On this day in 1829, Levi Strauss was born in Bavaria. Eleven years later, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto. Strauss, of course, went on to found the clothing company that eventually produced blue jeans hungered for by millions of people trapped under communist rule. In its own small way, the Levi Strauss company shone a tiny light to help illuminate the lie of socialist prosperity. Yet over time the company itself became a bastion of quasi-socialist experimentation in its business and personnel practices. So while it helped undermine communism, the company was itself undermined by communism.

Does that count as ironic? Ever since that Alanis Morissette song, in which almost none of her examples of irony were in fact ironic (itself an irony, I think), I've been wary of applying that term.

In any event, isn't history interesting?