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
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.
Friday, July 21, 2006
The machine we are part of hums a death song
Written by Jan Lundberg
Culture Change Letter #106 - July 27, 2005
The upcoming breakdown and subsequent reconvergence of human society have only certain features in common with the 1960s turmoil and enlightenment. The vaunted/feared '60s were part of the Age of Exuberance -- as William Catton described our expenditure of nonrenewable energy. I would say, as an observer of the Counterculture, that the reason the "'60s Revolution" failed was because one of its main premises was enjoying petroleum vinyl musical records -- significantly, protest music -- powered overwhelmingly by "unlimited" fossil energy!
I was so enamored with the music of my generation that I worried how it could be preserved and heard into the future if technology and resources did not forever accommodate. This occasionally concerned me as much as even the war, although the U.S. was finally getting kicked out of Indochina. All through this way of living I was not aware how mechanized the greater surrounding culture was. The hippies and various writers tried to oppose it and live differently, but today we all find ourselves part of a bigger, faster machine. It is more out of control today than decades ago, yet almost the entire segment of the intelligentsia that is aware, i.e., not anticipating a new-fangled energy panacea to perpetuate the machine, is willy-nilly waiting for collapse as the reason to live within Earth's limits.
The '60s activists and hipsters and today's concerned progressive citizens don't seem to question the technology that uses up nonrenewable resources and pollutes the fragile world. The result is that they inadvertently tried (and are trying) to save the system, in effect, by hoping it would clean up its act as global policeman and grossest polluter of the planet.
Yet, it would be vintage '60s for someone to say today, "How can you dare destroy the Earth?" But: through it all, our noisy culture and the dead artifacts we treasure, the mechanized and electrified population hums like a machine. We surely know it's not voices or human sounds when we hear the din of the petrocity.
The 20th century was fueled primarily by petroleum, the number one energy source in the U.S. today. Although there is a lot around, petroleum has long since peaked in extraction in North America. The world peaked in oil discoveries in 1965, resulting in today's mirroring of global peak extraction. If a billion barrels of oil were suddenly added to world reserves today, this would push back the time of global peak extraction by only five and a half days.
The size of today's cities is mind-boggling, with over a dozen exceeding 12 million people. Two of those are in the U.S. The U.S. is the third largest populace in the world, and the huge majority is urban, when we keep in mind that only 2% of the population lists farming as its vocation. About 90% of the food produced would not be possible without petroleum-oriented farming. Far more than 90% of the food is provided via oil fuels for transport. A majority of the average North American's food is refrigerated or frozen at some point, involving massive amounts of energy.
To most folks, whether urban or rural, the mental association with the city is positive in many respects. People's feelings are by and large more than tolerant about civilization and machines, especially refrigerators which are supposedly entirely benign, This testifies to the power of socialization, propaganda, and corruption of one's ability to think honestly and independently, when we admit that mass urbanization and energy gluttony are a disaster barely felt thus far. The amenities of the modern city are attractive, but are about as relevant to long-term survival as whether this year's fashion in skirts is short or long.
Being part of the speedy machine
The speed of modern living is still accelerating. Our pace and so-called obligations steal our time to relax and pay attention to things that matter more to the soul than, say, paychecks from the rat race. Peace is absent from our minds and bodies the more we speed through our days. Some cope via a little meditation, although almost no modern American dares take a few days to slow down to fast with just water in order to heal and reflect. Ironically, the number one illicit drug is speed (methamphetamine), and as with the milder form of speed, coffee, the abuser is trying to function or react according to society's speedy demands.
One way to understand the reasons for our relentless speeding is to compare modern individuals to parts of a machine that we usually call The City. If we identify ourselves as such, perhaps the constant, self-destructive, immediate pressure to make the dollar can receive stronger critical attention. We can rebel, which seems unlikely now, or just wait for unprecedented force of social change triggered by strained resource limits and accelerating climate distortion.
Overpopulation is a primary cause, but growing population serves as a moving target that society is totally unwilling to act on. More machine parts, or more fuel for the machine -- more of us -- is quite desirable to the respected maniacs of growth and unlimited profits. Making more people is still encouraged even though it has been unnecessary and detrimental for hundreds of years since "exponential growth" began.
