With lakes,
swimming holes, rivers, and pools beckoning, I went to a sporting goods chain
store at the mall — where else? — seeking a new bathing suit (pardon the quaint
locution). The store was curiously named Dick’s. All they had were clown trunks.
By this I mean a garment designed to hang somewhere around mid-calf, instantly
transforming a normally-proportioned adult male into a stock slapstick
character: the oafish man-child.
This being a
commodious warehouse-style store, there was rack upon rack of different brands
of bathing suits, all cut in the same clown style. I chanced by one of the
sparsely-deployed employees and inquired if they had any swimming togs in a
shorter cut.
“What you see
is alls we got,” he said.
Even the
Speedo brand had gone clown — except for the bikini brief, which I wore back
during 30 years of lap-swimming, but which I deemed not quite okay for an
elderly gentleman on the casual summer swim scene. So I left Dick’s without a
new suit, but not before having a completely unsatisfying conversation with one
of the managers.
“In the old
days,” I explained, “bathing suits were designed to minimize the amount of cloth
one dragged around in the water. These clown trunks you sell not only make a
person look ridiculous, but they must be an awful drag in the
water.”
“That’s what
they send us,” he said. “It’s alls we got.”
The
Fourth of July rolled in just in time to celebrate the disintegration of Iraq
following our eight-year, three trillion dollar campaign to turn it into a
suburb of Las Vegas. Me and my girl went over to the local fireworks
show, held on the ballfield of a fraternal order lodge on the edge of town. The
fire department had hung up a gigantic American Flag — like, fifty feet long! —
off the erect ladder of their biggest truck, in case anybody forgot what country
they were in. Personally, I was wondering what planet I was on. It was a big crowd, and every male in it was dressed in a clown
rig.
The
complete outfit, which has (oddly) not changed in quite a few years (suggesting
the tragic trajectory we’re on), includes the ambiguous long-short pants, giant
droopy T- shirt (four-year-olds have proportionately short legs and long
torsos), “Sluggo” style stubble hair, sideways hat (or worn “cholo” style to the
front ), and boat-like shoes, garments preferably all black, decorated with
death-metal band logos. You can see, perhaps, how it works against
everything that might suggest the phrase: “competent adult here.” Add a riot of
aggressive-looking tattoos in ninja blade and screaming skull motifs and you get
an additional message: “sociopathic menace, at your service.” Finally, there is
the question: just how much self-medication is this individual on at the moment?
I give you: America’s young manhood.
Does it
seem crotchety to dwell on appearances? Sorry. The public is definitely sending itself a message disporting itself
as it does in the raiment of clowning. Here in one of the “fly-over” zones of
America — 200 miles north of New York City — the financial economy is mythical
realm like Shangri-La and the real economy is somewhere between the toilet and a
rat hole. Under the tyranny of chain stores, there really is no true local
commercial economy. The few jobs here are menial and nearly superfluous to the
automatic workings of the giant companies.
I don’t have the statistics
but I suspect a lot of the males around here are on federal disability payments,
and probably in the psychological categories including “depression,” “learning
disabilities,” “ADHD, and so on.” In such a situation, wouldn’t a person benefit
from presenting himself as child-like, with a dash of menace? And wouldn’t it be
advantageous to look that way all of the time, in case one was unexpectedly
visited by a government employee?
Down in Brooklyn, a world
away, the young men go about in their hipster uniforms: Pee Wee Herman cut
casuals. They’re still role-playing “the smart kid in the class” even though
they’ve been out of class for a decade. Their computer dreams of IPO glory are
formulated with the tunnel-vision of science fair projects. Left out are the
realities of the greater unraveling.
Women are not at the center
of this story. Theirs is another story. Let some woman tell it before I get to
it.
Never has a society entered an epochal transition with such
unpreparedness.
Never has a society appeared so childishly
decadent.
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