Published on 1 Nov 2005 by KERA/Energy Bulletin. Archived on 26 Aug 2006.
Simmons-Kunstler interview
by Glenn Mitchell and Jeffrey J. Brown
Introduction
Matt Simmons and Jim Kunstler were interviewed on November 1, 2005 by Glenn Mitchell on KERA 90.1, the local PBS station in Dallas, Texas.
Matt and Jim, who had never met until that night, were in town for a symposium that night on: "The unfolding energy crisis and its impact on development patterns," sponsored by the Southern Methodist University Environmental Sciences Department and the Greater Dallas Planning Council. Among the financial underwriters were T. Boone Pickens and Chesapeake Energy.
This was a fairly remarkable interview, partly because Matt Simmons and Jim Kunstler, coming from vastly different backgrounds, had basically reached the same conclusions regarding Peak Oil. It's also interesting to see how events have unfolded since this interview.
Glenn Mitchell was a master at what he did; unfortunately, he passed away quite suddenly shortly after this interview, and he is deeply missed in the Dallas area. However, KERA has continued with a very good noon time (Central time) talk show in the same format that Glenn used. You can listen to the show, via the Internet, at www.kera.org.
The Simmons/Kunstler interview is available on an audio CD, from KERA 90.1. I highly recommend this interview as a great low key way to introduce people to the Peak Oil concept. Following is the ordering information:
KERA 90.1 can provide additional CDs for $10 each. Interested parties should send a check or money order along with details about the program (Simmons/Kunstler Interview on 11/1/05) to:
Talk Show CD Request
KERA 90.1
3000 Harry Hines Blvd.
Dallas, TX 75201
- Jeffrey J. Brown
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Interview
Glenn Mitchell
Matt Simmons
Jim Kunstler
MITCHELL: Jim, welcome.
KUNSTLER: Hi.
MITCHELL: Matthew, nice to have you.
SIMMONS: Thank you.
MITCHELL: Let me start with you Matthew. Lots of places produce oil. How do the Saudis come to dominate the market?
SIMMONS: Well they had the luxury of finding five unbelievably giant oil fields that could be produced at almost at will for a long period of time through a really small number of wells. And over the years as the United States finally peaked and went into decline they became the largest oil producer on Earth. They actually don’t produce more than about 8 million barrels of over 80 million barrels of oil we now use per day, but the problem is they are the only country that anyone knows of that hopefully has the capacity to keep expanding their production to meet ever-growing need for oil. So it’s not as much how much oil they produce today, it’s the fact that they are the only country that realistically could start to grow production as long as the world continues to use more oil.
MITCHELL: Jim, what’s the connection with modernity in oil?
KUNSTLER: Well our industrial societies are powered by oil. They are the final fuel source in the sequence that went from wood to coal and now to oil and there is kind of an accompanying delusion that there will naturally be another fuel source that “they” will come up with to replace oil. And this is the hope of a great many Cornucopians who believe that we are going to be able to keep running the Interstate highway system and Walt Disney World and all of the accessories of our car dependent lifestyle going.
MITCHELL: I was on CNBC this morning with an old corporate Cornucopian that is coming out with a book in the next few months that effectively argues that oil is actually renewable and is being baked inside the Earth as we speak.
KUNSTLER: Yeah….that’s a group of people who think the earth has a creamy nougat center.
MITCHELL: You know the guy actually believed it.
KUNSTLER: Well you know I think you can say that the delusional thinking in this country is already pretty high and is probably going to increase as the stress on our society grows and the stress will grow as our society is challenged to find a way to adapt to an energy scarce reality. You know Dick Chenney was famous for saying that the American way of life is non-negotiable. I think the truth is that reality is going to negotiate it for us if we refuse to join in on the negotiations.
MITCHEL: If you want to talk with us we're at 800-933-5372 or also at GMS@kera.org. Jim Kunstler’s book is called The Long Emergency Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century.
With us by phone is Matthew Simmons. His book Twilight in the Desert, the Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. They both are going to be at the SMU tonight or actually at Highland Park United Methodist Church for a seminar program called the Unfolding Energy Crisis at its Impact on Development Patterns. There will be a book signing at 6:00 and then the talk starts at 7:00. If you want more information about that you can call 214-768-2743. But if you have a question for us right now…800-933-5372 or GMS@kera.org. Matthew, how much Saudi production is politically dictated?
SIMMONS: I’m not sure what you mean by politically dictated.
MITCHELL: In other words who says how much they pump everyday?
SIMMONS: Oh I think basically they pump all the oil they can.
MITCHELL: Oh okay.
SIMMONS: There is no evidence anymore. Now four years ago they were carefully shutting in some of their supply. But even during the time they were shutting stuff in, it had a lot more to do with worries they had about their fields than actually trying to keep oil off the market. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and required the world to pull all stops to actually embargo Iraq and Kuwait’s oil, in a ninety day period of time Saudi Arabia took their oil production back from 5 million barrels a day where it had been resting during the 80s to 8 million barrels a day and they have been flat out every day ever since then.
MITCHELL: Jim, in your book you describe this as being a darker time than the eve of World War II. That was pretty dark. Why is this darker?
KUNSTLER: Yes. Well because in a way the challenges we face are much more intractable. World War II was in some ways a fairly simple struggle between good and evil between fatuous authoritarian government and democracy. Between particular tyrannical figures like Adolph Hitler who had declared his ambitions. So it was a clear-cut struggle. This is going to be a tremendous challenge to the United States in particular because we have developed a way of living that is a tremendous liability for us. We have this living arrangement called suburban sprawl which we have invested all of our post-war wealth in and which we now believe we are entitled to live in forever and keep on expanding and moreover to have an economy that is mainly based on the increasing production of more suburban sprawl which is to say “a living arrangement with no future.” And this presents tremendous psychological and economic problems for us. For example…think of suburbia as being the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world, because it is a living arrangement that really doesn’t have a future. Okay. Well, you put so much of your own wealth and your own spirit and your collective resources into this infrastructure for living that you can’t imagine letting go of it. And so what we’ll see is I believe a tremendous battle to maintain the entitlements of a way of life that really has no future. And it is going to be a tremendous act of futility. It’s going to take all of the effort that we should be putting into a much more intelligent response to this permanent energy crisis. All of the effort we could be putting into that is being diverted into a defence of suburbia and it’s going to be a very unfortunate and tragic thing.
MITCHELL: If we assume that there is no creamy nougat center in the Earth Matthew, when will the oil run out?
SIMMONS: The oil will actually never run out. One of the reasons that too many people scoff about the notion of peak oil is that they immediately think that we are running out of oil. The problem isn’t running out, the problem is peaking. And the problem of peaking wouldn’t be a big deal if we created a world where demand was also peaking. The problem is - and while Jim is talking about the United States I worry a lot more about the whole world - we have created a world that’s on a road map to needing at least 120 million barrels a day of oil to be daily consumed by 2020, which is only 15 years away. We could easily by then have a world where the supply has dropped from 82 million/83 million barrels a day now down to 70 or 60. At 60 million barrels a day we haven’t run out of oil. We just have an enormous gap between what we needed and what we can use.
KUNSTLER: You know the further implication of that is that it will generate enormous competition. Enormous contests to get control of the remaining oil in the world, and you know all bets are off about how that’s going to play out. Does it mean that the Chinese are going to try to control the oil in Central Asia? They have less oil than we do, the Chinese. They are madly running around the world now making contracts for oil with Venezuela, with the Canadians for the Alberta tar sands. What are we going to do if we cannot maintain our police station in Iraq in the Middle East which we set out by the way in order to modify and influence the behavior of those nations in the Middle East so we could continue buying their oil.
Well that’s a project that is not working out very well for us and we cannot be confident about our ability to control the terrain or the populations of these unfriendly nations. What happens when we have to leave that part of the world? Will we retain access to the 2/3 of the remaining oil that’s there? And how soon may that happen? You know these are all tremendous questions that we are not even beginning to ask ourselves.
MITCHELL: Matthew?
SIMMONS: Yes sir.
MITCHELL: What about India and China? When they start really using oil?
SIMMONS: Well the China’s use is doubled in the last 7 to 8 years. But what is astonishing is if you take the total amount of growth in China it is less than the growth in the last five years from the United States. And China today on a per capita basis still uses less than 2 barrels of oil per person. India still only uses about 1 barrel per person. If India and China both some day grew with no population increase, which is unrealistic, to the level of Mexico today, which is about 6 ½ barrels per person, you would have to add 44 ½ million barrels a day of additional oil. It’s impossible.
MITCHELL: If you want to talk to us we’re at 800-933-5372. We’re also at GMS@kera.org. Jim Kunstler and Matthew Simmons my guests. Let’s get a call from Stephen in Dallas. Hi.
CALLER: Hello.
MITCHELL: Hi there.
CALLER: Hey. I just about a month ago I read a commentary by or an article by the Governor of Montana who suggested that Montana possesses a third of the coal in the United States and the Nazis seem to have done pretty well by taking coal and turning it into oil, natural gas and gasoline. I’m not suggesting that the energy crisis can be averted because of this but what I’m suggesting is that the United States actually did have a coal to liquids project - a number of plants were built…I’m just guessing 80 years ago. And we essentially possess 33% of the world’s resources in terms of the potential of using coal.
MITCHELL: Okay. Let’s get a response first. Matthew, what do you think?
SIMMONS: Well it’s interesting. There is a pilot project that the Department of Energy in Patel Institute where they’re actually working up the numbers on right now that we start out at 25,000 barrels a day and ultimately ramp up to 75,000 barrels a day which we would call a teapot refinery. I was asked last week whether our firm would kind of scrub out the numbers when they were done. I said, "sure, what’s your estimated costs?" - "We don’t have any idea. It’s going to be really expensive." So I think the important thing to remember is that when South Africa worked on coal to liquids and when Germany worked on coal to liquids, we were using tiny amounts of oil then. So I think that coal to liquids can work but I think it’s going to be very difficult to actually scale up and actually even make a dent on a world that basically needs to grow by 2 to 3 million barrels a day per year.
KUNSTLER: We are going to use every alternative fuel that we can. There is no question about it. But the bottom line is that no combination of alternative fuels, whether they are synthesized coal liquids or wind power, solar power, hydrogen or anything else, no combination of these things will allow us to run the Interstate highway system, Wal-Mart and Walt Disney World the way we are accustomed to running them. We are going to have to make other arrangements and that’s what the people in this country don’t get.
MITCHELL: I suppose this is an obvious question Matthew. But you do raise it in your book. In what sense is oil not just another commodity?
SIMMONS: Whoever made that statement up ought to be shot or have their throat cut out. (LAUGH). Oil turns out not even to be a commonality term. The difference between light sweet oil which comes out of the ground at fast rates and heavy sour oil is the difference between having a Rolls Royce and having a jalopy. And then you get into unconventional oil, which people casually toss around today -say, oh don’t worry there are the tar sands of Canada. The tar sands of Canada are effectively a first cousin of coal - very energy intensive to convert into usable oil. So each of the grades of oil are so totally different that we should have never lumped them all together like calling all vehicles cars. So that’s the first mistake. The second mistake is that it’s the best energy source the world’s ever known about that could actually be stored and used as transportation fuel. So, while we might have misused the oil in the last few years in the belief that it would last forever, if we hadn’t had it we would be a very, very different world today. So the idea that we call it just another commodity I think led a lot of the economists in to thinking that it would last forever.
MITCHELL: Alright let’s get some calls. We have full board of callers and we’ll start with Michael in Garland. Good afternoon.
CALLER: Hi, good afternoon. I’m so glad to hear you addressing this problem head-on and directly rather than beating about the bush because I believe you…it is a serious problem. For the last 100 years of an oil age what kind of legacy do we have? We can’t breathe our air. We’re coddling dictators around the world. We’re starting wars to protect or to police sources of oil like you mentioned and political corruption. I don’t have all the answers but I would like to hear your opinion on one answer that I’m researching. Automobiles today based on internal combustion can be swapped out with electric. Electric technology with motors has advanced to a point where they can be recharged on the run. The project I’m working with however is working with Chinese engineers. We don’t have either the interest or the education here in this country to solve this problem on our own.
MITCHELL: Alright, what about electric cars?
KUNSTLER: Well I think that we are putting too much of our effort and attention into trying to increase the mileage of our vehicles and the efficiency of our vehicles and make our cars run better and trying to keep the whole car dependent system going. You know the trouble here is not that we are using the wrong kind of cars. The trouble is that we have created this tremendous infrastructure for car dependency. And you know we have to spend more of our effort on other things. Let me give you an example. We have a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. There isn’t one project that we could do that would be more meaningful than to restore the American railroad system. It would have a tremendous impact on our oil consumption plus it would have many other benefits like enabling people who cannot drive to get around. Just having a multi-model system for transportation would be a tremendous thing. And the fact that we are not even beginning to talk about this shows how unserious we are. And how abstracted from our sense of reality we are.
SIMMONS: The other thing that’s very important. I agree with Jim, other than saying that after we rebuild the rails we need to basically restore and make as efficient as possible our port system, because actually getting goods off rails on to boats gives another rash of big improvement energy efficient. But the problem of the electric car turns out to be a very insidious even worse problem. We are in a natural gas crisis worse than we are in an oil crisis. And since we have turned to natural gas as our incremental source of electricity, we cannot basically start creating new markets for electricity that are not current markets because we are going to have to learn how to live with less electricity too.
MITCHELL: Let’s get a call next from Mike in Dallas. Hi.
CALLER: Yeah. Hi, how you doing? One of the things that’s most aggravating is it shows that people aren’t wrapping their heads around this problem is people sitting in the winter or the summer running their engines in the cars when they are parked just to keep their heater or their air conditioning going. Anyone who knows a little bit of history knows that Japan started a war with the United States over oil and I was just wondering if we don’t get our heads around this - we don’t have a Manhattan style project to solve this problem - are we going to eventually run in to a Chinese super state that is not going to let us grab all the oil anymore?
SIMMONS: You know all you have to do is go back and think about the behavior that kids demonstrated in musical chairs. When you get down to the last few kids and fewer chairs you start getting apparent human behaviors, so the question is if we don’t address this, yeah, we are going to have fistfights with everybody.
SIMMONS: But I also think that we actually can wake up in time and actually address the issue in a remarkably short period of time - change our society so that we actually are driving less and shipping goods by rail and shipping goods over water. We can liberate organizations whether they are companies or universities that all operate today under an obsolete concept - that if you are a large group you need to be under one roof because we have to communicate.
KUNSTLER: We are going to have to significantly downscale, rescale, resize and reorganize all of the major activities of American life. We are going to have to do agriculture in a different way. We are going to have to grow a lot more of our food locally. We are going to have to rescale and reorganize trade and commerce. The big box model for commerce is very shortly going to come to an end. That’s Wal-Mart and Target and all of that. We are going to have to rebuild local interdependent networks of economic activity of a kind that were systematically and methodically destroyed by large corporations. And we are going to have to get on that job soon. And when we do we are going to find that our communities will restore themselves. We are going to probably have to say goodbye to the gigantic centralized school districts with their yellow fleets of school buses that run an average of 100,000 miles a year. All of these things are going to have to be changed. And you know this tremendous inertia in our culture we have all these investments we have made in the infrastructure for running things they way we run them. And we are not going to change them easily. There is going to be a titanic struggle to maintain the entitlements to these things whether they can be maintained or not. But you know what? Circumstances are going to compel us to change whether we like it or not. There has been a big argument over suburbia for the last fifteen years, and some of the apologists for it like David Brooks of the New York Times have made the argument repeatedly that suburbia must be great because people like it. And by the way that’s a foolish argument just to begin with, but the fact of the matter is whether people like it or not it’s coming off the menu. We are not going to be able to do it anymore whether we like it or not. And that’s…you know, life is tragic. This is not a Bruce Willis movie where we are going to be rescued at the last moment by some miracle. Life is tragic. History is remorseless and history doesn’t care whether we pound our culture down a rat hole. And that’s what we are in the process of doing. By not paying attention.
MITCHELL: So what are we headed for, some sort of Jeffersonian agricultural democracy?
KUNSTLER: Well I wouldn’t put it that way. I would say in the interim we’re headed for what I call the long emergency and that’s why I entitled my book that way. We’re headed for a period of hardship and turbulence in which a lot of people are not going to want to change, in which there is going to be a lot of friction and conflict between nations and classes within nations. And a tremendous amount of tumultuous economic loss of value of property, of jobs that will never come back and incomes that will be lost forever. Tremendous turbulence in the financial markets, because remember when you have industrial economies that are powered by oil and oil becomes increasingly a scarce resource, you’re not going to have normal economic growth in industrial societies. And when you don’t have that, all of the paper markers that represent the expectation and hope that growth will continue - like stocks and bonds and currencies and derivatives and all kinds of financial instruments - people are going to lose their faith in those. And faith is the only thing that sustains their value. So, we’re headed into a tremendous period of hardship and difficulty and we have to start immediately in addressing the changes that we have to make.
