Divest from brand Lexington

Fayette Urban Countiers unite!

A Creatives for Common Sense position paper

“The city now known as Lexington, KY, is built of the dust of a dead metropolis.”
—George Washington Ranck, History of Lexington Kentucky: Its early annals and recent progress (1872)

The Lexington brand is dead, its meaning long since blown on Entertainment and Bourbon districts, Rupp Arenas and Horse Parks. Lexington is the home of land barons and great compromisers, slave markets and horse markets. Its public statues enshrine regressive losers who, during a centuries-old civil war, skulked hardscrabble Bluegrass farmers out of meanness, and the preservation of slavery. Its signature sport team’s most signature sports moment (UK v. Texas Western) stands 40 years later as a defining symbol of the racist, defeated, loser all-white aspirations held by many in the country who fought viciously against the Civil Rights movement.

In Lexington today, Middle-Eastern Sheikhs and poorly-dressed white Euro-trash trust fund adults make big equine deals so we can all blissfully watch tiny Latinos ride million dollar horses around a track; pasty Midwestern coal lords under-write the sinewy grandsires of black jockeys provided they can run up and down a basketball court to the cheers of 20,000 mostly white, mostly wealthy fans, in an arena named for no less a man than college basketball’s moral equivalent of Jefferson Davis (another “man of his times” who also, it turns out, has Lexington ties). Brand-wise, the city’s image relies heavily on attracting old crusty boring awkward white people, most with money, who get off garnishing themselves with just enough color for proper aesthetics.

Unfortunately, that shrinking demographic is highly-sought after and comes with expensive upkeep. Maintaining the Lexington image for them is costing us shit-tons of money.  Lexington has chosen the worst time possible to pay for remaking itself as a city—at the height of a global urban development boom. Here as in other places, urban land and nearby “unique” pastoral farmscapes carry the most costs and require the most capital to secure and develop. Thirty years ago, when Lexington went suburban-gentry, urban branding offered big returns. Few did it, so the act stood out. Now, everyone does it. By buying in late at the height of the city bubble, branding Lexington as a world class city requires greater resources and offers lower (if any) rates of return.

Put plainly, not only is brand Lexington culturally outdated and currently uber-expensive, it’s also a bad business investment: it returns very little on the very large public investment needed to feed it.

Creatives for Common Sense believes that the time is now to divest from our city brand, that narrow, middle-finger-like sliver of over-valued land surrounding Main Street (and the high-priced farms dotting the spaces beyond) that leaders have branded “authentically us.” We must turn Lexington under, let it sit and rot itself back into the earth for some future use. Our lone remaining obligation should be simply on occasion to piss upon it, for the nutrients, and to reimagine ourselves as something better.

In its place, CfCS suggests the demographically, geographically, geologically, culturally, economically, botanically, poetically and hydrologically more diverse and inclusive “Fayette Urban County” (FUC) as our collective brand-identity.

The FUC brand has a number of things going for it. In terms of coverage, it is a brand that actually accounts for all of us. Aesthetically, the FUC horse head (the general shape of our county) is an infinitely preferable footprint than the Lexington “middle finger” our leaders have embraced. Regionally, identifying as a FUCer is more in line with the rest of the state, which tends to identify by county and not city.

And let’s not forget, in choosing FUC, Lexington’s historical brand transgressions can be wiped clean, the image equivalent of urban renewal. Where does that $5 million dollar asshole coach live who is leading the college basketball race to the bottom? Where is the flagship state school that most Kentuckians can no longer afford to attend? In what city is that great statesman whose compromise allowed slave trading to continue for another decade down the street from his estate? Where was that joke of a World Horse Olympics? What city’s airport allowed Bin Laden’s super-rich family to fly on 9/11 when the rest of the country’s airports were shut down? Brand-wise, these places and those assholes are all tethered to Lexington, KY, not Fayette Urban County.

Most importantly for Creatives, the county approach has the potential for off-the-charts growth in regional and national brand identity. While locales the world over compete on the expensive and crowded “best city” market, few places embrace their county heritage. Lexington, re-branded as Fayette Urban County, can be the standard-bearer for this new, as of yet untapped, market identity. Not only might this potentially save FUCers money when they pimp themselves to “the world,” but it might allow more of us—those without the means to pay into the turgid high-rent Lexington brand—more opportunities to benefit from our government’s marketing opportunities.

We say it proud. We are not Lexingtonians. We are FUCers. And we invite others who have any common sense about them to join us and be FUCers, too. Brand-up, Creatives.