi­nesses lust for acqui­si­tion. Researchers and inven­tors hope some giant will license their patents. Indie film direc­tors dream of shlocky four-picture deals based on video games. Popular musi­cians count up street cred to trade in for TV ads. The idea of ris­ing to the top and build­ing some­thing huge feels obso­lete to many peo­ple. Forget being Carnegie and Vanderbilt, Buffett or Bono, Oprah or Tiger. Instead, let’s sell the com­pany to Microsoft, the inven­tion to Lockheed, the barre chords and hair­style to Saatchi. The new dom­i­nant male strat­egy is to find the alpha dog and grovel, profitably.

This raises a ques­tion. If we’re not going to be super­stars and tycoons, why are we work­ing so hard in the first place? Selling out should be eas­ier. The enti­tled American middle-class kid does not work hard, but the money must flow. When you need to sell out and there’s noth­ing to sell, what do you do? Work is for chumps and art is hard.

In coastal Orange County, where I live, the prob­lem is acute. There’s an over­sup­ply of young men with great ambi­tions and lit­tle energy. If you’re not an ath­letic star or a hot DJ or loaded with cash from Dad’s mort­gage busi­ness, what the hell are you going to do to be #1?

The answer for a lot of these guys is bizarre: start your own cloth­ing line.

This would have been unthink­able 20 years ago. Fashion design was for homo­sex­u­als and women, full stop. But some­thing odd hap­pened in those years. Surfers and skaters were the first to trade cred for activewear. It made sense for the board shorts and t-shirts to get a per­sonal brand, and the MTV era had just arrived. Stars like future mur­derer Gator and Tony Hawk did very well, and oth­ers noticed. Skate and surf man­u­fac­tur­ers all rolled out their cloth­ing and acces­sories lines. Everyone else fol­lowed. If you had a bit of cool to trade, you could sell hats and shirts and all the other junk, and give away your stick­ers so your cus­tomers were ads for an ad.

This phe­nom­e­non per­co­lated down through sports to music, drag­ging along DJs and per­form­ers, until just about every­one who could be described as “cool” was asso­ci­ated with a cloth­ing line.

But as noted above, not every­one had cool to trade.

It turns out that’s not a prob­lem. If you’re a par­ty­ing dude with a wide social cir­cle of other dudes who fist­bump you and vomit at the same bars, you’re already gold. Run off a few thou­sand stick­ers and give away a hun­dred t-shirts, toss hats at friends, slap the stick­ers on fast food drive throughs and junc­tion boxes, and keep dump­ing money into it. If you’re con­stantly annoy­ing and will­ing to spend a lot of money on it, there’s a good chance you’ll suc­ceed. The black­let­ter type and swirly designs of com­pa­nies like Affliction are every­where. I per­son­ally know three engag­ing sociopaths who cre­ated their own lines of cloth­ing and did well. If there are enough stick­ers and fly­ers and drunk friendly dudes wear­ing your stuff, you can become a minor mogul of Men’s Casual.

The sell-out dream is now per­fect. It’s no longer nec­es­sary to build any cred­i­bil­ity in order to trash it for money. You can get the same effect by throw­ing your own money into stick­ers and shirts and pro­mot­ing them con­stantly, which is the kind of behav­ior the typ­i­cal O.C. bro dude already finds nat­ural. If you don’t have money your­self, another cheer­ful drunk does. And the weird­est part of the whole cycle is this: they some­times do sell out to a big com­pany and do very well. For every 100 red-faced stick­ered idiots there’s one Paul Frank.

I’m not attached to tra­di­tional ideals of mas­culin­ity. That whole busi­ness is too stu­pid for any­thing but humor­ous use. But there is some­thing jar­ring about the wealthy and priv­i­leged young men in my town and their Jagermeister-fuelled pur­suit of fame and for­tune in Men’s Ready-to-Wear. But you have to admit: a straight trade of party pop­u­lar­ity for busi­ness suc­cess is a bet­ter deal than years of actual effort. All the enter­pris­ing bro dude needs is money and a screen­print design, and the rest is done by com­pe­tent graph­ics spe­cial­ists and unfor­tu­nate Mexican laborers.

The pro­gres­sion is from those who do, to those who sell to those who do, to those who make t-shirts to sell to each other in hopes that those who sell to those who do will buy these and sell them to those who do, who will sell them to Wal-Mart.

The whole thing smells of empires in decline. Which, I think, will be the name of my new cloth­ing line.

A BORSCHT-IN 2009

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