MITCHELL: If you have a question 800-933-5372. We’re also at GMS@kera.org. Let’s get a call from Fletcher in Dallas. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. I had two questions. The first is probably a very, very easy question and I’m the only one who doesn’t know the answer to it. I wanted to know basically where is our oil going? Cars and buildings. What percentage…..
KUNSTLER: That’s a simple question to answer. 70% of the oil barrel in the United States and the world is used for transportation and about 98% of our transportation energy comes from oil. So that’s basically passenger cars and buses and trains and trucks. It turns out the big semi-trucks are the single biggest energy hog we have in the world today, getting 3 to 6 miles per gallon. So the SUV, actually, if you get 6 people in it, is actually a pretty good product to have.
MITCHELL: Kind of a mini-bus?
KUNSTLER: Yes. We just have to use them as mini-buses.
MITCHELL: What was your second question?
CALLER: The other one is probably a lot more difficult and that is what do you guys think is the best way to get out of this mess?
SIMMONS: Well I’ll take a stab at that. I think we need to reform energy data ASAP and have a global mandated standard of field by field production reports quarterly and the number of well bores. It sounds technical but that data would prove technically how close we are to be peak oil. Right now we just have a theological debate - a bunch of people saying I believe it’s a problem and a bunch of people saying I believe it’s not a problem. Once we prove it’s a problem then we have a global energy summit and we approach it the same way we created the United Nations. Hopefully a more productive organization. And we work out a new way to systematically redo how we use oil so that we don’t have wars and so forth. I actually think if we get a global standard in place it actually could end more peacefully than I think Jim is probably is afraid of, and I think if we don’t understand this Jim could prove to be an optimist.
KUNSTLER: Yeah I tend not to be idealistic about this. I tend to think we’re not going to have international tax and treaties and understandings that are going to make this easy for us. I think it will probably be an international scramble and contest. Although ultimately as this occurs I think the bigger nations will exhaust themselves as we are in the process of doing in Iraq - exhausting ourselves militarily and financially in running that war. We will probably withdraw into our own regions of the globe and the world will become a bigger place - the problems that we struggle with will be problems that we struggle with in our own regions and countries.
MITCHELL: Let’s get a call next from Andrea in Dallas. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. My question is you know how can I as an individual do something to either reduce my consumption or I mean I just kind of feel like a tiny little raindrop in a big giant ocean and I mean what can I do to help make….?
KUNSTLER: I mean you are not going to save the world Andrea. You know there are things that you can do and you would probably be better off thinking about the things that relate to your life, for example. People are going to have to make some better choices about where they are going to live in this country. Parts of the United States are not going to make it. You know Phoenix is not going to make it. It’s going to be substantially depopulated. In Las Vegas the excitement will be over. I happen to think that the Sunbelt as a whole is going to suffer in direct proportion to the amount that it benefited from the cheap oil fiesta of the last 40 years and may not be a great place to be. I think that the upper Midwest and the northeastern America will probably be somewhat more successful. Although all of America I think is going to be in trouble.
CALLER: How will Dallas fair?
KUNSTLER: Well I think Dallas has some liabilities. The Dallas Metroplex is at an extraordinarily overgrown hypertrophy. It’s going to be a tremendous liability because most of it will not be suited for retrofitting. A lot of it is simply going to lose its value and it’s usefulness. You also have a climate here which is a little bit tough to take in the hot part of the year and people actually have more trouble when it’s too hot than they do when it’s too cold. That’s the reason there were no really substantial cities in the southern United States until after World War II.
And so the kind of choice you have to start thinking about is what kind of vocation or profession can I choose that really has a future. You know….don’t choose public relations and marketing. Don’t choose some kind of abstract kind of job that depends on parasitizing some other activity.
CALLER: You mean like interior design? That’s what I do.
KUNSTLER: Exactly. I'm sorry. We’re probably going to have to follow much more hands on kinds of occupations and you know they are probably self-evident.
MITCHELL: Carpentry, for example.
KUNSTLER: Well we can't all be carpenters, but you know we can be carpenters. We can be paramedics. A lot of people are going to be working in agriculture. Agriculture is going to come back to the center of American life in a way that we couldn't imagine.
SIMMONS: One of our great role models of what we needed today is a Texas company - agriculture as whole foods. Their secret is they have a string of organic farms, Mom and Pop farming within thirty (30) miles of every store and they have avoided all of this food that comes from continents in a way that doesn't taste good.
MITCHELL: I like the fact that both of you think that trains should make a comeback.
SIMMONS: Well they have to. I think that would be a wonderful thing.
KUNSTLER: It is so amazing that we are not talking about this and it tells me - a registered Democrat - it tells me a lot about the cluelessness and brainlessness of the Democratic Party right now.
SIMMONS: You know unfortunately the green movement jumped on the idea of an 80 mile per gallon car that basically was probably impossible to actually create and would take thirty years, but that's their solution when what they should have been championing for is the return of trains and ports.
KUNSTER: And walkable communities.
SIMMONS: And walkable communities.
KUNSTLER: You know Matt, it even goes further than that because you know the unintended, tragic consequence of that project of creating the hyper car is that it only promotes the idea that we can continue to be a car dependent society. It's absolutely crazy.
SIMMONS: I'm a so anti CAFE standards, because I think once we past them a lot of people said well we've solved the problem. And unless we demolish the 220 million vehicles we have on the road today it hasn't even started to address the problems.
MITCHELL: Email from Paul who says "What will it take to get Americans to change their oil dependent lifestyle? Serious writers such as yourselves have been addressing this issue for decades yet very little has been or is being done."
KUNSTLER: I don't think that we have been addressing it for decades at all.
SIMMONS: Nor do I.
KUNSTLER: It's only really been in the last ten years since a group of eminent elder statesman geologists retired from the industry and started to speak their minds, once they were established in their pensions. And started to essentially tell the truth about the world oil supply situation. And you know oddly enough even while that conversation has been going on for ten years most of the American people don't want to believe it and our leaders do not want to believe it. You know there is a question about why our leadership is so bad. My own opinion about it is that the dirty secret of the American economy is that it's mostly about the creation of suburban sprawl. We don't have that much of a manufacturing economy anymore. And if you subtract all the suburban sprawl activities like the housing bubble, the real estate industry, the mortgage mills, all of the accessories of the housing bubble like the strip mall building and all that stuff. If you subtract that from our economy there is not a lot left besides fried chicken and open-heart surgery. And you know neither John Kerry or George Bush or any people at the highest level want get up and say Americans we cannot have a suburban sprawl economy anymore because all it represents is an investment in stuff that we are not going to be able to use in 5 or 10 years.
SIMMONS: I think it's probably even more insidious than that because for 50 years we've had a concept that the Middle East had unlimited amounts of oil. We actually worry more about if we can keep them from flooding the world with oil and destroying the rest of the world's oil industry because it's so cheap. Then we occasionally worried a little bit about geopolitics and we created an illusion that free and cheap energy would last forever. And so once you have that illusion - you know it wasn't quite as sinister as I think maybe Jim's comment would suggest - it was stupidity, and then compounding that are too many people who call themselves energy experts. I encounter these people all the time that basically talk about ingenuity and hard work and technology and creativity and how they will basically make energy usable forever at cheap prices.
KUNSTLER: Matt, this is Jim and I really am compelled to ask you this because people have asked me this repeatedly. Matt Simmons has on many occasions has consorted with and talked to the leaders and business and politics in America. You have advised George Bush at various times over the last 5 years and we really are puzzled about whether these guys get it or not.
SIMMONS: You know ironically I think they are starting to. I think part of the problem is that, yeah, that I speak out loudly when I'm in Washington and I speak out loudly when someone calls me, but so do lots of other people lobby to say we have no problems and I'm expert…..trust me we have no problems. It's very interesting though. There is a Congressman from Western Maryland Roscoe Bartlett, who was elected to Congress 14 years ago, who, from our website, got very concerned about peak oil. Congressman Bartlett - when he was elected to Congress 14 years ago was 66 years old - has his Ph.D. in Science. And he has basically spent a better part of an hour in the Oval Office with President Bush discussing peak oil. President Bush has asked the National Petroleum Council to gear up, roll up their sleeves and do a very serious analysis about how real is this issue. We are going to have to battle a lot of entrenched people that basically just…they don't believe it's an issue. And I don't think they have any axe to grind. They just basically don't think it's an issue because Adam Smith rules the oil business.
KUNSTLER: Well what you're saying you know is that the delusional thinking in our society is so broad and so wide and so deep that it runs into absolutely every level. And one of the ideas that you just expressed I think is at the center of it - the notion that we can replace our energy with technology. And you know I have to tell you I saw this live and in person when I went to the Google Headquarters in San Francisco. You know the greatest new tech company of the Internet era, right. And when an author comes to town they snatch the author and take them down to their headquarters to give a talk. They did that to me, so I went down and talked to them and I gave them my point of view that we were facing a big problem with energy, and one after another these guys got up and said "Dude we've got technology."
SIMMONS: I keep asking these guys "what technology?"
KUNSTLER: Well the deal is that they think that because they have been successful in moving pixels around screens that they can do anything. And what this really relates to Matt, is that we have developed an incredible sense of grandiosity about what our powers are and what we are able to do and that is tremendously dangerous for us.
SIMMONS: A growing number of people are finally starting to listen and get concerned and dig into the figures. It's why I'm so passionate about data reform, because if we have a globally mandated standard of data reform - and that can happen this year because all the major companies have the data we need - then you could take this argument out of a Church. Get it away from the theology of I believe this or I believe that and look at facts. And the facts are what I think scare people enough to basically do something before everything unravels.
MITCHELL: Here is a question from Gregory who is listening online in Memphis. This goes to your question about figuring out how much oil there is. He says "could you explain the water fraction of Saudi oil as an indicator of oil field exhaustion?"
SIMMONS: Yeah, what Saudi Arabia did when it was actually run by the Aramco companies was to prevent reservoir pressures from collapsing as oil was produced. They started a technique of injecting water while reservoir pressures were high in order to basically keep pressing the water up and keeping the pressures high. And today to pump about 8 million barrels a day of oil you would have to inject between 15 and 18 million barrels a day of water. So the water cut finally starts rising and as the water cut rises and the well water crowds of the oil. That's what finally causes depletion. So that's simply what it's all about.
MITCHELL: Let's get a call next from Gerald in Wichita Falls. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. I had a two-part question. First of all as I've passed by these refineries I have not passed one yet that didn't have a flair going up. If the price of natural gas is so high why don't they reuse that gas rather than just burn it off?
SIMMONS: I think what that's all about is basically pressure problems with the refineries - it's an emergency escape valve to keep a bigger problem from happening. They are not intentionally flaring the gas because they don't know what to do with it. So this way you don't always see flares. They are not a good sign, but it's not some sort of a casual plan. Now 60 years ago, ironically, you could fly over Texas in a plane and all of Texas was alive at night. We were flaring natural gas all over. First time I flew over the Middle East at night was in the early 70s, and you know when we got close to Bahrain where the plane was stopping, there looked like there was a large city - no it was just the gas flaring off the giant oil fields.
CALLER: Okay and the second part of my question, I remember back in the early 70s, it was about 1973. There were two gentlemen that were driving around the country that were explaining to people how they could get their cars to run about 200 per miles per gallon of gasoline and since then I've heard of several other people who had simple developments that could do that but yet they all seem to disappear. I've heard several that have died under mysterious circumstances and I was wondering is there anything really to that?
KUNSTER: I certainly get a lot of letters from people I regard as cranks saying that these things….but what it comes down to really is first of all it's sort of paranoid conspiracy theory and I'm allergic to conspiracy theories. It's another gloss on the old perpetual motion idea.
MITCHELL: Let's go to Ron in Dallas. Hi.
CALLER: Hi guys. I appreciate your time. Real quick question and then a follow-up. Number 1 - assuming that we put together all of the UN concept where the world's going to decide what it needs to do about oil, how to distribute it, how to handle it, how we all are going to get along together and everything just works beautifully, still ultimately some day it's going to come when we have no oil and I'm wondering what happens? Has anybody predicted….? What happens after that?
SIMMONS: Once we start weaning ourselves in a more efficient use we certainly buy ourselves time to try to figure out where the problems will be. Whether we can create some effective additional transportation and fuels. Natural gas is a lot harder to figure out and that's actually a worse problem in my opinion than oil. But I think that we don't have time to basically invent a lot of new things now. We have to attack significantly the consumption size. Another idea we have talked about is the railroads. Liberate organizations so as not to force people to all to come to work and work under one roof. Why do you have 1,000 people under one roof? So we can communicate. How many people even know each other? We have the tools today to allow people to work wherever they want, close to home or at home and be paid on productivity standards versus showing up from 9 to 5.
KUNSTLER: I would add something to that coming from a somewhat different angle. I think the 21st Century is going to be much more about staying where you are. And not so much about constant, ceaseless, incessant mobility which we have become accustomed to, and you know which we now assume is the norm. I would advise anybody thinking about the global oil predicament and it's ramifications to check all of their assumptions at the door about what life is going to be like in the future.
SIMMONS: But ironically, I don't think it has to come to an end. I think in fact if we make these changes it would be a better life and we would be more productive and have more free time. Ironically, we might look back…I think Tom Freeman's book The World is Flat is a fabulously interesting book to read but the world actually wasn't flat. It actually needed to get back round and get back to villages.
KUNSTLER: Yeah and I happen to think that Tom Freeman's thesis is quite incorrect. The idea that globalism is a permanent circumstance…
SIMMONS: Embedded in the concept was free, cheap…energy forever.
KUNSTLER: Yes and what he seemed to miss was the fact that globalism was a product of a very special set of circumstances at a very special time of….
SIMMONS: Globalism was actually sort of ironically the squaring of suburbia.
KUNSTLER: Uh-huh. I'm going to have to reflect on that.
MITCHELL: You guys can carry that on tonight. Let's get a call from April in Commerce. Hi.
CALLER: Hi. I was calling because someone referenced about electric cars and natural gas and how we’re short on natural gas and my call isn't in particular to electric cars so much as why haven’t we explored the option of more solar power and more electric like wind-power.
MITCHELL: Okay, we’ll ask, thanks. Matt, go ahead.
SIMMONS: Wind actually works. It’s commercial. For a long time it didn’t because gas prices were so cheap, but wind works fine now. Solar works, but it is just not very commercial. But the problem is neither one of them creates sustainable energy unless the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. So they’re just kind of emergency generators if you want to take home from that way. It turns out the environmentalists are out to hate wind just as much as they hated everything else. It was great when it was a concept.
KUNSTLER: But as you say the sun has to shine and wind doesn’t always blow.
SIMMONS: And all they create is electricity, and not very much of it.
KUNSTLER: Yeah you can’t run commercial airliners on solar or wind and you know there are a lot of problems associated with that. We certainly are going to use solar and wind. My guess is that we’re going to use them at a very local, perhaps a household level. It’s all a matter of scale. The other question associated with these things is, can you even have the hardware for solar and wind without an underlying oil economy? And I’m not sure that we can because they are complicated to manufacture and fabricate. They require exotic metals and energy and all sorts of questions like that.
MITCHELL: Let’s get a call from Jim in Dallas. Hi.
CALLER: Yes. I just had a quick comment that if people are really interested in learning how to live a self-sustaining life, they really should go back and look at how the hippies lived and look at the Whole Earth catalog and various sources like that on creatively living within your means and self-sustaining life, rather than second and third hand existence where other people are constantly doing for you.
SIMMONS: Well as a child of the 60s and as sort of a crypto hippy or ex-hippy it was sort of a good start but it wasn’t quite as simple as that you know. Hippies love their Volkswagens buses and hippies love their electric guitars. In fact, you know the whole phenomenon of powerful electronic music in a strange way is a perfect illustration of, you know, how we expressed ourselves at the very high point of the cheap oil fiesta. And I think that’s a good argument for going back and learning acoustic instruments.
MITCHELL: Well if want to get more of this tonight, the presentation is at 7:00 tonight at Highland Park United Methodist Church. It’s called the Unfolding Energy Crisis and its’ Impact on Development Patterns. There is a book signing at 6:00 p.m. followed by the program at 7:00 p.m. If you want more information about that you can call 214-768-2743 or go to our website. All the information is there. Jim Kunstler’s book is called The Long Emergency, Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century. Matthew Simmons’ book is Twilight in the Desert, the Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. Matthew, thank you very much.
SIMMONS: Thank you for having the program.
MITCHELL: Jim thanks.
