Chuck Norris was undoubtedly an American icon, a rugged-individualist fighter on- and off-screen who symbolized the international cultural influences, TV-star ubiquity, and B-movie campiness that defined a potent form of sweaty masculinity in the late 20th century.
We went to a restaurant the other night, and the waitress kept calling me by my name. She was like, 'Khloé, do you want another drink?' Whatever. And True was going, 'How does she know who you are?' And I go, 'Oh, I just come here all the time.' Which I don't, but they don't realize that we're on TV. Like, they don't know the difference, 'cause I'm not talking about it," she recalled on the On Purpose podcast.
And by "Who-dom," I don't mean the Seussian variety but the taxonomy coined by 's Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger: the vast, sub-stratospheric tier of celebrity occupied by figures whose fame is intensely meaningful to some and virtually nonexistent to everyone else. Whos are defined in opposition to Thems, the indisputable celebrities known to most except those living under a rock or who willingly reject the very notion of pop culture,
To be Black in the U.S. has such an expansive meaning that traces back to Europeans deciding who got to be "white." While some people, like the Italians and Irish, earned their way into "white-ness," those with even a drop of Black in their heritage were relegated to the lower rungs of the racial ladder.
The Stasi, the secret police, were legendary for their data files. Their work was based on instilling fear, and they induced stunningly amazing numbers of East Germans into informing on their neighbors. Something along the lines of 1 in 6 East Germans were informants, whether out of fear or out of approval of what the East German government was doing.