If these are truly “rogue sites”, Palin and McCain must be upset.

Rolex’s are counterfeited so often and so well that when I see one now, I automatically assume it’s a counterfeit. The brand to me is less valuable than Casio or Timex at this point and I think that’s part of the damage companies like Rolex are afraid of.

Someone who can afford to spend perhaps $100 on a watch is not going to buy a $10 fake Rolex. Instead, he is going to buy a Casio “Atomic” watch, so he can brag about how much more accurate it is than a mechanical Rolex, and if you give him half a chance, he’ll bend your ear, telling you all about the WWV radio broadcast time service, and the cesium clocks which drive WWV, all of which keep his watch within a tenth of a second of true time. The next step, of course, is a watch with a GPS receiver built in, accurate to tens or hundreds of nanoseconds perhaps. The Casio-wearer can look at the Rolex-wearer, and say something patronizing about “fools with more money than brains,” or words to that effect.

Of course there is a certain element of falsity in the Casio-wearer’s position, as well. A timekeeper is only as good as the process of relating its reading to the real world. If you need to keep time to tenths of a second, the timekeeper needs to be built into some other machine, so that it can automatically record or initiate events. It cannot be a watch anymore, in short. The kind of watch a strictly rational person buys is therefore a cheap digital watch, which can be kept within generally accepted limits of punctuality by being adjusted once a year or so.

However, the real issue is going to be that the kind of people who work at McDonald’s, and who obviously cannot afford a real Rolex will be wearing fake Rolexes, not as “passing,” but as a kind of cargo-cult reaction, an expression of a fantasy totally detached from reality, of being a rock star instead of asking “Do you want fries with that?” The Casio-wearer might like you to think that he got a bigger bonus than he actually got, but, if you know him, you know approximately where he works, and in what kind of job, and you aren’t very likely to mis-estimate his income by a factor of ten. The kind of person who is wearing a fake Rolex will be someone who will never even be within reaching distance of a real Rolex. If there are a hundred fake Rolexes for every real Rolex, someone wearing a real Rolex will be presumed, at sight, to be McDonald’s counter help or something like that, and the people who could afford to buy Rolexes will refuse to buy Rolexes.

Suppose you see a woman on the street, wearing a tiara of “diamonds,” comparing favorably in size and number with the British Crown Jewels. You don’t for a moment think the things are real, of course, and you assume they were borrowed from a little girl’s dress-up set. The only question remaining in your mind is whether the woman is a crazy street person, or an actress doing street theater (eg. a political demonstration). Suppose you raise a Rolex to that level. Back during the last war, the one in Vietnam, the Yippies had a star turn, two men in travesty of military uniform, with plastic airplane models glued to their hats, who were known as “General Hershey Bar,” and “General Waste-More-Land,” in mockery of the actual generals, Lewis Hershey and William Westmoreland. and who gave comic speeches. Imagine an Occupy Wall Street demonstrator, with about forty fake Rolexes stitched to his coat, in neat rows running all the way up the sleeves to the shoulders, declaiming “I am the uber-capitalist! The new Anti-Christ, and and I am the number of the Beast! I need all these six-hundred and sixty-six Rolex watches to keep track of how many jobs I am shipping to China!” And much more to the same effect. He gives a stylish performance, and gets lots of television coverage. At that point, it is conceivable that a great many potential Rolex customers would simply not want to wear Rolexes.