Meanwhile, the massive ignorance is staggeringly sad when it could be remedied immediately: The average North American motorist is only driving 5 MPH (five miles per hour) based on the total time required to be in, support and maintain the car. Therefore, the roughly one hundred million cars in the U.S. are simply revving the urban machine in an illusion of speed. If people abandoned this illusion and started quietly walking the 5 MPH instead, or bicycling at 20 MPH, improving their health and awareness, they would be most of the way along to realistically remaking their lives and extricating themselves from the maw of the machine.
The bicycle is not just unappreciated; it is targeted by some misguided police departments who want to get in on the growth industry of Homeland Security funding while at the same time persecuting folk who don't support the full-blown consumer economy as exemplified by car culture. New York City has cracked down on large group bike rides as if they threaten Americans like the London bombers threatened transit riders. It is important to keep in mind that the machine known as the city is a police state, a natural consequence of overcrowding.
It is said that fish don't realize they're in water. We are likewise connected to the always humming city-machine, and we are always in the environment of the machine but for momentary escapes via automobile. I would like people to understand what they are surrounded by, and that today's city be acknowledged not just as noisy, dirty and unhealthful, but also as an unfriendly entity using us up as if we are pellets of machine fuel. The city consumes land just around it like a cancer, but even greater is the "ecological footprint" of the average U.S. city: 19 times the city's own area due to distant resources appropriated by empire and corporate colonialism.
"Though we may be part of a machine system..."
We do not have to deny our nature-selves and write off living close to the land as some forgotten primitive dream. We will continue experiencing the city-machine hum until we again have silence we have not known for many decades. The skies were quiet over the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Picture the same thing applying to ground transportation as well, day after day, indefinitely, all over the world. Could this presage the universal and possibly permanent return to nature, as despoiled as it is?
The city actually hums in a dull and smoggy roar similar to distant surf. Some of the frequencies are off the human charts but affect us nonetheless, whether they be industrial or secret/government generated. But the fact that the city hums -- this deserves the duck test: Does it walk like a duck, talk like a duck... It must be a (machine).
We have established that the city is a machine, and plugged-in human city residents are machine parts or machine fodder. But this does not mean we are literally machines, yet: some corporate institutions and their scientists are working on it. If we don't want to be a part of such a mechanized, technological culture without a future, we must actually unplug our noisy, costly refrigerators (oh my gosh, the barbarity!) and live as the world has always lived prior to recent industrialization. Where futurists disagree is whether we have a choice in ending up in or escaping a diabolical nanotech world of domination.
Our having become little machines also means that with machinery, many things are accomplished much quicker than without machinery, and machine (technological) dependency has led to an addiction to faster living and the creation of tremendous stress. The stress is in part due to the never-ceasing hum of the machine and society's inhumane demand to have the citizen perform as a machine instead of as a tender being in need of love, hospitality and understanding.
Although "The Machine" is going to sputter and die, there is rebirth as part of the inevitable passing of an inaminate, cold entity that took up space, time and energy.
Awareness of our machine existence seems to be absent among people who see little problem with the rapid paving of the Earth, the roads and cars, the airplanes, the proliferation of monstrously large buildings, the massive wiring and cellularizing, the hum of the city machine, etc. Or, if people are aware, they don't care -- as long as they can get their gasoline and food, not to mention other more tantalizing goodies.
Some of us are aware of the system we have erected as a machine needing to be dismantled or changed into a living organism -- for the sake of our common survival and the health of the biosphere -- but we are all part of the system. A general is more part of it than a fruit-stand entrepreneur, but we are all mixed in or plugged in.
An illustration of that idea that's closer to home: I have been invited to give a speech at Congressman Roscoe Bartlett's energy conference this fall. What we are all starting to learn is that it doesn't matter if someone is more tied to the system than someone else when we have to come together to deal with an unprecedented crisis. We have to start redefining success and change the culture, as Congressman Bartlett says.
The positive, don't forget!
Just knowing we have built a machine that's humming along, one that is opposed to nature and our own needs as sensitive beings, is a start toward dismantling negative structures. Humans are clever and diverse, and a small number are speedily working on a non-machine approach to daily living. As they are outside the machine to a significant degree, their ways are not entirely workable according to the rules of the machine and those who serve it.
However, as an investment in the future, sustainable living and social tools for survival are to be valued as better than gold. Our next essay is on just this question: how do we behave and change our ways in order to achieve sustainability, simplicity and slower living? Please write in your suggestions for a fun concept: What would you like to see practiced on a "Petrocollapse Rehearsal Day"? I have selected Sept 21, the fall equinox, as the Beginning of (the) Fall. Obvious ideas include using no cars, electricity, running water or plastic. Perhaps such a day will even be observed, and the public will create notes and share the experience.
