The Banana King

The internet twenty years ago was a lot like the Wild West. Sure, people had built some interesting things, but there wasn’t really any sense of order.

Today, by contrast, things look a lot more predictable in many ways. Millions of people will see something they appreciate, and since it’s so easy to recreate another person’s art, you’ll see a rubber-stamp of the same sort of template used over and over again, with some small tweaks here and there.

Back then, memes in the modern sense were a long way off. We watched a lot of things a lot of times because they were notably different, and really for no other reason. This was a reflection of the wider world too: kids who felt like they didn’t fit in with mainstream culture could find ways to connect to one another by appreciating the weird TV shows and musical groups. If you weren’t normal, you were one of us.

One of those super weird ideas was Charlie the Unicorn, and you can actually still go and watch the original five-ish minute sketches on YouTube today, though the first one was created before the platform (YouTube) existed. There wasn’t even a standard way to make and share videos, even for connected nerds.

Anyway, here’s a clip from episode 2 I want you to watch in its entirety. If you can’t get to a screen where you can play sound, I’ll give you the TL;DR in a minute anyway, but I think it’s worth it to travel back 20 years and get a sense of the weirdness of the earlyish internet:

Charlie is ultimately convinced to (what else?) put a banana in his ear, and then something funny happens. Charlie starts to believe he really is the banana king.

Sorry, the what?

Charlie’s two friends (Pink and Blue) have essentially badgered Charlie into going with them to Candy Mountain, where an important ceremony is about to take place. In order for the ceremony to begin, Charlie apparently must put a banana in his ear. He is about to meet the king.

But there’s a twist: according to Pink and Blue, Charlie himself is the Banana King. He’s very skeptical at first, but Charlie allows himself to be carried away (metaphorically and physically) into belief. I… I am the Banana King?

Then, he crashes to the ground before realizing the entire setup was an elaborate scam so Charlie could be robbed.

This is quite the cautionary tale. Charlie should know better than to agree to something so insane, yet he seems to be caught between forces that pin him here. While this whole thing seems nuts to him, he doesn’t want to let his peers down or seem unwilling to go along with things. They implant an earloop by repeating their message in unison until it gets maddening for Charlie.

Finally, he throws his hands up in the air and stops resisting. You might say that he used to think.

Resistance to a repeating message might seem trivial. After all, we’ve been told by comic books and jedi movies that mind control only works on the weak!

This is a really dangerous mindset. Manipulation works on you and me, and our defense has to begin by admitting that. Smart people are sometimes even more gullible—like Charlie, they can sometimes assume they’ve got it all figured out, so there’s no danger in participating in a fantasy.

I used to try to defeat this gullible, want-to-believe mindset with constant cynicism. Nothing was cool enough and everything got my side-eye, and it sort of worked: I was seldom duped. However, if you’re skeptical of everything and everyone, it makes connecting with other humans very difficult. There has to be a trade-off and a balance.

There have been a few real-life Banana Kings, but I want to focus on Sam Zemuray, or Sam the Banana Man as he came to be called. His fortune was built when he realized that he could purchase the bananas that were being rejected as “too ripe.” The issue was that the bananas would rot while being shipped north from the port in New Orleans where Sam began his business.

United Fruit would just throw the bananas away since it cost money to ship them. Sam’s solution was effective and simple: he would set up a distribution system that catered to the American South, so there would be demand nearby, and so he took advantage of ultra-cheap rates to carve out a huge price advantage in the region.

What began as flipping bananas (reselling) turned into flipping governments by the mid-20th century. Sam’s company, Cuyamel Fruit Co, engineered a coup in Honduras around 1911. Decades later, after Sam had taken control of the much bigger United Fruit, he hired PR man Edward Bernays to improve United Fruit’s image in the eyes of the public, and to keep the public terrified of communist expansion in South and Central America.

Sam was gone by the time it happened, but this led to the overthrow of the government in Guatemala in 1954. There is now a dark legacy surrounding the phrase banana republic, where no self-respecting nation ever wants to be called one of those.

The next time you get a hankering to put a ripe banana right into your favorite ear, stop to consider the cautionary tales of Charlie and Sam. While Charlie paid the price himself, Sam left a legacy of destruction and chaos in the wider world.