KUNSTLER: A pleasure to be here.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
UPDATE (27 Aug): At last! We have the edited transcript. "Tar zans" has now been corrected to be "tar sands"
----
UPDATE (26 Aug) - fixed several spots in the transcriptions. Reader SP points out that the (inaudible) spots in the first caller's question about coal-to-gas are probably "Fischer-Tropsch" process. Reader DM points out that "nugget" should be "nougat."
-BA
Monday, August 28, 2006
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Floods, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Wildfires, Earthquakes ... Why We Don't Prepare
By AMANDA RIPLEY/ BOULDER
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1229102,00.html?cnn=yes
Posted Sunday, Aug. 20, 2006
Every July the country's leading disaster scientists and emergency planners gather in Boulder, Colo., for an invitation-only workshop. Picture 440 people obsessed with the tragic and the safe, people who get excited about earthquake "shake maps" and righteous about flood insurance. It's a spirited but wonky crowd that is growing more melancholy every year.
After 9/11, the people at the Boulder conference decried the nation's myopic focus on terrorism. They lamented the decline of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). And they warned to the point of cliché that a major hurricane would destroy New Orleans. It was a convention of prophets without any disciples.
This year, perhaps to make the farce explicit, the event organizers, from the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, introduced a parlor game. They placed a ballot box next to the water pitchers and asked everyone to vote: What will be the next mega-disaster? A tsunami, an earthquake, a pandemic flu? And where will it strike? It was an amusing diversion, although not a hard question for this lot.
Because the real challenge in the U.S. today is not predicting catastrophes. That we can do. The challenge that apparently lies beyond our grasp is to prepare for them. Dennis Mileti ran the Natural Hazards Center for 10 years, and is the country's leading expert on how to warn people so that they will pay attention. Today he is semiretired, but he comes back to the workshop each year to preach his gospel. This July, standing before the crowd in a Hawaiian shirt, Mileti was direct: "How many citizens must die? How many people do you need to see pounding through their roofs?" Like most people there, Mileti was heartbroken by Katrina, and he knows he'll be heartbroken again. "We know exactly--exactly--where the major disasters will occur," he told me later. "But individuals underperceive risk."
Historically, humans get serious about avoiding disasters only after one has just smacked them across the face. Well, then, by that logic, 2006 should have been a breakthrough year for rational behavior. With the memory of 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, still fresh in their minds, Americans watched Katrina, the most expensive disaster in U.S. history, on live TV. Anyone who didn't know it before should have learned that bad things can happen. And they are made much worse by our own lack of ambition--our willful blindness to risk as much as our reluctance to work together before everything goes to hell.
Granted, some amount of delusion is probably part of the human condition. In A.D. 63, Pompeii was seriously damaged by an earthquake, and the locals immediately went to work rebuilding, in the same spot--until they were buried altogether by a volcano 16 years later. But a review of the past year in disaster history suggests that modern Americans are particularly, mysteriously bad at protecting themselves from guaranteed threats. We know more than we ever did about the dangers we face. But it turns out that in times of crisis, our greatest enemy is rarely the storm, the quake or the surge itself. More often, it is ourselves.
•A Tour of the American Hazardscape
So what has happened in the year that followed the carnival of negligence on the Gulf Coast? In New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers has worked day and night--like men bailing a sinking ship, literally--to rebuild the bulwarks. They have got the flood walls and levees to where they were before Katrina, more or less. That's, er, not enough, we can now say with confidence. But it may be all that can be expected from one year of hustle.
Meanwhile, New Orleans officials have, to their credit, crafted a plan to use buses and trains to evacuate the sick, the disabled and the carless before the next big hurricane. The city estimates that 15,000 people will need a ride out. However, state officials have not yet determined where the trains and buses will take everyone. The negotiations with neighboring communities are ongoing and difficult.
More encouraging is the fact that Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and the state legislature managed to pass mandatory building codes this year. Most states already have such codes. Florida has had a strict one in place since 2001, and structures built under it tend to be the ones left standing after a 120 m.p.h. wind rips through. We know that for every dollar spent on that kind of basic mitigation, society saves an average of $4, according to a 2005 report by the nonprofit National Institute of Building Sciences. Then there's Mississippi, which, believe it or not, still has no statewide building code. Katrina destroyed 68,729 houses there. But this year a proposed mandatory code, opposed by many builders, real estate lobbyists and homeowners, ended up voluntary.
At the same time, Mississippi has helped coastal towns develop creative plans for rebuilding more intelligently. New Orleans, however, still has no central agency or person in charge of rebuilding. The city's planning office is down to nine people, from 24 before Katrina, and it really needs 65, according to the American Planning Association. And the imperative to rebuild the wetlands that protect against storms, much discussed in the weeks after Katrina and just as important as the levees, gets less attention every day. Worst of all, Mayor Ray Nagin and the city council are still not talking honestly about the fact that New Orleans will have to occupy a much smaller footprint in the future. It simply can't provide city services across its old boundaries, and its old boundaries cannot realistically be defended against a major storm anytime soon.
Here is the reality of New Orleans' risk profile, present and future: Donald Powell, the banker appointed by President George W. Bush to run the reconstruction effort, said last December, "The Federal Government is committed to building the best levee system known in the world." As of right now, the Corps plans to spend $6 billion to make sure that by 2010, the city will (probably) be flooded only once every 100 years. That's not close to the best in the world. The Netherlands has a system designed to protect populated areas against anything but a 1-in-10,000-years flood. Alternatively, the Corps could build 1-in-500-year protection for the city, but that would cost about $30 billion, says Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center.
It may be unfair, but this is the reality New Orleans leaders should be talking about. In a TIME poll of 1,000 Americans taken this month, 56% said they did not think all of New Orleans should be rebuilt if it might flood again. But in New Orleans, a city cut through with racial distrust and anger over the Corps' faulty levees, the same conversation is laced with suspicion. There is enough high ground in New Orleans for the city to relocate the entire pre-Katrina population more safely. The mostly African-American Lower Ninth Ward could still exist; it would just need to be smaller. But for many locals, rebuilding in the same doomed locations has become a point of pride, of dignity--just the opposite of what it should be. When a planning panel brought in by Nagin's Bring Back New Orleans Commission--comprising 50 specialists in urban and post-disaster planning--late last year proposed holding off on redeveloping places that had flooded repeatedly until residents had more information, the traumatized population recoiled as one. The city council quickly passed a defiant and suicidal resolution: "All neighborhoods [should] be included in the timely and simultaneous rebuilding of all New Orleans neighborhoods."
•A National Culture of Unpreparedness
In the 12 months since Katrina, the rest of the U.S. has not proved to be a quicker study than the Gulf Coast. There is still no federal law requiring state and local officials to plan for the evacuation of the sick, elderly, disabled or poor. But in the past few months, both houses of Congress triumphantly passed bills that require locals to plan for the evacuation of pets.
In June the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released an unprecedented analysis of state and urban emergency plans around the country, including assessments of evacuation plans and command structures. The report concluded that most "cannot be characterized as fully adequate, feasible, or acceptable." Among the worst performers: Dallas, New Orleans and Oklahoma City. (The best by far was the state of Florida.)
But it's not just bureaucrats who are unprepared for calamity. Regular people are even less likely to plan ahead. In this month's TIME poll, about half of those surveyed said they had personally experienced a natural disaster or public emergency. But only 16% said they were "very well prepared" for the next one. Of the rest, about half explained their lack of preparedness by saying they don't live in a high-risk area.
In fact, 91% of Americans live in places at a moderate-to-high risk of earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, high-wind damage or terrorism, according to an estimate calculated for TIME by the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina. But Americans have a tendency to be die-hard optimists, literally. It is part of what makes the country great--and vincible. "There are four stages of denial," says Eric Holdeman, director of emergency management for Seattle's King County, which faces a significant earthquake threat. "One is, it won't happen. Two is, if it does happen, it won't happen to me. Three: if it does happen to me, it won't be that bad. And four: if it happens to me and it's bad, there's nothing I can do to stop it anyway."
Here's one thing we know: a serious hurricane is due to strike New York City, just as one did in 1821 and 1938. Experts predict that such a storm would swamp lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and Jersey City, N.J., force the evacuation of more than 3 million people and cost more than twice as much as Katrina. An insurance-industry risk assessment ranked New York City as No. 2 on a list of the worst places for a hurricane to strike; Miami came in first. But in a June survey measuring the readiness of 4,200 insured homeowners living in hurricane zones, New Yorkers came in second to last. They had taken only about a third of eight basic steps to protect themselves from a major storm (such as getting flood insurance or putting together a disaster evacuation plan or kit).
The conventional wisdom after Katrina was that most of the people who failed to evacuate were too poor to do so. But a recent survey of more than 2,000 respondents in eight hurricane-prone states showed that other forces may also be at play. The survey, led by Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health, attempted to determine what, if anything, would pry people from their homes in the face of another Katrina. Overall, 33% said they would not leave or were not sure whether they would leave if an evacuation order was given. But it was homeowners, at 39%, who were particularly stubborn. Lack of funds or transportation does play a role for stay-behinds, but according to the poll, a greater consideration is a vague belief that their home is built well enough to survive a storm--a justification offered by a whopping 68%.
People cherry-pick the lessons of Katrina to avoid taking action. Fifty-four percent of those who say they wouldn't evacuate are worried that the roads would be too crowded, and 67% believe shelters would be dangerous. That's understandable, unfortunately. One of the most damaging legacies of Katrina might be the TV images of looting and the graphic rumors of violence that crystallized our belief that we turn into savages in a disaster--a notion that is demonstrably untrue; after most disasters, including Katrina, the crime rate goes down. Ironically, 66% of those surveyed were also confident that if they stayed at home, they would eventually be rescued--a faith hardly justified by the Katrina experience. Ours is a strange culture of irrational distrust--buoyed by irrational optimism.
Heat waves bring out the same kind of self-delusion. Scott Sheridan, professor of geography at Kent State University, has studied heat-wave behavior--focusing particularly on seniors, who are at special risk in hot weather--in Philadelphia; Phoenix, Ariz.; Toronto; and Dayton, Ohio. He found that less than half of people 65 and older abide by heat-emergency recommendations like drinking lots of water. Reason: they don't consider themselves seniors. "Heat doesn't bother me much, but I worry about my neighbors," said an older respondent.
That optimism helps explain why construction along the Gulf Coast of Mexico and both coasts of Florida continues to boom, even though hurricane season is an annual affair. Keep in mind that dense coastal construction is the main reason storms are causing more and more damage every year in the U.S. More than 50% of Americans live in coastal areas, which means heavy weather increasingly runs into people and property. Also, the elimination of wetlands to make room for development means there's less and less of a buffer zone to absorb storm surges and mitigate damage. So our biggest problem is not the weather but our romantic urge to live near water.
•Trickle-Down Apathy
When Americans cannot be trusted to save themselves, the government does it for them--at least that's the story of mandatory car insurance, seat-belt laws and smoking bans. But when it comes to preventing disasters, the rules are different. The message, says Paul Farmer, executive director of the American Planning Association, is consistent: "We will help you build where you shouldn't, we'll rescue you when things go wrong, and then we'll help you rebuild again in the same place."
In New Orleans, for example, many people in positions of power knew full well that the entire city should not be rebuilt after Katrina. They were quietly counting on the Federal Government to play the heavy. FEMA was expected to release new building rules for the first time since 1984. The rules would determine which areas and structures the Federal Government would insure against floods. Everything else would be lost, and the feds would be the perfect scapegoats. In April FEMA released its new guidelines. But instead of banning development in areas that are extremely likely to flood again, FEMA blinked. The major new requirement was that some houses be built 3 ft. off the ground--even though Katrina flooded up to 20 ft. in some neighborhoods.
Nationwide, only 20% of American homes at risk for floods are covered by flood insurance. Private insurers largely refuse to offer it because floods are such a sure thing. In certain flood-prone areas, the Federal Government requires people to buy policies from the government's National Flood Insurance Program to get a mortgage loan. But the program has never worked even remotely as insurance should. It has never priced people out of living in insanely risky areas. Instead, too few places are included in the must-insure category, and premiums are kept artificially low. This year, despite brave talk about finally fixing the program, Congress caved in to short-sighted constituents and real estate interests and failed to make major changes.
It may not be reassuring to hear that America's handicaps in this area are as old as the country itself. A federal system like ours is not built to plan for--or respond to--massive disasters, concedes George Foresman, the country's new Under Secretary for Preparedness. "Everything we're trying to do goes counter to how the Founding Fathers designed the system," he says, sitting in his office on the DHS campus in Washington, surrounded by pie charts documenting what needs fixing. Unlike other, more centralized governments, ours cannot easily force states or companies to act. And when the feds try to demand changes anyway, state and local officials bristle at the interference. Like teenagers, we resent paternalism--until we're in trouble. Then we expect to be taken care of.
Before he was appointed by President Bush to the new, post-Katrina preparedness job, Foresman spent more than 22 years in emergency-management in Virginia. His hiring in December was one of the few bright spots of the past 12 months, say veteran emergency planners who know him. He understands the importance of preparing for all kinds of disasters, not just terrorist attacks. But he does not soft-sell the challenge ahead. "Frankly, the American public doesn't do well with being told what not to do," he says. With reason: before James Lee Witt became FEMA director under President Bill Clinton, he was county judge in Yell County, Ark. In 1983 he made the mistake of trying to get the county to participate in the national flood-insurance program. "I almost got cremated by farmers. [They were] saying, 'Ain't no way in hell I'm going to let the Federal Government tell me where I can build a barn,'" he says.
If the feds want something to change, they have to suggest it--nicely. After the 1993 floods in the Midwest, the Federal Government, under Witt's direction, managed to do something rare: it offered to buy out flood-prone properties to prevent repeat disasters. Several communities accepted, and the government, in partnership with the state, bought back 25,000 properties. The thousands of acres left behind were converted into wetlands, which act like a sponge in storms. In 1995 the floods came again. "And guess what?" says Witt. "We never spent one dime on responding. Nobody lost everything they worked for."
Today relations between the different levels of government are at a low point. The natural tensions of a federal system have been exacerbated by an Administration that distrusts government even more than the average voter does. President Bush did not want to establish DHS to begin with. When he was pressured to do it anyway, he created a department weak in leadership, autonomy and funding.
So although DHS has received an unprecedented amount of money for emergency management, it's a fraction of what most security experts think is necessary. And most of the money has gone toward counterterrorism. While some counterterrorism equipment can be useful in other kinds of disasters, the money cannot be used to pay the salaries of state and local employees. That would violate an ideological position against making the Federal Government bigger (even though the Federal Government has grown under the Bush Administration through other outlays, like military and education spending). So $18 billion has gone out to states and cities, but most of it has been spent on shiny equipment like haz-mat suits and X-ray machines--even in cities that desperately need police and firefighters instead. Only 20% has gone to planning and training, which Foresman himself admits is not enough.
At the close of the Boulder workshop this year, Kathleen Tierney, head of the Natural Hazards Center, stood up to say, "We as human societies have yet to understand ... that nature doesn't care. And for that reason, we must care." She was quoting herself intentionally. She had said the same thing the year before, seven weeks before Katrina. As she spoke, her voice rose: "Here we stand one year later. Where is the political will to protect lives and property?"
Then Tierney announced the hotly anticipated results of the Next Big One contest. There were some outliers. One person predicted that a gamma-ray flare would kill 90% of the earth's species. That is what is known in the disaster community as a hilarious joke. But the winner, with 32% of the votes, was once again a hurricane. After all, eight of the 10 costliest disasters in U.S. history have been hurricanes. This time, most of the hurricane voters predicted that the storm would devastate the East Coast, including New York City. History has left us all the clues we need. Now we wait for the heartbreak.
With reporting by With reporting by Jeffrey Kluger/New York
By AMANDA RIPLEY/ BOULDER
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1229102,00.html?cnn=yes
Posted Sunday, Aug. 20, 2006
Every July the country's leading disaster scientists and emergency planners gather in Boulder, Colo., for an invitation-only workshop. Picture 440 people obsessed with the tragic and the safe, people who get excited about earthquake "shake maps" and righteous about flood insurance. It's a spirited but wonky crowd that is growing more melancholy every year.
After 9/11, the people at the Boulder conference decried the nation's myopic focus on terrorism. They lamented the decline of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). And they warned to the point of cliché that a major hurricane would destroy New Orleans. It was a convention of prophets without any disciples.
This year, perhaps to make the farce explicit, the event organizers, from the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, introduced a parlor game. They placed a ballot box next to the water pitchers and asked everyone to vote: What will be the next mega-disaster? A tsunami, an earthquake, a pandemic flu? And where will it strike? It was an amusing diversion, although not a hard question for this lot.
