It's in our Jeans

I was alerted by an article on the Little Miss Attila blog about an article by George F. Will in the Washington Post in which he rails about the ubiquitous tide of denim on the sartorial landscape. He is clearly against America's preference for jeans and would prefer it if we all grew up, started wearing dockers and put on a tie, this from a man who wore bow ties until recently. His conversion to cravats suggests he finally learned to tie a four in hand necktie and could eschew the clip ons. That leaves Dave Garroway, Louis Farrakhan, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, and Tucker Carlson to be taught the Windsor knot.

With so many bad choices Americans can make; T-shirts that say I'm with stupid, baseball caps caps worn backwards by people that clearly are not catching the next inning, hoodies with the "designers" name as motif and the tramp stamp tattoo, why Will decided to blast jeans as an example for the decline of Western Civilization seems odd. One clue why is in the opening sentence, "On any American street, or in any airport or mall...", this rhetorical flourish shows Bill has never been on an American street, an airport or mall in living memory but still wants to be considered one of the folks. He disparages running shoes as well but not so vehemently, perhaps he wears them around the office and changes into the Ferragamos when he's getting into a cab.

He suggests we adopt Fred Astaire as our fashion exemplar, I'm sure Bill will be wearing spats, a top hat and tails the next time he catches a Southwest flight to Vegas.

The adjective that frequently jumps to mind regarding George Will is fustian and I am afraid this column falls into that category. I suspect he was trying to be funny but like Anderson Cooper joking about the homosexual act of tea bagging while displaying a more than a passing knowledge of the practice, the article reveals more about the author than the article intended. In this case Will comes across as a second rate Mencken, a curmudgeon but without the Sage of Baltimore's quaint anti-semitism and racism.

(Anderson's tea bagging references were meant to disparage the recent Tea Party demonstrations but also managed to expose our media elite's familiarity with gay sub-culture. It'll be fun to hear what they have to say about felching when that subject comes up.)

Mr. Will takes a nuanced view of things, his baseball book, "Men at Work", celebrated the work ethic of professional ball players, a class of people notorious for their slovenly and outlandish clothing, without once mentioning the fact.

Mr. Will thinks Jeans wearing Americans are unauthentic unless they toil in the soil or are panning for gold, there may be other professions that can wear denim but the only one he mentions wranglers on the old Chisholm Trail, it may be time for George to get out of the office and see what other things Americans do for a living.