While shopping recently I met another car in a mall lot lane. I
could see the driver and passenger plainly. They looked Middle
Eastern, and I didn’t know them.
But the driver smiled and gave me a little wave. I waved back,
puzzled. I knew he wasn’t responding to my friendly face. My
self-delusion doesn’t stretch quite that far.
I figured it out at last, I think. He and his friend were
wearing suits and ties. I was wearing a tie too, and my weekend
fedora (the older one, a Christy’s Foldable).
His greeting had been the salute of one civilized man to
another. Accustomed to more gracious attire back where he came
from, he’d found even a threadbare specimen like me a welcome sight
in a land of barbarians.
I think we’ve got it all wrong about clothes in this country. I
think we’ve had it wrong ever since the cultural petit mal
that was the 1960s.
We revered something called “authenticity” back in the Sixties.
Dressing neatly, grooming ourselves, even basic hygiene — all such
activities were condemned as “plastic.” Conformist. Hypocritical.
Real beauty sprang from the heart, we told each other, and anyone
blind to such beauty had, like, no soul, man. The really authentic
thing, of course, would have been to wear no clothes at all, but
where that wasn’t practical (like in February in Minnesota, where I
lived then and live now), decency demanded dressing like a Biafran
refugee and smelling like a dog’s bed.
It never occurred to us, in our innocence (no, let’s be honest
— our arrogance), that inner beauty might also involve some small
concern for the noses of others, and that cleaning up, smelling
good, and covering ourselves with attractive clothing might also be
a way of striving for greater peace and universal consciousness in
the world.
Of course we were young then, our generation, and some of us
actually did look good without clothes on.
Not as many as thought they did, though.
Certainly not me.
IN ANY CASE, TODAY the “Now Generation” of the Sixties is entering
its own sixties, and the percentage of us whose bodies bear close
inspection has… well, I just had supper and I’d rather not think
about it.
Many are the duties a responsible culture (if there were one
around) would lay upon us, its elders. We’d be expected to keep the
fires of reason and tradition burning in the home and the public
square. We’d be expected to act as a damper on the political and
social passions of our youngers, counseling against complacent
pacifism on the one hand and obnoxious aggression on the other.
We’d be expected to provide a little free babysitting for the
grandchildren when the kids needed a weekend in Tahoe or St.
Thomas.
But no duty of elders, it seems to me, is more vital to the
common weal on a day-to-day basis than that of simply dressing
decently. An old man in a neat suit (preferably with a hat. Extra
points for a cane) is a walking civic improvement. By contrast, an
old fart in baggy shorts and a Budweiser tee-shirt is a sight from
which small children should be shielded. By force of law if
necessary.
About old women I shall say nothing at all (mostly out of
fear).
Throughout history each generation has heard the complaint,
“Young people today have no manners! They don’t respect their
elders!”
Today, for the first time in history, the young people have a
reasonable and incontrovertible response: “We don’t respect you
because you look like a bunch of clowns.”
The baseball caps (especially when turned backwards — who do
you think you’re kidding?), the voluminous shorts that so
effectively showcase our varicose veins, the tee-shirts that limn
so elegantly our bloated bellies and sagging chests, all these are,
it seems to me, marks of a civilization rapidly headed for the
assisted living facility. We show disrespect to ourselves when we
go around dressed like kids in an Our Gang movie short. (I
suspect we’re all pathologically imprinted on Spanky and Alfalfa.
Saturday morning television has much to answer for.) It’s a silent
cry for help, this manner of dress, a semiotic appeal for some
long-dead grownup to come upstairs from the grave and save us from
the ugliness we’ve created for ourselves.
And of course someone is waiting to do just that.
ALL MY LIFE I’VE HEARD people speak of a cosmic, universal cultural
pendulum. “The pendulum swings one way,” people told me when I was
young, “then it swings back. People are experimenting with new ways
of doing things today. Tomorrow they’ll want to go back to the
traditional ways.”
Well, I’ve been waiting. That pendulum has been swinging left
for a long time now, it seems to me, building up a whole heck of a
lot of potential energy. In my imagination it looks like the
pendulum on a cartoon clock (blame Saturday morning TV again),
stretched like a rubber band and curving up near the little doors
of the cuckoo compartment. When it finally lets go, it’ll snap back
with a vengeance, probably cold-cocking Porky Pig and knocking him
through the living room window.
What form will this backswing take? There are clues, I think, if
you know where to look.
Even as we Americans fritter our time away in vain amusements
and questionable sartorial fads, Europe is being subsumed by the
culture of my friend in the parking lot, the culture of Islam.
Europe, that body-obsessed continent, with its nude beaches (you
knew I’d bring up nude beaches, didn’t you?), casual sex, and open
pornography, is already surrendering (tragically, but perhaps with
some relief) to the Puritanism of the East.
And since our own elite have always considered Europe’s way the
only sure standard of what’s right and fashionable, and since the
European party won the last elections, I suggest we start covering
ourselves too, to get used to it.