Because the real challenge in the U.S. today is not predicting catastrophes. That we can do. The challenge that apparently lies beyond our grasp is to prepare for them. Dennis Mileti ran the Natural Hazards Center for 10 years, and is the country's leading expert on how to warn people so that they will pay attention. Today he is semiretired, but he comes back to the workshop each year to preach his gospel. This July, standing before the crowd in a Hawaiian shirt, Mileti was direct: "How many citizens must die? How many people do you need to see pounding through their roofs?" Like most people there, Mileti was heartbroken by Katrina, and he knows he'll be heartbroken again. "We know exactly--exactly--where the major disasters will occur," he told me later. "But individuals underperceive risk."
Historically, humans get serious about avoiding disasters only after one has just smacked them across the face. Well, then, by that logic, 2006 should have been a breakthrough year for rational behavior. With the memory of 9/11, the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, still fresh in their minds, Americans watched Katrina, the most expensive disaster in U.S. history, on live TV. Anyone who didn't know it before should have learned that bad things can happen. And they are made much worse by our own lack of ambition--our willful blindness to risk as much as our reluctance to work together before everything goes to hell.
Granted, some amount of delusion is probably part of the human condition. In A.D. 63, Pompeii was seriously damaged by an earthquake, and the locals immediately went to work rebuilding, in the same spot--until they were buried altogether by a volcano 16 years later. But a review of the past year in disaster history suggests that modern Americans are particularly, mysteriously bad at protecting themselves from guaranteed threats. We know more than we ever did about the dangers we face. But it turns out that in times of crisis, our greatest enemy is rarely the storm, the quake or the surge itself. More often, it is ourselves.
•A Tour of the American Hazardscape
So what has happened in the year that followed the carnival of negligence on the Gulf Coast? In New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers has worked day and night--like men bailing a sinking ship, literally--to rebuild the bulwarks. They have got the flood walls and levees to where they were before Katrina, more or less. That's, er, not enough, we can now say with confidence. But it may be all that can be expected from one year of hustle.
Meanwhile, New Orleans officials have, to their credit, crafted a plan to use buses and trains to evacuate the sick, the disabled and the carless before the next big hurricane. The city estimates that 15,000 people will need a ride out. However, state officials have not yet determined where the trains and buses will take everyone. The negotiations with neighboring communities are ongoing and difficult.
More encouraging is the fact that Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco and the state legislature managed to pass mandatory building codes this year. Most states already have such codes. Florida has had a strict one in place since 2001, and structures built under it tend to be the ones left standing after a 120 m.p.h. wind rips through. We know that for every dollar spent on that kind of basic mitigation, society saves an average of $4, according to a 2005 report by the nonprofit National Institute of Building Sciences. Then there's Mississippi, which, believe it or not, still has no statewide building code. Katrina destroyed 68,729 houses there. But this year a proposed mandatory code, opposed by many builders, real estate lobbyists and homeowners, ended up voluntary.
At the same time, Mississippi has helped coastal towns develop creative plans for rebuilding more intelligently. New Orleans, however, still has no central agency or person in charge of rebuilding. The city's planning office is down to nine people, from 24 before Katrina, and it really needs 65, according to the American Planning Association. And the imperative to rebuild the wetlands that protect against storms, much discussed in the weeks after Katrina and just as important as the levees, gets less attention every day. Worst of all, Mayor Ray Nagin and the city council are still not talking honestly about the fact that New Orleans will have to occupy a much smaller footprint in the future. It simply can't provide city services across its old boundaries, and its old boundaries cannot realistically be defended against a major storm anytime soon.
Here is the reality of New Orleans' risk profile, present and future: Donald Powell, the banker appointed by President George W. Bush to run the reconstruction effort, said last December, "The Federal Government is committed to building the best levee system known in the world." As of right now, the Corps plans to spend $6 billion to make sure that by 2010, the city will (probably) be flooded only once every 100 years. That's not close to the best in the world. The Netherlands has a system designed to protect populated areas against anything but a 1-in-10,000-years flood. Alternatively, the Corps could build 1-in-500-year protection for the city, but that would cost about $30 billion, says Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center.
It may be unfair, but this is the reality New Orleans leaders should be talking about. In a TIME poll of 1,000 Americans taken this month, 56% said they did not think all of New Orleans should be rebuilt if it might flood again. But in New Orleans, a city cut through with racial distrust and anger over the Corps' faulty levees, the same conversation is laced with suspicion. There is enough high ground in New Orleans for the city to relocate the entire pre-Katrina population more safely. The mostly African-American Lower Ninth Ward could still exist; it would just need to be smaller. But for many locals, rebuilding in the same doomed locations has become a point of pride, of dignity--just the opposite of what it should be. When a planning panel brought in by Nagin's Bring Back New Orleans Commission--comprising 50 specialists in urban and post-disaster planning--late last year proposed holding off on redeveloping places that had flooded repeatedly until residents had more information, the traumatized population recoiled as one. The city council quickly passed a defiant and suicidal resolution: "All neighborhoods [should] be included in the timely and simultaneous rebuilding of all New Orleans neighborhoods."
•A National Culture of Unpreparedness
In the 12 months since Katrina, the rest of the U.S. has not proved to be a quicker study than the Gulf Coast. There is still no federal law requiring state and local officials to plan for the evacuation of the sick, elderly, disabled or poor. But in the past few months, both houses of Congress triumphantly passed bills that require locals to plan for the evacuation of pets.
In June the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released an unprecedented analysis of state and urban emergency plans around the country, including assessments of evacuation plans and command structures. The report concluded that most "cannot be characterized as fully adequate, feasible, or acceptable." Among the worst performers: Dallas, New Orleans and Oklahoma City. (The best by far was the state of Florida.)
But it's not just bureaucrats who are unprepared for calamity. Regular people are even less likely to plan ahead. In this month's TIME poll, about half of those surveyed said they had personally experienced a natural disaster or public emergency. But only 16% said they were "very well prepared" for the next one. Of the rest, about half explained their lack of preparedness by saying they don't live in a high-risk area.
In fact, 91% of Americans live in places at a moderate-to-high risk of earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, high-wind damage or terrorism, according to an estimate calculated for TIME by the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina. But Americans have a tendency to be die-hard optimists, literally. It is part of what makes the country great--and vincible. "There are four stages of denial," says Eric Holdeman, director of emergency management for Seattle's King County, which faces a significant earthquake threat. "One is, it won't happen. Two is, if it does happen, it won't happen to me. Three: if it does happen to me, it won't be that bad. And four: if it happens to me and it's bad, there's nothing I can do to stop it anyway."
Here's one thing we know: a serious hurricane is due to strike New York City, just as one did in 1821 and 1938. Experts predict that such a storm would swamp lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and Jersey City, N.J., force the evacuation of more than 3 million people and cost more than twice as much as Katrina. An insurance-industry risk assessment ranked New York City as No. 2 on a list of the worst places for a hurricane to strike; Miami came in first. But in a June survey measuring the readiness of 4,200 insured homeowners living in hurricane zones, New Yorkers came in second to last. They had taken only about a third of eight basic steps to protect themselves from a major storm (such as getting flood insurance or putting together a disaster evacuation plan or kit).
The conventional wisdom after Katrina was that most of the people who failed to evacuate were too poor to do so. But a recent survey of more than 2,000 respondents in eight hurricane-prone states showed that other forces may also be at play. The survey, led by Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health, attempted to determine what, if anything, would pry people from their homes in the face of another Katrina. Overall, 33% said they would not leave or were not sure whether they would leave if an evacuation order was given. But it was homeowners, at 39%, who were particularly stubborn. Lack of funds or transportation does play a role for stay-behinds, but according to the poll, a greater consideration is a vague belief that their home is built well enough to survive a storm--a justification offered by a whopping 68%.
People cherry-pick the lessons of Katrina to avoid taking action. Fifty-four percent of those who say they wouldn't evacuate are worried that the roads would be too crowded, and 67% believe shelters would be dangerous. That's understandable, unfortunately. One of the most damaging legacies of Katrina might be the TV images of looting and the graphic rumors of violence that crystallized our belief that we turn into savages in a disaster--a notion that is demonstrably untrue; after most disasters, including Katrina, the crime rate goes down. Ironically, 66% of those surveyed were also confident that if they stayed at home, they would eventually be rescued--a faith hardly justified by the Katrina experience. Ours is a strange culture of irrational distrust--buoyed by irrational optimism.
Heat waves bring out the same kind of self-delusion. Scott Sheridan, professor of geography at Kent State University, has studied heat-wave behavior--focusing particularly on seniors, who are at special risk in hot weather--in Philadelphia; Phoenix, Ariz.; Toronto; and Dayton, Ohio. He found that less than half of people 65 and older abide by heat-emergency recommendations like drinking lots of water. Reason: they don't consider themselves seniors. "Heat doesn't bother me much, but I worry about my neighbors," said an older respondent.
That optimism helps explain why construction along the Gulf Coast of Mexico and both coasts of Florida continues to boom, even though hurricane season is an annual affair. Keep in mind that dense coastal construction is the main reason storms are causing more and more damage every year in the U.S. More than 50% of Americans live in coastal areas, which means heavy weather increasingly runs into people and property. Also, the elimination of wetlands to make room for development means there's less and less of a buffer zone to absorb storm surges and mitigate damage. So our biggest problem is not the weather but our romantic urge to live near water.
•Trickle-Down Apathy
When Americans cannot be trusted to save themselves, the government does it for them--at least that's the story of mandatory car insurance, seat-belt laws and smoking bans. But when it comes to preventing disasters, the rules are different. The message, says Paul Farmer, executive director of the American Planning Association, is consistent: "We will help you build where you shouldn't, we'll rescue you when things go wrong, and then we'll help you rebuild again in the same place."
In New Orleans, for example, many people in positions of power knew full well that the entire city should not be rebuilt after Katrina. They were quietly counting on the Federal Government to play the heavy. FEMA was expected to release new building rules for the first time since 1984. The rules would determine which areas and structures the Federal Government would insure against floods. Everything else would be lost, and the feds would be the perfect scapegoats. In April FEMA released its new guidelines. But instead of banning development in areas that are extremely likely to flood again, FEMA blinked. The major new requirement was that some houses be built 3 ft. off the ground--even though Katrina flooded up to 20 ft. in some neighborhoods.
Nationwide, only 20% of American homes at risk for floods are covered by flood insurance. Private insurers largely refuse to offer it because floods are such a sure thing. In certain flood-prone areas, the Federal Government requires people to buy policies from the government's National Flood Insurance Program to get a mortgage loan. But the program has never worked even remotely as insurance should. It has never priced people out of living in insanely risky areas. Instead, too few places are included in the must-insure category, and premiums are kept artificially low. This year, despite brave talk about finally fixing the program, Congress caved in to short-sighted constituents and real estate interests and failed to make major changes.
It may not be reassuring to hear that America's handicaps in this area are as old as the country itself. A federal system like ours is not built to plan for--or respond to--massive disasters, concedes George Foresman, the country's new Under Secretary for Preparedness. "Everything we're trying to do goes counter to how the Founding Fathers designed the system," he says, sitting in his office on the DHS campus in Washington, surrounded by pie charts documenting what needs fixing. Unlike other, more centralized governments, ours cannot easily force states or companies to act. And when the feds try to demand changes anyway, state and local officials bristle at the interference. Like teenagers, we resent paternalism--until we're in trouble. Then we expect to be taken care of.
Before he was appointed by President Bush to the new, post-Katrina preparedness job, Foresman spent more than 22 years in emergency-management in Virginia. His hiring in December was one of the few bright spots of the past 12 months, say veteran emergency planners who know him. He understands the importance of preparing for all kinds of disasters, not just terrorist attacks. But he does not soft-sell the challenge ahead. "Frankly, the American public doesn't do well with being told what not to do," he says. With reason: before James Lee Witt became FEMA director under President Bill Clinton, he was county judge in Yell County, Ark. In 1983 he made the mistake of trying to get the county to participate in the national flood-insurance program. "I almost got cremated by farmers. [They were] saying, 'Ain't no way in hell I'm going to let the Federal Government tell me where I can build a barn,'" he says.
If the feds want something to change, they have to suggest it--nicely. After the 1993 floods in the Midwest, the Federal Government, under Witt's direction, managed to do something rare: it offered to buy out flood-prone properties to prevent repeat disasters. Several communities accepted, and the government, in partnership with the state, bought back 25,000 properties. The thousands of acres left behind were converted into wetlands, which act like a sponge in storms. In 1995 the floods came again. "And guess what?" says Witt. "We never spent one dime on responding. Nobody lost everything they worked for."
Today relations between the different levels of government are at a low point. The natural tensions of a federal system have been exacerbated by an Administration that distrusts government even more than the average voter does. President Bush did not want to establish DHS to begin with. When he was pressured to do it anyway, he created a department weak in leadership, autonomy and funding.
So although DHS has received an unprecedented amount of money for emergency management, it's a fraction of what most security experts think is necessary. And most of the money has gone toward counterterrorism. While some counterterrorism equipment can be useful in other kinds of disasters, the money cannot be used to pay the salaries of state and local employees. That would violate an ideological position against making the Federal Government bigger (even though the Federal Government has grown under the Bush Administration through other outlays, like military and education spending). So $18 billion has gone out to states and cities, but most of it has been spent on shiny equipment like haz-mat suits and X-ray machines--even in cities that desperately need police and firefighters instead. Only 20% has gone to planning and training, which Foresman himself admits is not enough.
At the close of the Boulder workshop this year, Kathleen Tierney, head of the Natural Hazards Center, stood up to say, "We as human societies have yet to understand ... that nature doesn't care. And for that reason, we must care." She was quoting herself intentionally. She had said the same thing the year before, seven weeks before Katrina. As she spoke, her voice rose: "Here we stand one year later. Where is the political will to protect lives and property?"
Then Tierney announced the hotly anticipated results of the Next Big One contest. There were some outliers. One person predicted that a gamma-ray flare would kill 90% of the earth's species. That is what is known in the disaster community as a hilarious joke. But the winner, with 32% of the votes, was once again a hurricane. After all, eight of the 10 costliest disasters in U.S. history have been hurricanes. This time, most of the hurricane voters predicted that the storm would devastate the East Coast, including New York City. History has left us all the clues we need. Now we wait for the heartbreak.
With reporting by With reporting by Jeffrey Kluger/New York
Friday, August 11, 2006
BAGGY-PANTS THUGGERY & HIP-HOP BURLESQUE:
CLOTHING AS SEXUAL POLITICS IN AMERICA
By Kevin Esser
http://home.wanadoo.nl/ipce/library_two/files/esser_baggy.htm
Do gay guys wear tight pants so other guys can check out their butts?
That’s what some teenaged boy wanted to know in a 1996 film documentary dealing with gay issues in the classroom. How else could he think? What else could he wonder given today’s dress code of Hetero Correctness? His question has been answered by many dismal years of American males in oversized, baggy clothing—men and boys hidden from one another, hidden from themselves, hidden from the dangerous reality of their own bodies.
An otherwise sensible gentleman confesses to watching these boys in their baggy clownshirts and clownpants, to finding them actually attractive. Room enough, he jokes, to climb in there with them and play around. Nothing but a laugh to him, this situation, nothing to contemplate beyond the boys themselves and the disheveled, butch excitement he finds in them. Of course, boys in Nazi scouting regalia might also have seemed cute as teddy bears—those sporty shorts, those jaunty neckerchiefs—but no one should be so oblivious as to ignore the brutish agenda behind the attire. Not then, not now.
When did this start?
How did this stylized disfigurement of an entire gender become the norm? It’s a discussion that begs to be illustrated: here a boy in “shorts” that reach comically to his ankles; here another in pants with a crotch that sags to his knees; here yet another dressed for the beach, a foolish spectacle in swim trunks that might have come from Bozo’s closet. No bare thighs or knees. No evidence of hips or buttocks. Nothing now but a sad-sack army of anonymous males, shapeless and identical, shorn and shrouded like so many ritual mourners, like prisoners of war, like refugees from some battle fought and lost.
To understand what’s happening now, go back to a time when that battle, that war, seemed to have been fought and won. Go back, let’s say, thirty years. Startling now to see movies or photos from those days—from the Sixties, the Seventies, right through the mid-Eighties.
Boys in mini cut-offs and bare-tummy T-shirts, in mesh tanktops and knee socks and the scantiest of gym shorts, the clingiest of sweatshorts, often with no underwear, more provocative that way, nothing to confine the bulge in front or the cheeks in back. Full and frank display. Startling now, yes, but not back then. Young males were expected to look that way, just a natural aspect of their whole cocky, rude, show-off persona. But what explains that nonchalant acceptance? What explains those fleeting years of erotic flamboyance? And what happened to bring doomsday to Eden?
It’s useful to remember, as historical context, that males have always determined and governed the rules of modesty—both for women and for themselves. Men have always decided, in this and every other culture, how the body will be displayed, and where, and to what effect.
