| Muck and Mystery Loitering With Intent |
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People should be beautiful in every way--in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.
-- Anton Chekhov
But if you can't be beautiful, fake it. At least that seems to be the current fashion in liberal fashions. In a previuous post, Another Brick, the ideas of George Lakoff, attempting to hoodwink the public with linguistic jiu jitsu, were ridiculed:
This is a dead end, a part of the laughably naive nonsense we hear about reframing the discussion, hoodwinking the public with linguistic jiu jitsu. It's self-punking again, as noted in The Man Who Framed Himself: How George Lakoff got trapped in his own metaphors.Similarly, one of the loopier segments of paleo-environmentalism is advocating dress codes for activists.Like Lakoff, any number of pundits have embarrassed themselves trying to come up with new ways to frame issues to sell them to a sceptical public. The problem is that times have passed them by. They are like aging tarts with big hair in prom dresses who think that their face lift will allow them to pass for hotties. No one is fooled. Even their friends wince. What's needed is a little reality therapy for the reality based community. The alternative, contra-positive reality they inhabit provides too few points of contact with the real issues and attitudes of the world.
"We greens have to stop looking like we eat bark and live in a root cellar," says Warkomski, who sometimes accessorizes his preppy work attire with hemp canvas shoes, the eco-equivalent of bling. And his theory holds water: Aliso Viejo recently passed a seriously green building ordinance. I doubt Karl could have garnered support for it while sporting a "How did our oil get underneath their sand?" T-shirt (though he does wear that T-shirt underneath his dress-up clothes).It's "Get Clean for Gene" part d'oh! I guess they forget that the result last time was Richard Nixon, just as they have never grasped that it was linguistic mushiness and obvious flummery that helped Kerry lose, and that it was image consultant blundering that helped so many pretenders lose in recent decades: Dukakis in a tank, Gore's attempts to be an alpha male (like Bill), Dean's Iowa meltdown that saw his bell-ringers get out the vote... for his opponents (Kerry, Edwards, anyone but the guy these nutters like).All I'm asking you to do is, like Karl, think about your image. Strategically. This doesn't have to mean selling your soul. There are manufacturers out there making ecologically intelligent clothes. And if you can't afford or find a fair-trade, Italian-cut, three-button wool suit for that speech on the merits of wind power, try buying secondhand...
Apathy toward image may be an expression of rebellion, but it's also a blown opportunity. You could be promoting a green lifestyle as one of vitality and flair, rather than one of dreary deprivation.
Contrast this with Timothy Burke's views noted in Why Bother
The spectators are watching: if we start to match them lie for lie, cheat for cheat, cheap shot for cheap shot, we walk right into the caricature that’s been drawn of us. I write as I do because I’m hoping to connect with popular veins of consciousness and knowledge that are very different from mine on terms of mutual toleration, possibly even respect, to persuade others with a certain humility of ambition and affect without losing sight of my faith in the rightness and soundness of my views.The spectators are watching, so it can't just be a pose, or seem like a pose, or it does just play into the caricature. It isn't that Chekhov was wrong, "People should be beautiful in every way--in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves", it's that the last part is what makes the first part valuable. Some say that such grace can, if approached properly, begin as a costume.
I started wearing suits to class. And it resulted in a number of curious things. First, students did take things I said more seriously. They paid more attention in class. And it occurred to me that they interpreted my suits as caring not only about myself but about them. It pleased them that I would take the time and effort to look good for them, especially when they knew full well that I certainly didn’t have to do it, that it was totally a free choice on my part.The clumsy language and ratty appearance of activists isn't just a fashion statement, it's a reflection of their substance and the quality of their thinking. Changing the externals, speech and appearance, to deceive others has some possible outcomes: it may fail when the charade is sussed out and so confirm existing suspicions, or it may change the deceiver, beautifying their minds a bit, in time maybe a lot.Second, I found that I felt better. I felt more intelligent, more important, more respectable. I began to wonder why I’d been dressing like a boy – and perhaps more importantly, thinking about myself as a boy – for all those years? And it occurred to me that I’d been, in effect, disrespecting myself. I didn’t think enough of myself to look good.
What's most likely is that it will just be hilarious, like children dressing up in their parents clothes and speaking in odd ways trying to say things they don't understand, mispronouncing the hard words or mixing them up with similar sounding words and providing material for the next generation of stand up comics.