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As someone who spends a
fair amount of time in airports, I marvel at the way my fellow citizens
present themselves in public. I see middle-aged women who appear to have left
home in their pajamas. But it's the costume and demeanor of American young men especially that raises
interesting questions about who we have become.
The fashion and body language of male youth in 2007 comes from three sources:
prison, the nursery, and the pimpmobile. It's an old story now that many
conventions of gangster fashion come out of the jail experience, where they
take away your belt and shoelaces so you won't hang yourself. Apparently, at
some point in US history, they stopped giving the belts and shoelaces back on
release, and it became stylish to wear your trousers falling down below the
top of your underpants (or butt crack as the case may be). Jail being a kind
of accreditation device these days, the message may be: I passed the entrance exam.
Less obvious is the
contribution of the nursery. Pants that are ambiguously neither
long or short, worn with XX-large T shirts, tend to make grown men
look like babies. Babies have short legs and large torsos compared to grown
men. They also make big awkward gestures and touch their sex organs a lot. Add
a sideways hat and unlaced sneakers and you have the complete kindergarten
rig. Why a 20-year-old male would want to look five years old is another
interesting question, but it may have a lot to do with the developmental
failures of boys raised in households without fathers. They simply don't know
how to be men. They only know how to behave like five year old boys. They
even give themselves nursery school nicknames. But they are men, and what
could be more menacing than the paradox of a child bent on homicide.
Tattoos used to be pretty much the sole fashion statement of merchant seamen
or people who have served in the armed forces (or people who live in
jungles). Now they are common among career girls. The tattooed guys I see
down at the gym are ordinary young men who work in cubicles. Tattoos on
sailors used to celebrate places they had been or people they had loved. The
tattoos I see now are meant to convey fierce and barbaric statements of
superhuman power: look at me, I'm a Power Ranger! It's
understandable that someone who spends most of his waking hours in a cubicle
wearing a telephone headset in order to swindle old people out of their
savings might fantasize about rising above all that.
But the tragic thing, of course, is that getting tattooed is not quite the
same as accomplishing something with your life. In the end, you're just
another loser with a grandiose and ridiculous tattoo.
The pimp connection is too obvious to belabor --
meant to mock normal executive attire while signifying an existence of total
leisure and the enjoyment of unearned riches. The trouble is that the worship
of unearned riches -- based on the belief that it truly is possible to get
something for nothing -- has now become normal at all levels in American life.
Everybody from the lowest whoremonger on Hollywood Boulevard to the Wall Street
hedge fund managers believes in unearned riches plucked from
"suckers." The catch is that men who live by this code almost
always come to a bad end. They get their throats cut with razors, or go to
prison, or manage to lose all their unearned riches (and the investments of
many strangers, too).
The portrait of the young American male in 2007, therefore, is of an
impotent, infantalized being lost in grandiose
fantasies of power and importance. It's a picture of men without real
confidence, and no idea how to achieve it, who wish to project a
transcendently ferocious image complete with odds-and-ends of manner taken
from comic books and movies based on comic books, in order to be taken
seriously.
The rest of the world must tremble to contemplate the picture we present. The
Nazi soldiers of 1944 were glamour boys compared to the riff-raff that
American young men have become. As for those who actually do make it into the
army, you wonder how they appear to the locals overseas -- they're probably
taken seriously as exactly what the present themselves to be: manifestly evil beings who really
need to be blown up. Back home, I look around at the thugs and sluggos at my gym, and I'm ashamed to be a citizen of the
same country they live in.
By :
James Howard Kunstler
http://www.kunstler.com/
James
Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature
writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone
Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis.
His
latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the
21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic
crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive
dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the
American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over
oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides,
Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
You
can purchase your own copy here : The Long
Emergency . You can get more from James Howard Kunstler - including his artwork, information about his
other novels, and his blog - at his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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