A hundred years ago, even in America, the unclothed male form was not an unusual sight, regardless of what we might think today about Victorian prudery or Edwardian stuffiness. Boxers of that era commonly fought in miniscule trunks that left the buttocks mostly bare.
(Take another look at the George Bellows painting, Stag at Sharkey’s. Or ponder the image of “Gentleman Jim” Corbett nearly naked in his 1897 bout versus Robert Fitzsimmons.)
Young boys, even teenagers, routinely swam nude in public—given the evidence of archival films and photographs—no shock at all to see them skinny-dipping from city docks and piers or splashing naked in the municipal fountains of crowded city squares, in full view of urban passers-by and onlookers. Swimmers at male-only YMCA pools and school pools and community pools were expected, often obliged, to swim nude.
The culture was guided by the Greco-Roman ethos of the gymnasium (a word that means, don’t forget, to exercise naked), masculine physicality unblinkingly accepted in all its uncouth dynamism of muscle and gristle and sweat. Only much later in the century did this casual acceptance give way to a more suburban, middle-class code of modesty that we’ve come to associate with the 1950s and with Eisenhower-era conservatism. The male form gradually disappeared in this country as an object of public spectacle. Years would pass before new sociocultural developments spawned its return.
The so-called Sexual Revolution
was this momentous rebirthing force. Boys and girls both were suddenly happy and eager to shed their conservative drag, to exhibit themselves, to flaunt themselves more and more boldly, more and more immodestly. Woodstock Nation. The return to nature. Back to the Garden.
Hell, why not go all the way and strip bare? Remember streaking? Largely, no surprise, it was a male phenomenon—ritualized exhibitionism, flashing as a fad, what you’d expect from boys with all inhibitions erased.
Hair and Oh! Calcutta! brought this frolic of youthful nudity to the stage. At the movies, Franco Zeffirelli created a Romeo and Juliet in 1968 that epitomized this Age of Aquarius sensuality, his young men and boys voluptuous in their hose and codpieces, his puppyish teenaged Romeo shown frankly and delectably naked.
For roughly twenty years, this male riot of bodily display would equal or surpass anything enjoyed by females, boys often more skimpily and seductively attired than girls, packs of them prowling the malls and the arcades like half-naked catamites, denim shorts so tight they wouldn’t zip.
And yet, call it a paradox,
this lusty romp thrived in a milieu of sexual naiveté, the revelers themselves all gleefully anarchic in a juvenile sort of way, like children first discovering their own bodies, fascinated and giggly and eager for new sensation..
The original Flower Child exuberance gave way, in the Seventies, to the feral excess of punk and glam, a carnival of hedonism and sexual ambivalence featuring the likes of Queen, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie. Long hair on girls, long hair on boys. Short-shorts on girls, short-shorts on boys. The teen idols from these years—tender boytoys such as Davy Jones, David Cassidy and his brother Shaun, Leif Garrett, Tony DeFranco—were the perfect avatars of this new androgyny.
There was a unisex worship of the id, a unisex celebration of the Body Erotic that reached its heyday with disco, with Village People and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, with macho men doing the milkshake and having fun at the YMCA. Suddenly, remarkably, gay and mainstream were one and the same, no segregation, no distinction between queer and straight, an entire culture cheerfully and unwittingly homo-eroticized. The hetero aesthetic and the homo aesthetic had become indistinguishable among young males—in matters of music, hairstyles, and, yes, clothing—no thought or care given beyond looking good and feeling good.
This twenty-year idyll of naïve flamboyance burned brightest at the end. Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Prince, Wham!, Menudo—the biggest male pop stars of this fin de disco era all were icons of sumptuous androgyny. Break-dancing provided the fiercely libidinous backdrop with its brash accoutrements of chains and tight leather, of rising-sun muscle shirts and samurai headbands. Francis Ford Coppola, with his 1983 film of The Outsiders, contributed a melodrama of sultry teen fellowship that gave us characters named Johnny and Sodapop and Ponyboy swooning prettily in one another’s arms. On the radio, a song called Let’s Hear It For The Boy became the fitting anthem for this gaudy and rambunctious eve of destruction.
Then, as gradually at first as someone waking from contented dreams, this culture of androgyny and lush playfulness began its sad metamorphosis.
Two powerful sociopolitical forces were already lumbering towards collision by this time, namely the mid-Eighties, with young males trapped between as unfortunate casualties.
Repressive demagoguery from the Right,
clamorous identity and advocacy politics from the Left.
One without the other would have been the hammer without the anvil; together, these counterforces met head-on and obliterated twenty years of high-spirited masculine display, twenty years of young men and boys flaunting the beauty and sexiness of their own bodies. That type of “gay” behavior, as it now seemed, became anathema, intolerable.
It’s tidy and convenient and largely accurate to pinpoint 1980
as the fateful turning point, the year of Reagan’s election and the political ascendancy of his right-wing coalition—even though the full seismic shocks went unfelt for several more years. These dour neo-Puritan champions of so-called “family values” quickly took up arms against a sea of perceived indecencies.
The White House itself led this crusade, Reagan’s Attorney General Ed Meese issuing his report on pornography in 1986. Congress passed its own draconian Child Protection Act of 1984 as a sop to the psycho-sexual hysteria being generated by the Christian Right and by the new industry of abuse and victimization that blossomed at this time. Regressive hypnotherapy and its windfall of recovered memories, later discredited, fueled this boom industry. Police and prosecutors throughout the country, with gleeful media complicity, were suddenly awash in cases of alleged pedophile rings and ritual Satanic abuse, the vast majority of which proved to be unfounded and were never even brought to trial. Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly and her Eagle Forum—these and other demagogues had moved from the sidelines to the establishment center, bringing their potent arsenals of hate-mongering and humorless conformity with them.
At this same time,
charging from the opposite ideological direction, came the aggressive activism and rhetoric of Gay Identity Politics. This is not to say that gay activism was an invention of the 1980s. Homosexuals had been politically strident for many years, the Stonewall Riot of 1969 just the most notable event in a tumultuous history. But that earlier activism had been a desperate struggle for basic civil liberties, for freedom from police harassment, for the right to assemble, to fraternize, to exist. This new radicalism was something altogether different, nothing less than a full-scale assault on the American mainstream in order to establish, forcefully and permanently, a distinct gay identity and a powerful political presence. The struggle for basic rights and minimal tolerance had now given way to a demand for total recognition and total acceptance.
The catastrophe of AIDS,
more than anything else, inspired the zealotry of this movement. By 1982, the health crisis was already being featured in Time and Newsweek and other mainstream media outlets. The sensuous frivolity of disco and its early-Eighties denouement was now being replaced by a type of left-wing gay activism just as grim and humorless as its right-wing counterpart. Understandable, given the deadly stakes, no time or energy to waste for those engaged in this ghastly struggle for survival. Rock Hudson became the AIDS poster boy in 1985, bringing unprecedented publicity while also personalizing the murky gay identity for hetero America. ACT UP and Queer Nation, among others, further fanned the flames of publicity and national awareness. More and more, there was this very real prominence of homosexuality as an “alternative lifestyle” and a distinct subculture or other-culture apart from the hetero mainstream. That twenty-year idyll of naïve and flamboyant androgyny had truly and thoroughly ended.
So what exactly took its place? What was happening by the late Eighties? By 1990?
The onslaught of right-wing orthodoxy and its conformist agenda had proven itself ruthlessly effective. Intergenerational sex had become demonized in new and sensational ways. The age of consent was being revised and raised nationwide, state by state, to redefine the very nature of childhood. Anti-pornography hysteria and litigation (with the wrongheaded support of radical feminists and lesbians) continued to thrive, from Cincinnati art galleries to the Sears catalog, a chilling wave of censorship and intimidation soon exported by America Prime to its far-flung imperium (Western Europe, the Philippines, Thailand, etc.). Robert Mapplethorpe’s and Sally Mann’s photographs, Michelangelo’s David, Isabelle Holland’s The Man Without A Face—all were attacked as obscene, as perverted, as inimical to Americans and Christians everywhere. A film such as Popi, rated “G” upon its original release in 1969 despite several scenes of pubescent male nudity, now would have met the legal definition of obscenity in most American communities. The giant retailers, led by Sears and JCPenney and Montgomery Ward, even stopped using live models in their ads for boys’ underwear, the national psyche attuned by this time to seeing scantily-clad young males solely in terms of homo-eroticism and kiddie porn.
The gay-rights movement itself shared responsibility for this upheaval of sexual fear and loathing. Its AIDS-fueled militancy had been successful in gaining a token seat at the noisy multicultural table, but the response from hetero America was something close to panic. Like intoxicated libertines suddenly waking in some stranger’s bed, heterosexual males suffered a traumatic morning-after of revulsion and self-disgust, frantic to distance themselves from both the literal and figurative contagion of homosexuality. Gay Identity Politics had met head-on with the inevitable “equal and opposite reaction” of Hetero Identity Politics. Left-wing zealotry had collided with right-wing zealotry to create a profound cultural schism, forcing the public to identify with one sexual camp or the other—gay and proud over here, straight and proud over there.
Once begun, this sexual divergence became an unstoppable duel of force/counterforce. Gay Pride Parades and Christian counter-rallies competed on the evening news. We’re here and we’re queer! God hates fags!
For the first time, certain images and iconography were being openly identified and celebrated as gay. For the first time, boldly distinctive ways of looking and dressing gay were being publicized for the whole world to see. Those same ways of looking and dressing which an entire culture had joyfully shared for so many years now became the unique style of a queer other-culture. Straight males, conditioned by the new right-wing orthodoxy and its "family values” homophobia, began looking in the mirror to find themselves, much to their squeamish amazement, dressed like faggots, dressed in the kind of short, tight clothing that only girls or queers would wear. Being sexy and displaying the body, from now on, could be for homos only, not for real men.
But if short-and-tight was now gay, then what was straight?
If skimpy-and-sexy was now improperly homo, then what was properly hetero? How should this new culture of Hetero Separatism and Hetero Correctness express itself?
This conundrum had never existed before. In the days before Gay Identity Politics, there had been a naïve disregard for sexual orientation, a simplistic credo that maleness always meant heteroness. Sure, queers existed, but somewhere else, maybe in Greenwich Village or some offbeat locale like San Francisco. They were invisible; they were irrelevant. However males chose to look or behave or dress was, ipso facto, properly and appropriately heterosexual because, after all, what else could it be? Nothing can “look gay” when there’s no gay way to look, no gay identity, no gay anything. Boys in Speedos? Hetero. Boys in short-shorts? Hetero. Only when gays asserted themselves to become a conspicuous and distinctive subpopulation, a distinctive demographic Other to the hetero Us, did a way of looking gay and dressing gay emerge.
Aggressive self-promotion of this gay identity, coupled with the equally aggressive counterattack of Hetero Separatism, forced young men and boys everywhere to start dressing themselves not just as proper males but, for the first time, as proper straight males.
This was something new in the history of Western culture. Male attire had always, more or less, been specific to gender, but never to sexual orientation. The naughty unisex protocol of the previous twenty years had been replaced by a stern protocol of dualism. Girls and queers had laid claim to short-and-tight, to skimpy-and-sexy, so boys, not wanting to be seen as sissy or gay, began a frenetic scramble to establish a new and exclusively hetero male protocol that would mark them as separate, that would proclaim their own straight, macho identity. By the rule of opposites, this new uniform of Hetero Correctness replaced short with long, tight with loose, skimpy with baggy, sexy with shapeless.
A new anti-gay aesthetic had been born.
Not all of this happened overnight. The metamorphosis was gradual but relentless. On the basketball court, as early as the mid-Eighties, Michael Jordan was showcasing an original way of looking macho in shorts that were longer and baggier than any worn before. In college basketball, Michigan State and some few other schools became early converts to this new and still slightly odd style of covering up to display manliness, covering up to be cool.
Not surprising that a game dominated by African-Americans should be the trendsetter. Young blacks, long at the cultural forefront, were now using their innovative prowess to undo what they themselves had helped to create over the previous twenty years. This urban culture of rap and hip-hop would become the dominant force of the Nineties—more than just a way of dressing, actually a new lifestyle of Hetero Extremism, a street religion of cartoonish and exaggerated heterosexual behaviors and attitudes, beliefs and taboos.
What Michael Jordan had first popularized on the basketball court was now adopted and adapted and embellished by this culture of hip-hop into an extravagant caricature of sloppy, goonish virility. Of course, hip-hop is just an easy label for the new way of thinking and behaving which has come to define maleness. It’s a huge catchall of mannerisms and music and language and, not least, fashion. It’s a manifestation of Hetero Separatism, but not the cause. Simply ascribing the current burlesque of male bagginess to “hip-hop fashion” is to mistake the symptom for the disease.
Early on, in fact, a Seattle-born movement of music and attitude called “grunge” vied with hip-hop as the prime pop-cultural force among American youth. Nirvana and Pearl Jam exemplified this genre of neo-punkish, suburban angst. But whether the offshoot is grunge or hip-hop or some other subcultural variant such as Goth or gangsta or slacker, the aggressively hetero taproot remains, each style identical in its gross contempt for the male body, the idea now not only to cover and conceal but actually to disfigure and uglify as a proclamation of gender integrity.
Buffoonishly oversized clothing is worn in protective layers, like sexual camouflage, to obliterate any trace of the body’s shape or contour: baggy jackets over baggy shirts over baggy pants, the pants themselves with low-sewn crotches specifically designed to make the fabric sag and flatten in front and at the seat, eliminating once and forever the unsavory homo spectacle of hips and bulges and buttocks. Boys end up looking freakishly elongated and misshapen, like figures distorted in a funhouse mirror.
Much was made, at first, of this bagginess as just another youthful fashion trend, just kids being kids, just the latest way of looking cool, defiant, outrageous. Teenagers themselves, mostly boys but also some girls, could offer no deeper insight or self-perception, usually describing their own bizarre wardrobe as comfortable, simply comfortable. This profoundly significant mode of expression was dismissed as something merely frivolous, few people if any fully understanding the deeper, more insidious explanation for their own appearance.
Soon enough, girls stopped having anything to do with this new way of dressing, never more to them than a whimsical fashion fling, a brief foray into the outlandish, like playing dress-up at Halloween. They left baggy clothing to the boys and happily claimed for themselves a monopoly of the Body Erotic.
For the boys, there was no choice, no alternative.
What girls were free to choose or discard as just another style, no more permanent than platform shoes or tie-dye, boys were forced to continue wearing as a self-imposed and mandatory uniform. Whether packaged as hip-hop or grunge or some other pop-cultural curiosity, baggy clothing was now the centerpiece of a rigidly enforced dress code, the outward and immutable expression of male anti-gay solidarity. Once established, this dress code of Hetero Correctness made any retreat impossible, appearance linked inextricably to sexuality from now on.
In other words, this fashion is not a fashion. This style is not a style.
Baggy clothing is now a permanent and essential weapon in the defense of proper, hetero masculinity. Boys announce to themselves and to the world, every time they dress this way, their own witless self-loathing, their own dull and knee-jerk acceptance of male grossness, male brutishness. Young men and boys, who once displayed themselves in clothing that was all about being frisky, playful, affectionate, sexy, open, unique, beautiful, joyous, now shroud themselves to appear grim, dark, covered, sullen, thuggish, hostile, ugly, shapeless, anonymous.
This new regime of male self-abhorrence should be plain for everyone to see, for everyone to understand. Men and boys are declaring, loudly and belligerently and unmistakably, that females and only females are attractive and sexually alluring; that only females may dress seductively and flaunt their sexiness; that only females may be viewed as exciting, erotic beings.
That, furthermore, as healthy heterosexuals, males themselves must feel not just a positive attraction towards females but an actual revulsion for other males, and must display this revulsion, this manly self-contempt, by disfiguring themselves, by covering themselves, by sparing themselves and one another the unpleasant sight of their own bodies. Boys are not physically attractive; boys are not sexually alluring; boys must not be viewed, by themselves or by others, as exciting, erotic beings. The clownish, baggy clothing they wear is the uniform of this proud Hetero Manifesto of mutual loathing.
But how is this current uniformity any different from the behavior of previous generations of teenagers?
Haven’t young people always craved the security of the pack? Weren’t boys just as mindlessly conformist twenty years ago in their tight short-shorts and knee socks as they are today?
Yes, they were—the adolescent herd mentality never changes. But yesterday’s conformity, to call it that, was actually a collective celebration of each boy’s uniqueness. Today’s identical bagginess is designed to hide the body and to make everyone appear drably the same, shapelessly and sexlessly anonymous; yesterday’s aesthetic of short-and-tight was designed to achieve the very opposite, to show the body and to display each of those bodies as unique, to display each and every boy as unique, each form, each figure, each shape beautifully different, beautifully distinct.