Being at one with the Earth has gone out of style according to modern society, as if manufactured contraptions and accelerated entropy are fair trade offs. However, there are some hard-core nature lovers who live close to nature, and their articulate expressions for their preferences and ethics may become all the rage -- at least in the hopes of this columnist. This is yet another area of inquiry that can use input from the Culture Change readership. Your comments are welcome. Look forward to another Culture Change report on returning to our hunter-gatherer roots despite the impending wreckage of petroleum civilization that has given us consumer convenience such as the cancer epidemic.
If the machine is humming its death song, we should recognize it and not just cover our ears. "Destroy what destroys you" is the response of anarchists promoting their own bravado, and it is unfeasible as well as uncompassionate. So, what to do? Gandhi's principles of noncooperation and nonparticipation, with village crafts for self-sufficiency, may still be the best strategy -- updated, of course, to our era of maximum pavement and machine domination. Monkey-wrenching the machine can be as simple as not buying a new car, if enough people participate consciously, or will come to pass soon enough: Financial meltdown of the economy and/or petroleum supply failure will hoist corporate globalism on its own petard. The machine paradigm will be its own undoing.
Written by Jan Lundberg
Culture Change Letter #106 - July 27, 2005
The upcoming breakdown and subsequent reconvergence of human society have only certain features in common with the 1960s turmoil and enlightenment. The vaunted/feared '60s were part of the Age of Exuberance -- as William Catton described our expenditure of nonrenewable energy. I would say, as an observer of the Counterculture, that the reason the "'60s Revolution" failed was because one of its main premises was enjoying petroleum vinyl musical records -- significantly, protest music -- powered overwhelmingly by "unlimited" fossil energy!
I was so enamored with the music of my generation that I worried how it could be preserved and heard into the future if technology and resources did not forever accommodate. This occasionally concerned me as much as even the war, although the U.S. was finally getting kicked out of Indochina. All through this way of living I was not aware how mechanized the greater surrounding culture was. The hippies and various writers tried to oppose it and live differently, but today we all find ourselves part of a bigger, faster machine. It is more out of control today than decades ago, yet almost the entire segment of the intelligentsia that is aware, i.e., not anticipating a new-fangled energy panacea to perpetuate the machine, is willy-nilly waiting for collapse as the reason to live within Earth's limits.
The '60s activists and hipsters and today's concerned progressive citizens don't seem to question the technology that uses up nonrenewable resources and pollutes the fragile world. The result is that they inadvertently tried (and are trying) to save the system, in effect, by hoping it would clean up its act as global policeman and grossest polluter of the planet.
Yet, it would be vintage '60s for someone to say today, "How can you dare destroy the Earth?" But: through it all, our noisy culture and the dead artifacts we treasure, the mechanized and electrified population hums like a machine. We surely know it's not voices or human sounds when we hear the din of the petrocity.
The 20th century was fueled primarily by petroleum, the number one energy source in the U.S. today. Although there is a lot around, petroleum has long since peaked in extraction in North America. The world peaked in oil discoveries in 1965, resulting in today's mirroring of global peak extraction. If a billion barrels of oil were suddenly added to world reserves today, this would push back the time of global peak extraction by only five and a half days.
The size of today's cities is mind-boggling, with over a dozen exceeding 12 million people. Two of those are in the U.S. The U.S. is the third largest populace in the world, and the huge majority is urban, when we keep in mind that only 2% of the population lists farming as its vocation. About 90% of the food produced would not be possible without petroleum-oriented farming. Far more than 90% of the food is provided via oil fuels for transport. A majority of the average North American's food is refrigerated or frozen at some point, involving massive amounts of energy.
To most folks, whether urban or rural, the mental association with the city is positive in many respects. People's feelings are by and large more than tolerant about civilization and machines, especially refrigerators which are supposedly entirely benign, This testifies to the power of socialization, propaganda, and corruption of one's ability to think honestly and independently, when we admit that mass urbanization and energy gluttony are a disaster barely felt thus far. The amenities of the modern city are attractive, but are about as relevant to long-term survival as whether this year's fashion in skirts is short or long.
