Thuggo and Sluggo - By James Howard Kunstler…..MY HERO!
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.
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