Yesterday’s style also was just that: a style. It arrived, it thrived, it eventually expired. Never, even during its heyday, was it the sole and only way for males to dress. Young men and boys might have reveled in the freedom of that sexy clothing, but other choices certainly existed. Today, those choices are gone. All clothing for young males is more or less baggy. Any boy who might, in some rebellious mood, desire to wear something tighter or shorter is simply out of luck. That type of clothing is no longer manufactured by major labels or sold by major retailers. Bagginess is not a style; bagginess is not a choice; bagginess is a strict and uncompromising code of heterosexual propriety.
Even within the gay community itself, of course, baggy clothing has now become the norm. But this should surprise no one. The same political activism which first brought a startling new gay identity to the national consciousness eventually won homosexuals an uneasy measure of acceptance and respectability from the socio-cultural mainstream.
Once inside the master’s house, these former pariahs became eager to consolidate their newfound status by blending in, by stressing sameness over difference, by showcasing themselves as “normal” members of the diverse American family. This sheepish compliance has bred a conformist mentality no less rigid and dull-witted than the regimentation of Hetero Correctness itself. Gays now prove their “we’re just like you” normality by aping the conventions of the straight mainstream, which means looking and dressing like every other “normal” Tom, Dick, and Harry. The edgy symbiosis has come full circle; homo and hetero have once again become largely indistinguishable; only this time, today, it’s the straight aesthetic of shapeless anonymity providing the insipid template.
So, given the absence nowadays of an urgent gay threat, the absence of a flamboyant queer nemesis, why do heterosexuals persist in their own aggressively separatist dress code? The answer has already been given: Once established, this dress code makes any retreat impossible. Once a “hetero look” has been prescribed, there’s no renouncing it without renouncing your own sexual orientation. Abandoning it would equal a declaration of gayness.
Never mind the craven eagerness of homosexuals themselves to assimilate; the stereotypical “gay look” remains vivid in the cultural memory and can never again be allowed to contaminate straight males. No clothing must ever again be too tight or too short—in other words, too gay. No boy must ever again show too much bare skin or display himself in any way that might acknowledge the beauty of his own body or encourage the world to look at him, to desire him—because that would mark him as a sissy, a deviant, a fairy.
Sure, gays might be good campy fun these days, quaintly and comically entertaining in The Birdcage or on Will & Grace, maybe even worthy of pity as the tragic victims of AIDS—but no one should want to be like them, no one should want to be mistaken for them. They’re OK, but still, after all. . . they’re gay, forever the Other, forever the Opposite.
Any glance around the cultural landscape will confirm this state of hopeless, no-retreat intransigence. What began as a random and spontaneous consequence of gay radicalism colliding with hetero orthodoxy has become institutionalized and commercialized and vigorously marketed by corporate America, not only in this country but throughout the entire Americanized world. Watch any TV show from Venezuela, from England, from South Korea—pick a country, you’ll see the same baggy male clothing, the same unwitting emulation of America and its hip-hop burlesque of Hetero Extremism.
Every aspect of male life betrays this style that is no style, this fashion that is no fashion.
Sports, due to Michael Jordan’s early influence, were first to convert and transmogrify, basketball especially susceptible to this grotesque imperative of the thuggish, of the buffoonish. All other sports quickly and slavishly followed, an identical evolution from short to long, from tight to baggy. Soccer shorts and gym shorts, track shorts and tennis shorts and boxing trunks—all underwent this same transformation. Wrestling singlets also were lengthened to eliminate the inappropriate display of bare thighs.
Even beyond athletics, this rule of long-and-baggy forced the redesign of everything from scout uniforms to clothing for infants and toddlers. But only male scouts, of course. And only male infants and toddlers. This supposedly teen fashion, just kids being kids, has altered the appearance and character of an entire gender, no regard to age or race or any other demographic factor that might normally determine a style’s popularity.
No spectacle more vividly betrays the true prevalence and permanence of this heterosexist über-protocol than males, young and old, in baggy swimwear. How could a mere fashion of the streets force such exaggerated body phobia at the beach? At the pool? Why would six-year-old boys and sixty-year-old men show identical subservience to something which is no more than a silly teen fad, an insignificant hip-hop whimsicality, even to the extreme of covering themselves where uncovering has always been the happy-go-lucky custom.
Swim trunks for males are now baggy swim pants, some nearly ankle-length, the farcical antithesis of everything you’d expect to see at the beach or the pool, those traditional havens of carefree and immodest display, even nudity. The pretense of bagginess equaling comfort finally crumbles in this context where nakedness, let’s face it, is the ideal. As clothing is added, comfort is reduced; as skin is covered, pleasure is diminished. Swimming is also called bathing, after all—and there’s a certain lunacy to bathing in baggy pants. Yet men and boys do just that and do it willingly, a blatant example of senseless and counterintuitive behavior that can be sustained only through persistent conditioning and aggressive marketing.
No one would want swimwear which is designed to be heavy and hot and uncomfortable unless they’ve been convinced of its overriding necessity, its deep importance as symbol and totem, its value and its virtue as a uniform of hetero identity, hetero allegiance, hetero belonging. This is institutionalized “street fashion” and “counterculture” at its most corporate, its most commercial, its most relentlessly cynical.
The body phobia
produced by roughly fifteen years of this protocol and its unyielding dress code is real and drastic, an entire generation of boys trained to despise their own physiques, to look at themselves with debilitating shame.
Such an assertion might be dismissed as hyperbole, as paranoid rhetoric, as shrill alarmism—except for testimony from corporate insiders such as Stuart Isaac, vice president of sports promotions for Speedo, the company responsible for developing the new Fastskin swimsuit. This full-body suit has helped to rekindle interest in competitive swimming among young males. Why? According to Isaac himself, in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, boys have been “turned off” from swimming in recent years because of “their reluctance to wear a tiny suit in public.” But now, even for those kids unable to afford the full Fastskin bodysuit, Speedo and other companies have come to the rescue with a modified version, with trunks similar to bicycle shorts which are long enough—again according to Stuart Isaac—to help “alleviate concerns.”
That’s right: Boys can now stop worrying that anyone might ever again see them improperly exposed in those “tiny” suits, thanks to corporate America and institutionalized Hetero Correctness. The cardinal sin of those tiny suits, let’s not forget, being their inherent gayness. Always that equation now between showing off the body and being queer.
A recent PBS show called Shore Thing offered its own wry confirmation, wondering how best to distinguish a gay beach from its straight counterparts, then answering,
“Well, the suits are smaller and tighter here. . .”
Of course. Or take this definitive summation from yet another Chicago Sun-Times article about male swimwear:
“Anything tight on a guy—regardless of physique—is unattractive. Loose is better. For men, loose should be the only way to go.”
OK. Enough said. End of discussion.
Recently, it seems, even mainstream media have recognized something oddly pathological about these current male attitudes and behaviors, coining the term “Rude Boy culture” in an attempt to make sense of the senseless.
Consider an article from the February 5, 2001 issue of Time, which observes that
“Rude Boy culture has a determined self-loathing streak”;
that this Rude Boy culture
“treats women as sex objects while implying that men are morons”;
that, indeed, there is
“even a root uneasiness with maleness itself in some Rude Boy culture.”
All obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention. Males have abandoned the Body Erotic to females and adopted the role of gangster, of thug, of sideshow psycho, trapped in this dysfunctional persona of their own creation with no hope for escape.
In a fever of overcompensation, these predatory Rude Boys have hyper-sexualized females into what can only be described as sluttish prey. Females themselves have responded with avid complicity, smugly content in their monopoly of all things erotic and seductive, showing off more and more of themselves while males show less and less.
What’s popular now with girls, as the Washington Post and other sources have reported, are salacious items such as “booty shorts” that leave the body as bare as possible, a vogue known among designers and retailers as the “nude look.” The resulting confluence of these baggy boys and these next-to-naked girls—in any music video, for example—can be a jarringly surrealistic sight, like the freakish dalliance between some gang of deranged circus clowns and their hooker consorts.
In all this cultural debris,
does any trace remain of that effulgence of male display from the Sixties, the Seventies, the early Eighties? There does, yes, but only those bits and pieces that pose no threat to the strict tenets of Hetero Correctness.
A harmless vestige of the Eighties such as People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” is one high-profile example. Soap opera studs and Baywatch hunks are another, their type of bare-chested manliness still perceived as safely orthodox, their above-the-waist mode of display still acceptable. Below the waist, of course, would stigmatize them as queer—which is why Mad TV, Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Drew Carey Show, etc., all have portrayed “gay” characters wearing tight short-shorts or tiny Speedos for quick and easy audience recognition.
One intriguing exception to this otherwise hard-and-fast rule is professional wrestling, where many performers still compete in the scanty spandex trunks of a bygone era. This is allowed, perhaps, because of the cartoonish and fantastical nature of the wrestlers themselves, as if these ersatz superheroes and villains have been given some special license to play dress-up, to create their own alien extravaganza of brawling beefcake.
Fascinating, therefore, the enormous popularity of this spectacle throughout the culture at large, and among teenaged boys in particular. Is the bizarre homoerotic subtext itself part of the attraction? Is there a yearning, especially in the male psyche, for something lost and irretrievable? Maybe professional wrestling functions, on some deeply unspoken level, as a boisterous guilty pleasure for a culture demoralized by years of hetero orthodoxy and regimentation, a culture hungry for that type of uninhibited male flamboyance now taboo in everyday life.
And maybe, while rummaging for clues and subtext, we should ponder, just briefly, the head-to-toe veiling of fundamentalist Muslim women.
Is there some analogy between that tradition of the hijab and what’s happening now throughout America and its cultural colonies? Are young men and boys wearing their own hip-hop version of the Iranian chador and the Afghan burqa?
There’s much of the same self-loathing in these seemingly disparate situations, the same body shame and phobia, the same fanatical control of public bodily display by an overseer establishment, the same mortifying submission to one’s own depersonalization.
It’s most intriguing, though, to remember that those Muslim women are veiled, according to doctrine, as a means of blunting male desire. The female form is regarded with a sort of superstitious reverence and trepidation, as something precious that must be protected but also as something dangerously provocative that must be kept covered and suppressed.
Have American males turned this same type of custodial fanaticism against themselves?
Are boys, in this country, the forbidden temptation that must always be jealously hidden?
Are boys the intoxicating provocateurs who must be kept covered and suppressed?
Are men and boys cowering from their own treacherous bodies beneath those layers of baggy clothing?
If so, what a demented saga of inverted sexual repression and longing and self-denial these last fifteen years have been.
That must be the answer.
That metaphor of the hijab must finally explain the tenacity of what might have been and should have been nothing but a passing folly. The spell of hetero allegiance continues to exert its own powerful hold, of course, any retreat from bagginess now tantamount to gender betrayal—but put aside even that. Put aside also those tunnel-visioned explanations of bagginess as an outgrowth of the urban crime-scape, as merely a bizarre expedient for hiding weapons and drugs.
Here’s the truth:
Boys are beautiful, every bit as beautiful as girls, therefore boys must be kept covered. Bagginess is necessary for hiding the reality of that male beauty. The indisputable visual evidence of that beauty, quite simply, must forever be kept under wraps. How else to preserve a strong and united hetero front? To keep the faithful in thrall? How else to perpetuate the fallacy of masculine ugliness? To maintain the illusion of males as somehow aesthetically and erotically inferior to females? Only one way: Keep boys covered in baggy hip-hop chadors. Keep their bodies and their beauty carefully concealed. Otherwise, the hetero protocol collapses.
But why search for meaning or understanding?
After all the fuss and bother and overwrought analysis, aren’t we just dealing with silly trivialities of dress and appearance? Why worry about such things? Why care? So much easier to play along, to join the pack, to scoff at anyone who might differ or question. But that old Socratic maxim holds true for cultures as well as individuals: The unexamined cultural life, you could aptly paraphrase, is not worth living. Like it or not, there is significance to the way people dress themselves. Deep significance, for example, to the corseted primness of Victorian females. Deep and age-old significance to military and paramilitary uniforms, to clerical vestments, to the black garb of ultra-Orthodox Jewish males, to those Iranian chadors and those Afghan burqas. And deep significance, for those willing to see it, to the bagginess of today’s men and boys.
Clothing has meaning.
Clothing sends powerful messages. There’s a way to dress that enhances and flatters the body, that proudly exhibits the body; there’s another that disrespects and debases the body, that announces shame. There’s a way to dress that shows off, that displays, that expresses self-respect and a joyous pride in one’s own beauty and strength and worth; there’s another that conceals and hides, that uglifies, that expresses self-loathing and hostility and a gloomy contempt for one’s own worthlessness.
A way that says my body is good and should be celebrated; another that says my body is bad and should be despised and covered. Ignoring these meanings and these messages is the worst kind of intellectual corruption, something cowardly and gullible in the easy denial of the utterly obvious, in the surrender to blindness and conformity with never a word of protest or challenge, such an undignified embrace of the hateful, the stupid, the oafish.
But if there’s any conspiracy to be found in all of this, it’s one of silence. Men and boys seldom if ever have understood or verbalized the motives behind their own foolish appearance, no need for pronouncements or tirades.
Once the protocol of Hetero Correctness was established some fifteen years ago, complete with its aggressively anti-gay dress code, nothing but its own momentum was necessary to carry it forward. Always a visceral and intuitive entanglement of behaviors, this protocol requires no list of instructions or explicit marching orders. It’s a protocol and a manifesto of the heart, not the head. And now, after these many years, no one even notices or wonders about the strangeness of it all.
This style that is no style, this fashion that is no fashion has become the natural order, the dreary status quo. Girls are pretty; boys are ugly. Girls are sexy and seductive; boys are goonish and repellent. Girls are prey; boys are predators. Their clothing proclaims this gospel to a world long since converted and transfixed.
So what’s the answer, finally, to that puzzled boy’s question?
Is it true that gay guys wear tight pants to let other guys check out their butts? Sure, some of them, it’s a sensible enough strategy—but only those heretical few who’ve not yet camouflaged themselves in the bagginess of straight anonymity. For the most part, that boy need not worry; guys in tight pants are little more than a memory these days. Young males, in fact, might have no memory of them at all, might have trouble even believing that their fathers and uncles and older brothers once dressed, oh my god, like queers.
Nearly impossible now to make anyone understand how that once-upon-a-time loosening of inhibition and social restraint gave birth, however briefly, to an American heyday of honest desire, honestly expressed. Nearly impossible to imagine how that genie could have escaped the bottle for roughly twenty years, somehow allowing this American culture its heady fling of Boy Worship before the guardians of hetero orthodoxy were awakened to action.
More than just odd or charmingly old-fashioned, those pre-1985 filmic and photographic images of young males now strike the eye something like anthropological curiosities, like images of some lost branch of the human family tree. Or like some third, unique gender now gone extinct. The lost Boy-nymph. The vanished Boy-coquette.
Inconceivable that those exotic, come-hither creatures in their itty-bitty shorts and crotch-bulging jeans could have evolved into the baggy, shapeless clown-thugs of today. There’s an aesthetic discontinuity between them that should make anyone dizzy, those immodest show-offs from yesteryear surely some alien species or gender that mysteriously came and went, victimized by one of those cataclysmic extinctions that leave nothing but tantalizing relics and a rumor of decadent splendor.
Any other explanation is too unsettling, any serious assessment of the truth too bitter, too harsh, difficult even to contemplate a culture that would turn against itself so viciously, that would destroy some rare and beautiful part of itself simply out of hatred and ignorance and sexual hysteria. It’s a loss that everyone secretly must sense, secretly must share. Like music gone silent. Like laughter cut dead.
CLOTHING AS SEXUAL POLITICS IN AMERICA
By Kevin Esser
http://home.wanadoo.nl/ipce/library_two/files/esser_baggy.htm
Do gay guys wear tight pants so other guys can check out their butts?
That’s what some teenaged boy wanted to know in a 1996 film documentary dealing with gay issues in the classroom. How else could he think? What else could he wonder given today’s dress code of Hetero Correctness? His question has been answered by many dismal years of American males in oversized, baggy clothing—men and boys hidden from one another, hidden from themselves, hidden from the dangerous reality of their own bodies.
An otherwise sensible gentleman confesses to watching these boys in their baggy clownshirts and clownpants, to finding them actually attractive. Room enough, he jokes, to climb in there with them and play around. Nothing but a laugh to him, this situation, nothing to contemplate beyond the boys themselves and the disheveled, butch excitement he finds in them. Of course, boys in Nazi scouting regalia might also have seemed cute as teddy bears—those sporty shorts, those jaunty neckerchiefs—but no one should be so oblivious as to ignore the brutish agenda behind the attire. Not then, not now.
When did this start?
How did this stylized disfigurement of an entire gender become the norm? It’s a discussion that begs to be illustrated: here a boy in “shorts” that reach comically to his ankles; here another in pants with a crotch that sags to his knees; here yet another dressed for the beach, a foolish spectacle in swim trunks that might have come from Bozo’s closet. No bare thighs or knees. No evidence of hips or buttocks. Nothing now but a sad-sack army of anonymous males, shapeless and identical, shorn and shrouded like so many ritual mourners, like prisoners of war, like refugees from some battle fought and lost.
To understand what’s happening now, go back to a time when that battle, that war, seemed to have been fought and won. Go back, let’s say, thirty years. Startling now to see movies or photos from those days—from the Sixties, the Seventies, right through the mid-Eighties.
Boys in mini cut-offs and bare-tummy T-shirts, in mesh tanktops and knee socks and the scantiest of gym shorts, the clingiest of sweatshorts, often with no underwear, more provocative that way, nothing to confine the bulge in front or the cheeks in back. Full and frank display. Startling now, yes, but not back then. Young males were expected to look that way, just a natural aspect of their whole cocky, rude, show-off persona. But what explains that nonchalant acceptance? What explains those fleeting years of erotic flamboyance? And what happened to bring doomsday to Eden?
It’s useful to remember, as historical context, that males have always determined and governed the rules of modesty—both for women and for themselves. Men have always decided, in this and every other culture, how the body will be displayed, and where, and to what effect.
A hundred years ago, even in America, the unclothed male form was not an unusual sight, regardless of what we might think today about Victorian prudery or Edwardian stuffiness. Boxers of that era commonly fought in miniscule trunks that left the buttocks mostly bare.
(Take another look at the George Bellows painting, Stag at Sharkey’s. Or ponder the image of “Gentleman Jim” Corbett nearly naked in his 1897 bout versus Robert Fitzsimmons.)
Young boys, even teenagers, routinely swam nude in public—given the evidence of archival films and photographs—no shock at all to see them skinny-dipping from city docks and piers or splashing naked in the municipal fountains of crowded city squares, in full view of urban passers-by and onlookers. Swimmers at male-only YMCA pools and school pools and community pools were expected, often obliged, to swim nude.
The culture was guided by the Greco-Roman ethos of the gymnasium (a word that means, don’t forget, to exercise naked), masculine physicality unblinkingly accepted in all its uncouth dynamism of muscle and gristle and sweat. Only much later in the century did this casual acceptance give way to a more suburban, middle-class code of modesty that we’ve come to associate with the 1950s and with Eisenhower-era conservatism. The male form gradually disappeared in this country as an object of public spectacle. Years would pass before new sociocultural developments spawned its return.
The so-called Sexual Revolution
was this momentous rebirthing force. Boys and girls both were suddenly happy and eager to shed their conservative drag, to exhibit themselves, to flaunt themselves more and more boldly, more and more immodestly. Woodstock Nation. The return to nature. Back to the Garden.
Hell, why not go all the way and strip bare? Remember streaking? Largely, no surprise, it was a male phenomenon—ritualized exhibitionism, flashing as a fad, what you’d expect from boys with all inhibitions erased.
Hair and Oh! Calcutta! brought this frolic of youthful nudity to the stage. At the movies, Franco Zeffirelli created a Romeo and Juliet in 1968 that epitomized this Age of Aquarius sensuality, his young men and boys voluptuous in their hose and codpieces, his puppyish teenaged Romeo shown frankly and delectably naked.
For roughly twenty years, this male riot of bodily display would equal or surpass anything enjoyed by females, boys often more skimpily and seductively attired than girls, packs of them prowling the malls and the arcades like half-naked catamites, denim shorts so tight they wouldn’t zip.
And yet, call it a paradox,
this lusty romp thrived in a milieu of sexual naiveté, the revelers themselves all gleefully anarchic in a juvenile sort of way, like children first discovering their own bodies, fascinated and giggly and eager for new sensation..
The original Flower Child exuberance gave way, in the Seventies, to the feral excess of punk and glam, a carnival of hedonism and sexual ambivalence featuring the likes of Queen, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie. Long hair on girls, long hair on boys. Short-shorts on girls, short-shorts on boys. The teen idols from these years—tender boytoys such as Davy Jones, David Cassidy and his brother Shaun, Leif Garrett, Tony DeFranco—were the perfect avatars of this new androgyny.
There was a unisex worship of the id, a unisex celebration of the Body Erotic that reached its heyday with disco, with Village People and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, with macho men doing the milkshake and having fun at the YMCA. Suddenly, remarkably, gay and mainstream were one and the same, no segregation, no distinction between queer and straight, an entire culture cheerfully and unwittingly homo-eroticized. The hetero aesthetic and the homo aesthetic had become indistinguishable among young males—in matters of music, hairstyles, and, yes, clothing—no thought or care given beyond looking good and feeling good.
This twenty-year idyll of naïve flamboyance burned brightest at the end. Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, Prince, Wham!, Menudo—the biggest male pop stars of this fin de disco era all were icons of sumptuous androgyny. Break-dancing provided the fiercely libidinous backdrop with its brash accoutrements of chains and tight leather, of rising-sun muscle shirts and samurai headbands. Francis Ford Coppola, with his 1983 film of The Outsiders, contributed a melodrama of sultry teen fellowship that gave us characters named Johnny and Sodapop and Ponyboy swooning prettily in one another’s arms. On the radio, a song called Let’s Hear It For The Boy became the fitting anthem for this gaudy and rambunctious eve of destruction.
Then, as gradually at first as someone waking from contented dreams, this culture of androgyny and lush playfulness began its sad metamorphosis.
Two powerful sociopolitical forces were already lumbering towards collision by this time, namely the mid-Eighties, with young males trapped between as unfortunate casualties.
Repressive demagoguery from the Right,
clamorous identity and advocacy politics from the Left.
One without the other would have been the hammer without the anvil; together, these counterforces met head-on and obliterated twenty years of high-spirited masculine display, twenty years of young men and boys flaunting the beauty and sexiness of their own bodies. That type of “gay” behavior, as it now seemed, became anathema, intolerable.
It’s tidy and convenient and largely accurate to pinpoint 1980
as the fateful turning point, the year of Reagan’s election and the political ascendancy of his right-wing coalition—even though the full seismic shocks went unfelt for several more years. These dour neo-Puritan champions of so-called “family values” quickly took up arms against a sea of perceived indecencies.
The White House itself led this crusade, Reagan’s Attorney General Ed Meese issuing his report on pornography in 1986. Congress passed its own draconian Child Protection Act of 1984 as a sop to the psycho-sexual hysteria being generated by the Christian Right and by the new industry of abuse and victimization that blossomed at this time. Regressive hypnotherapy and its windfall of recovered memories, later discredited, fueled this boom industry. Police and prosecutors throughout the country, with gleeful media complicity, were suddenly awash in cases of alleged pedophile rings and ritual Satanic abuse, the vast majority of which proved to be unfounded and were never even brought to trial. Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, Phyllis Schlafly and her Eagle Forum—these and other demagogues had moved from the sidelines to the establishment center, bringing their potent arsenals of hate-mongering and humorless conformity with them.
At this same time,
charging from the opposite ideological direction, came the aggressive activism and rhetoric of Gay Identity Politics. This is not to say that gay activism was an invention of the 1980s. Homosexuals had been politically strident for many years, the Stonewall Riot of 1969 just the most notable event in a tumultuous history. But that earlier activism had been a desperate struggle for basic civil liberties, for freedom from police harassment, for the right to assemble, to fraternize, to exist. This new radicalism was something altogether different, nothing less than a full-scale assault on the American mainstream in order to establish, forcefully and permanently, a distinct gay identity and a powerful political presence. The struggle for basic rights and minimal tolerance had now given way to a demand for total recognition and total acceptance.
The catastrophe of AIDS,
more than anything else, inspired the zealotry of this movement. By 1982, the health crisis was already being featured in Time and Newsweek and other mainstream media outlets. The sensuous frivolity of disco and its early-Eighties denouement was now being replaced by a type of left-wing gay activism just as grim and humorless as its right-wing counterpart. Understandable, given the deadly stakes, no time or energy to waste for those engaged in this ghastly struggle for survival. Rock Hudson became the AIDS poster boy in 1985, bringing unprecedented publicity while also personalizing the murky gay identity for hetero America. ACT UP and Queer Nation, among others, further fanned the flames of publicity and national awareness. More and more, there was this very real prominence of homosexuality as an “alternative lifestyle” and a distinct subculture or other-culture apart from the hetero mainstream. That twenty-year idyll of naïve and flamboyant androgyny had truly and thoroughly ended.
So what exactly took its place? What was happening by the late Eighties? By 1990?
The onslaught of right-wing orthodoxy and its conformist agenda had proven itself ruthlessly effective. Intergenerational sex had become demonized in new and sensational ways. The age of consent was being revised and raised nationwide, state by state, to redefine the very nature of childhood. Anti-pornography hysteria and litigation (with the wrongheaded support of radical feminists and lesbians) continued to thrive, from Cincinnati art galleries to the Sears catalog, a chilling wave of censorship and intimidation soon exported by America Prime to its far-flung imperium (Western Europe, the Philippines, Thailand, etc.). Robert Mapplethorpe’s and Sally Mann’s photographs, Michelangelo’s David, Isabelle Holland’s The Man Without A Face—all were attacked as obscene, as perverted, as inimical to Americans and Christians everywhere. A film such as Popi, rated “G” upon its original release in 1969 despite several scenes of pubescent male nudity, now would have met the legal definition of obscenity in most American communities. The giant retailers, led by Sears and JCPenney and Montgomery Ward, even stopped using live models in their ads for boys’ underwear, the national psyche attuned by this time to seeing scantily-clad young males solely in terms of homo-eroticism and kiddie porn.
The gay-rights movement itself shared responsibility for this upheaval of sexual fear and loathing. Its AIDS-fueled militancy had been successful in gaining a token seat at the noisy multicultural table, but the response from hetero America was something close to panic. Like intoxicated libertines suddenly waking in some stranger’s bed, heterosexual males suffered a traumatic morning-after of revulsion and self-disgust, frantic to distance themselves from both the literal and figurative contagion of homosexuality. Gay Identity Politics had met head-on with the inevitable “equal and opposite reaction” of Hetero Identity Politics. Left-wing zealotry had collided with right-wing zealotry to create a profound cultural schism, forcing the public to identify with one sexual camp or the other—gay and proud over here, straight and proud over there.
Once begun, this sexual divergence became an unstoppable duel of force/counterforce. Gay Pride Parades and Christian counter-rallies competed on the evening news. We’re here and we’re queer! God hates fags!
For the first time, certain images and iconography were being openly identified and celebrated as gay. For the first time, boldly distinctive ways of looking and dressing gay were being publicized for the whole world to see. Those same ways of looking and dressing which an entire culture had joyfully shared for so many years now became the unique style of a queer other-culture. Straight males, conditioned by the new right-wing orthodoxy and its "family values” homophobia, began looking in the mirror to find themselves, much to their squeamish amazement, dressed like faggots, dressed in the kind of short, tight clothing that only girls or queers would wear. Being sexy and displaying the body, from now on, could be for homos only, not for real men.
But if short-and-tight was now gay, then what was straight?
If skimpy-and-sexy was now improperly homo, then what was properly hetero? How should this new culture of Hetero Separatism and Hetero Correctness express itself?
This conundrum had never existed before. In the days before Gay Identity Politics, there had been a naïve disregard for sexual orientation, a simplistic credo that maleness always meant heteroness. Sure, queers existed, but somewhere else, maybe in Greenwich Village or some offbeat locale like San Francisco. They were invisible; they were irrelevant. However males chose to look or behave or dress was, ipso facto, properly and appropriately heterosexual because, after all, what else could it be? Nothing can “look gay” when there’s no gay way to look, no gay identity, no gay anything. Boys in Speedos? Hetero. Boys in short-shorts? Hetero. Only when gays asserted themselves to become a conspicuous and distinctive subpopulation, a distinctive demographic Other to the hetero Us, did a way of looking gay and dressing gay emerge.
Aggressive self-promotion of this gay identity, coupled with the equally aggressive counterattack of Hetero Separatism, forced young men and boys everywhere to start dressing themselves not just as proper males but, for the first time, as proper straight males.
This was something new in the history of Western culture. Male attire had always, more or less, been specific to gender, but never to sexual orientation. The naughty unisex protocol of the previous twenty years had been replaced by a stern protocol of dualism. Girls and queers had laid claim to short-and-tight, to skimpy-and-sexy, so boys, not wanting to be seen as sissy or gay, began a frenetic scramble to establish a new and exclusively hetero male protocol that would mark them as separate, that would proclaim their own straight, macho identity. By the rule of opposites, this new uniform of Hetero Correctness replaced short with long, tight with loose, skimpy with baggy, sexy with shapeless.
A new anti-gay aesthetic had been born.
Not all of this happened overnight. The metamorphosis was gradual but relentless. On the basketball court, as early as the mid-Eighties, Michael Jordan was showcasing an original way of looking macho in shorts that were longer and baggier than any worn before. In college basketball, Michigan State and some few other schools became early converts to this new and still slightly odd style of covering up to display manliness, covering up to be cool.
Not surprising that a game dominated by African-Americans should be the trendsetter. Young blacks, long at the cultural forefront, were now using their innovative prowess to undo what they themselves had helped to create over the previous twenty years. This urban culture of rap and hip-hop would become the dominant force of the Nineties—more than just a way of dressing, actually a new lifestyle of Hetero Extremism, a street religion of cartoonish and exaggerated heterosexual behaviors and attitudes, beliefs and taboos.
What Michael Jordan had first popularized on the basketball court was now adopted and adapted and embellished by this culture of hip-hop into an extravagant caricature of sloppy, goonish virility. Of course, hip-hop is just an easy label for the new way of thinking and behaving which has come to define maleness. It’s a huge catchall of mannerisms and music and language and, not least, fashion. It’s a manifestation of Hetero Separatism, but not the cause. Simply ascribing the current burlesque of male bagginess to “hip-hop fashion” is to mistake the symptom for the disease.
Early on, in fact, a Seattle-born movement of music and attitude called “grunge” vied with hip-hop as the prime pop-cultural force among American youth. Nirvana and Pearl Jam exemplified this genre of neo-punkish, suburban angst. But whether the offshoot is grunge or hip-hop or some other subcultural variant such as Goth or gangsta or slacker, the aggressively hetero taproot remains, each style identical in its gross contempt for the male body, the idea now not only to cover and conceal but actually to disfigure and uglify as a proclamation of gender integrity.
Buffoonishly oversized clothing is worn in protective layers, like sexual camouflage, to obliterate any trace of the body’s shape or contour: baggy jackets over baggy shirts over baggy pants, the pants themselves with low-sewn crotches specifically designed to make the fabric sag and flatten in front and at the seat, eliminating once and forever the unsavory homo spectacle of hips and bulges and buttocks. Boys end up looking freakishly elongated and misshapen, like figures distorted in a funhouse mirror.
Much was made, at first, of this bagginess as just another youthful fashion trend, just kids being kids, just the latest way of looking cool, defiant, outrageous. Teenagers themselves, mostly boys but also some girls, could offer no deeper insight or self-perception, usually describing their own bizarre wardrobe as comfortable, simply comfortable. This profoundly significant mode of expression was dismissed as something merely frivolous, few people if any fully understanding the deeper, more insidious explanation for their own appearance.
Soon enough, girls stopped having anything to do with this new way of dressing, never more to them than a whimsical fashion fling, a brief foray into the outlandish, like playing dress-up at Halloween. They left baggy clothing to the boys and happily claimed for themselves a monopoly of the Body Erotic.
For the boys, there was no choice, no alternative.
What girls were free to choose or discard as just another style, no more permanent than platform shoes or tie-dye, boys were forced to continue wearing as a self-imposed and mandatory uniform. Whether packaged as hip-hop or grunge or some other pop-cultural curiosity, baggy clothing was now the centerpiece of a rigidly enforced dress code, the outward and immutable expression of male anti-gay solidarity. Once established, this dress code of Hetero Correctness made any retreat impossible, appearance linked inextricably to sexuality from now on.
In other words, this fashion is not a fashion. This style is not a style.
Baggy clothing is now a permanent and essential weapon in the defense of proper, hetero masculinity. Boys announce to themselves and to the world, every time they dress this way, their own witless self-loathing, their own dull and knee-jerk acceptance of male grossness, male brutishness. Young men and boys, who once displayed themselves in clothing that was all about being frisky, playful, affectionate, sexy, open, unique, beautiful, joyous, now shroud themselves to appear grim, dark, covered, sullen, thuggish, hostile, ugly, shapeless, anonymous.
This new regime of male self-abhorrence should be plain for everyone to see, for everyone to understand. Men and boys are declaring, loudly and belligerently and unmistakably, that females and only females are attractive and sexually alluring; that only females may dress seductively and flaunt their sexiness; that only females may be viewed as exciting, erotic beings.
That, furthermore, as healthy heterosexuals, males themselves must feel not just a positive attraction towards females but an actual revulsion for other males, and must display this revulsion, this manly self-contempt, by disfiguring themselves, by covering themselves, by sparing themselves and one another the unpleasant sight of their own bodies. Boys are not physically attractive; boys are not sexually alluring; boys must not be viewed, by themselves or by others, as exciting, erotic beings. The clownish, baggy clothing they wear is the uniform of this proud Hetero Manifesto of mutual loathing.
But how is this current uniformity any different from the behavior of previous generations of teenagers?
Haven’t young people always craved the security of the pack? Weren’t boys just as mindlessly conformist twenty years ago in their tight short-shorts and knee socks as they are today?
Yes, they were—the adolescent herd mentality never changes. But yesterday’s conformity, to call it that, was actually a collective celebration of each boy’s uniqueness. Today’s identical bagginess is designed to hide the body and to make everyone appear drably the same, shapelessly and sexlessly anonymous; yesterday’s aesthetic of short-and-tight was designed to achieve the very opposite, to show the body and to display each of those bodies as unique, to display each and every boy as unique, each form, each figure, each shape beautifully different, beautifully distinct.
Yesterday’s style also was just that: a style. It arrived, it thrived, it eventually expired. Never, even during its heyday, was it the sole and only way for males to dress. Young men and boys might have reveled in the freedom of that sexy clothing, but other choices certainly existed. Today, those choices are gone. All clothing for young males is more or less baggy. Any boy who might, in some rebellious mood, desire to wear something tighter or shorter is simply out of luck. That type of clothing is no longer manufactured by major labels or sold by major retailers. Bagginess is not a style; bagginess is not a choice; bagginess is a strict and uncompromising code of heterosexual propriety.
Even within the gay community itself, of course, baggy clothing has now become the norm. But this should surprise no one. The same political activism which first brought a startling new gay identity to the national consciousness eventually won homosexuals an uneasy measure of acceptance and respectability from the socio-cultural mainstream.
Once inside the master’s house, these former pariahs became eager to consolidate their newfound status by blending in, by stressing sameness over difference, by showcasing themselves as “normal” members of the diverse American family. This sheepish compliance has bred a conformist mentality no less rigid and dull-witted than the regimentation of Hetero Correctness itself. Gays now prove their “we’re just like you” normality by aping the conventions of the straight mainstream, which means looking and dressing like every other “normal” Tom, Dick, and Harry. The edgy symbiosis has come full circle; homo and hetero have once again become largely indistinguishable; only this time, today, it’s the straight aesthetic of shapeless anonymity providing the insipid template.
So, given the absence nowadays of an urgent gay threat, the absence of a flamboyant queer nemesis, why do heterosexuals persist in their own aggressively separatist dress code? The answer has already been given: Once established, this dress code makes any retreat impossible. Once a “hetero look” has been prescribed, there’s no renouncing it without renouncing your own sexual orientation. Abandoning it would equal a declaration of gayness.
Never mind the craven eagerness of homosexuals themselves to assimilate; the stereotypical “gay look” remains vivid in the cultural memory and can never again be allowed to contaminate straight males. No clothing must ever again be too tight or too short—in other words, too gay. No boy must ever again show too much bare skin or display himself in any way that might acknowledge the beauty of his own body or encourage the world to look at him, to desire him—because that would mark him as a sissy, a deviant, a fairy.
Sure, gays might be good campy fun these days, quaintly and comically entertaining in The Birdcage or on Will & Grace, maybe even worthy of pity as the tragic victims of AIDS—but no one should want to be like them, no one should want to be mistaken for them. They’re OK, but still, after all. . . they’re gay, forever the Other, forever the Opposite.
Any glance around the cultural landscape will confirm this state of hopeless, no-retreat intransigence. What began as a random and spontaneous consequence of gay radicalism colliding with hetero orthodoxy has become institutionalized and commercialized and vigorously marketed by corporate America, not only in this country but throughout the entire Americanized world. Watch any TV show from Venezuela, from England, from South Korea—pick a country, you’ll see the same baggy male clothing, the same unwitting emulation of America and its hip-hop burlesque of Hetero Extremism.
Every aspect of male life betrays this style that is no style, this fashion that is no fashion.
Sports, due to Michael Jordan’s early influence, were first to convert and transmogrify, basketball especially susceptible to this grotesque imperative of the thuggish, of the buffoonish. All other sports quickly and slavishly followed, an identical evolution from short to long, from tight to baggy. Soccer shorts and gym shorts, track shorts and tennis shorts and boxing trunks—all underwent this same transformation. Wrestling singlets also were lengthened to eliminate the inappropriate display of bare thighs.
Even beyond athletics, this rule of long-and-baggy forced the redesign of everything from scout uniforms to clothing for infants and toddlers. But only male scouts, of course. And only male infants and toddlers. This supposedly teen fashion, just kids being kids, has altered the appearance and character of an entire gender, no regard to age or race or any other demographic factor that might normally determine a style’s popularity.
No spectacle more vividly betrays the true prevalence and permanence of this heterosexist über-protocol than males, young and old, in baggy swimwear. How could a mere fashion of the streets force such exaggerated body phobia at the beach? At the pool? Why would six-year-old boys and sixty-year-old men show identical subservience to something which is no more than a silly teen fad, an insignificant hip-hop whimsicality, even to the extreme of covering themselves where uncovering has always been the happy-go-lucky custom.
Swim trunks for males are now baggy swim pants, some nearly ankle-length, the farcical antithesis of everything you’d expect to see at the beach or the pool, those traditional havens of carefree and immodest display, even nudity. The pretense of bagginess equaling comfort finally crumbles in this context where nakedness, let’s face it, is the ideal. As clothing is added, comfort is reduced; as skin is covered, pleasure is diminished. Swimming is also called bathing, after all—and there’s a certain lunacy to bathing in baggy pants. Yet men and boys do just that and do it willingly, a blatant example of senseless and counterintuitive behavior that can be sustained only through persistent conditioning and aggressive marketing.
No one would want swimwear which is designed to be heavy and hot and uncomfortable unless they’ve been convinced of its overriding necessity, its deep importance as symbol and totem, its value and its virtue as a uniform of hetero identity, hetero allegiance, hetero belonging. This is institutionalized “street fashion” and “counterculture” at its most corporate, its most commercial, its most relentlessly cynical.
The body phobia
produced by roughly fifteen years of this protocol and its unyielding dress code is real and drastic, an entire generation of boys trained to despise their own physiques, to look at themselves with debilitating shame.
Such an assertion might be dismissed as hyperbole, as paranoid rhetoric, as shrill alarmism—except for testimony from corporate insiders such as Stuart Isaac, vice president of sports promotions for Speedo, the company responsible for developing the new Fastskin swimsuit. This full-body suit has helped to rekindle interest in competitive swimming among young males. Why? According to Isaac himself, in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times, boys have been “turned off” from swimming in recent years because of “their reluctance to wear a tiny suit in public.” But now, even for those kids unable to afford the full Fastskin bodysuit, Speedo and other companies have come to the rescue with a modified version, with trunks similar to bicycle shorts which are long enough—again according to Stuart Isaac—to help “alleviate concerns.”
That’s right: Boys can now stop worrying that anyone might ever again see them improperly exposed in those “tiny” suits, thanks to corporate America and institutionalized Hetero Correctness. The cardinal sin of those tiny suits, let’s not forget, being their inherent gayness. Always that equation now between showing off the body and being queer.
A recent PBS show called Shore Thing offered its own wry confirmation, wondering how best to distinguish a gay beach from its straight counterparts, then answering,
“Well, the suits are smaller and tighter here. . .”
Of course. Or take this definitive summation from yet another Chicago Sun-Times article about male swimwear:
“Anything tight on a guy—regardless of physique—is unattractive. Loose is better. For men, loose should be the only way to go.”
OK. Enough said. End of discussion.
Recently, it seems, even mainstream media have recognized something oddly pathological about these current male attitudes and behaviors, coining the term “Rude Boy culture” in an attempt to make sense of the senseless.
Consider an article from the February 5, 2001 issue of Time, which observes that
“Rude Boy culture has a determined self-loathing streak”;
that this Rude Boy culture
“treats women as sex objects while implying that men are morons”;
that, indeed, there is
“even a root uneasiness with maleness itself in some Rude Boy culture.”
All obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention. Males have abandoned the Body Erotic to females and adopted the role of gangster, of thug, of sideshow psycho, trapped in this dysfunctional persona of their own creation with no hope for escape.
In a fever of overcompensation, these predatory Rude Boys have hyper-sexualized females into what can only be described as sluttish prey. Females themselves have responded with avid complicity, smugly content in their monopoly of all things erotic and seductive, showing off more and more of themselves while males show less and less.
What’s popular now with girls, as the Washington Post and other sources have reported, are salacious items such as “booty shorts” that leave the body as bare as possible, a vogue known among designers and retailers as the “nude look.” The resulting confluence of these baggy boys and these next-to-naked girls—in any music video, for example—can be a jarringly surrealistic sight, like the freakish dalliance between some gang of deranged circus clowns and their hooker consorts.
In all this cultural debris,
does any trace remain of that effulgence of male display from the Sixties, the Seventies, the early Eighties? There does, yes, but only those bits and pieces that pose no threat to the strict tenets of Hetero Correctness.
A harmless vestige of the Eighties such as People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” is one high-profile example. Soap opera studs and Baywatch hunks are another, their type of bare-chested manliness still perceived as safely orthodox, their above-the-waist mode of display still acceptable. Below the waist, of course, would stigmatize them as queer—which is why Mad TV, Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Conan O’Brien, The Drew Carey Show, etc., all have portrayed “gay” characters wearing tight short-shorts or tiny Speedos for quick and easy audience recognition.
One intriguing exception to this otherwise hard-and-fast rule is professional wrestling, where many performers still compete in the scanty spandex trunks of a bygone era. This is allowed, perhaps, because of the cartoonish and fantastical nature of the wrestlers themselves, as if these ersatz superheroes and villains have been given some special license to play dress-up, to create their own alien extravaganza of brawling beefcake.
Fascinating, therefore, the enormous popularity of this spectacle throughout the culture at large, and among teenaged boys in particular. Is the bizarre homoerotic subtext itself part of the attraction? Is there a yearning, especially in the male psyche, for something lost and irretrievable? Maybe professional wrestling functions, on some deeply unspoken level, as a boisterous guilty pleasure for a culture demoralized by years of hetero orthodoxy and regimentation, a culture hungry for that type of uninhibited male flamboyance now taboo in everyday life.
And maybe, while rummaging for clues and subtext, we should ponder, just briefly, the head-to-toe veiling of fundamentalist Muslim women.
Is there some analogy between that tradition of the hijab and what’s happening now throughout America and its cultural colonies? Are young men and boys wearing their own hip-hop version of the Iranian chador and the Afghan burqa?
There’s much of the same self-loathing in these seemingly disparate situations, the same body shame and phobia, the same fanatical control of public bodily display by an overseer establishment, the same mortifying submission to one’s own depersonalization.
It’s most intriguing, though, to remember that those Muslim women are veiled, according to doctrine, as a means of blunting male desire. The female form is regarded with a sort of superstitious reverence and trepidation, as something precious that must be protected but also as something dangerously provocative that must be kept covered and suppressed.
Have American males turned this same type of custodial fanaticism against themselves?
Are boys, in this country, the forbidden temptation that must always be jealously hidden?
Are boys the intoxicating provocateurs who must be kept covered and suppressed?
Are men and boys cowering from their own treacherous bodies beneath those layers of baggy clothing?
If so, what a demented saga of inverted sexual repression and longing and self-denial these last fifteen years have been.
That must be the answer.
That metaphor of the hijab must finally explain the tenacity of what might have been and should have been nothing but a passing folly. The spell of hetero allegiance continues to exert its own powerful hold, of course, any retreat from bagginess now tantamount to gender betrayal—but put aside even that. Put aside also those tunnel-visioned explanations of bagginess as an outgrowth of the urban crime-scape, as merely a bizarre expedient for hiding weapons and drugs.
Here’s the truth:
Boys are beautiful, every bit as beautiful as girls, therefore boys must be kept covered. Bagginess is necessary for hiding the reality of that male beauty. The indisputable visual evidence of that beauty, quite simply, must forever be kept under wraps. How else to preserve a strong and united hetero front? To keep the faithful in thrall? How else to perpetuate the fallacy of masculine ugliness? To maintain the illusion of males as somehow aesthetically and erotically inferior to females? Only one way: Keep boys covered in baggy hip-hop chadors. Keep their bodies and their beauty carefully concealed. Otherwise, the hetero protocol collapses.
But why search for meaning or understanding?
After all the fuss and bother and overwrought analysis, aren’t we just dealing with silly trivialities of dress and appearance? Why worry about such things? Why care? So much easier to play along, to join the pack, to scoff at anyone who might differ or question. But that old Socratic maxim holds true for cultures as well as individuals: The unexamined cultural life, you could aptly paraphrase, is not worth living. Like it or not, there is significance to the way people dress themselves. Deep significance, for example, to the corseted primness of Victorian females. Deep and age-old significance to military and paramilitary uniforms, to clerical vestments, to the black garb of ultra-Orthodox Jewish males, to those Iranian chadors and those Afghan burqas. And deep significance, for those willing to see it, to the bagginess of today’s men and boys.
Clothing has meaning.
Clothing sends powerful messages. There’s a way to dress that enhances and flatters the body, that proudly exhibits the body; there’s another that disrespects and debases the body, that announces shame. There’s a way to dress that shows off, that displays, that expresses self-respect and a joyous pride in one’s own beauty and strength and worth; there’s another that conceals and hides, that uglifies, that expresses self-loathing and hostility and a gloomy contempt for one’s own worthlessness.
A way that says my body is good and should be celebrated; another that says my body is bad and should be despised and covered. Ignoring these meanings and these messages is the worst kind of intellectual corruption, something cowardly and gullible in the easy denial of the utterly obvious, in the surrender to blindness and conformity with never a word of protest or challenge, such an undignified embrace of the hateful, the stupid, the oafish.
But if there’s any conspiracy to be found in all of this, it’s one of silence. Men and boys seldom if ever have understood or verbalized the motives behind their own foolish appearance, no need for pronouncements or tirades.
Once the protocol of Hetero Correctness was established some fifteen years ago, complete with its aggressively anti-gay dress code, nothing but its own momentum was necessary to carry it forward. Always a visceral and intuitive entanglement of behaviors, this protocol requires no list of instructions or explicit marching orders. It’s a protocol and a manifesto of the heart, not the head. And now, after these many years, no one even notices or wonders about the strangeness of it all.
This style that is no style, this fashion that is no fashion has become the natural order, the dreary status quo. Girls are pretty; boys are ugly. Girls are sexy and seductive; boys are goonish and repellent. Girls are prey; boys are predators. Their clothing proclaims this gospel to a world long since converted and transfixed.
So what’s the answer, finally, to that puzzled boy’s question?
Is it true that gay guys wear tight pants to let other guys check out their butts? Sure, some of them, it’s a sensible enough strategy—but only those heretical few who’ve not yet camouflaged themselves in the bagginess of straight anonymity. For the most part, that boy need not worry; guys in tight pants are little more than a memory these days. Young males, in fact, might have no memory of them at all, might have trouble even believing that their fathers and uncles and older brothers once dressed, oh my god, like queers.
Nearly impossible now to make anyone understand how that once-upon-a-time loosening of inhibition and social restraint gave birth, however briefly, to an American heyday of honest desire, honestly expressed. Nearly impossible to imagine how that genie could have escaped the bottle for roughly twenty years, somehow allowing this American culture its heady fling of Boy Worship before the guardians of hetero orthodoxy were awakened to action.
More than just odd or charmingly old-fashioned, those pre-1985 filmic and photographic images of young males now strike the eye something like anthropological curiosities, like images of some lost branch of the human family tree. Or like some third, unique gender now gone extinct. The lost Boy-nymph. The vanished Boy-coquette.
Inconceivable that those exotic, come-hither creatures in their itty-bitty shorts and crotch-bulging jeans could have evolved into the baggy, shapeless clown-thugs of today. There’s an aesthetic discontinuity between them that should make anyone dizzy, those immodest show-offs from yesteryear surely some alien species or gender that mysteriously came and went, victimized by one of those cataclysmic extinctions that leave nothing but tantalizing relics and a rumor of decadent splendor.
Any other explanation is too unsettling, any serious assessment of the truth too bitter, too harsh, difficult even to contemplate a culture that would turn against itself so viciously, that would destroy some rare and beautiful part of itself simply out of hatred and ignorance and sexual hysteria. It’s a loss that everyone secretly must sense, secretly must share. Like music gone silent. Like laughter cut dead.
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