Being part of the speedy machine
The speed of modern living is still accelerating. Our pace and so-called obligations steal our time to relax and pay attention to things that matter more to the soul than, say, paychecks from the rat race. Peace is absent from our minds and bodies the more we speed through our days. Some cope via a little meditation, although almost no modern American dares take a few days to slow down to fast with just water in order to heal and reflect. Ironically, the number one illicit drug is speed (methamphetamine), and as with the milder form of speed, coffee, the abuser is trying to function or react according to society's speedy demands.
One way to understand the reasons for our relentless speeding is to compare modern individuals to parts of a machine that we usually call The City. If we identify ourselves as such, perhaps the constant, self-destructive, immediate pressure to make the dollar can receive stronger critical attention. We can rebel, which seems unlikely now, or just wait for unprecedented force of social change triggered by strained resource limits and accelerating climate distortion.
Overpopulation is a primary cause, but growing population serves as a moving target that society is totally unwilling to act on. More machine parts, or more fuel for the machine -- more of us -- is quite desirable to the respected maniacs of growth and unlimited profits. Making more people is still encouraged even though it has been unnecessary and detrimental for hundreds of years since "exponential growth" began.
Meanwhile, the massive ignorance is staggeringly sad when it could be remedied immediately: The average North American motorist is only driving 5 MPH (five miles per hour) based on the total time required to be in, support and maintain the car. Therefore, the roughly one hundred million cars in the U.S. are simply revving the urban machine in an illusion of speed. If people abandoned this illusion and started quietly walking the 5 MPH instead, or bicycling at 20 MPH, improving their health and awareness, they would be most of the way along to realistically remaking their lives and extricating themselves from the maw of the machine.
The bicycle is not just unappreciated; it is targeted by some misguided police departments who want to get in on the growth industry of Homeland Security funding while at the same time persecuting folk who don't support the full-blown consumer economy as exemplified by car culture. New York City has cracked down on large group bike rides as if they threaten Americans like the London bombers threatened transit riders. It is important to keep in mind that the machine known as the city is a police state, a natural consequence of overcrowding.
It is said that fish don't realize they're in water. We are likewise connected to the always humming city-machine, and we are always in the environment of the machine but for momentary escapes via automobile. I would like people to understand what they are surrounded by, and that today's city be acknowledged not just as noisy, dirty and unhealthful, but also as an unfriendly entity using us up as if we are pellets of machine fuel. The city consumes land just around it like a cancer, but even greater is the "ecological footprint" of the average U.S. city: 19 times the city's own area due to distant resources appropriated by empire and corporate colonialism.
"Though we may be part of a machine system..."
We do not have to deny our nature-selves and write off living close to the land as some forgotten primitive dream. We will continue experiencing the city-machine hum until we again have silence we have not known for many decades. The skies were quiet over the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Picture the same thing applying to ground transportation as well, day after day, indefinitely, all over the world. Could this presage the universal and possibly permanent return to nature, as despoiled as it is?
The city actually hums in a dull and smoggy roar similar to distant surf. Some of the frequencies are off the human charts but affect us nonetheless, whether they be industrial or secret/government generated. But the fact that the city hums -- this deserves the duck test: Does it walk like a duck, talk like a duck... It must be a (machine).
We have established that the city is a machine, and plugged-in human city residents are machine parts or machine fodder. But this does not mean we are literally machines, yet: some corporate institutions and their scientists are working on it. If we don't want to be a part of such a mechanized, technological culture without a future, we must actually unplug our noisy, costly refrigerators (oh my gosh, the barbarity!) and live as the world has always lived prior to recent industrialization. Where futurists disagree is whether we have a choice in ending up in or escaping a diabolical nanotech world of domination.
Our having become little machines also means that with machinery, many things are accomplished much quicker than without machinery, and machine (technological) dependency has led to an addiction to faster living and the creation of tremendous stress. The stress is in part due to the never-ceasing hum of the machine and society's inhumane demand to have the citizen perform as a machine instead of as a tender being in need of love, hospitality and understanding.
Although "The Machine" is going to sputter and die, there is rebirth as part of the inevitable passing of an inaminate, cold entity that took up space, time and energy.
Awareness of our machine existence seems to be absent among people who see little problem with the rapid paving of the Earth, the roads and cars, the airplanes, the proliferation of monstrously large buildings, the massive wiring and cellularizing, the hum of the city machine, etc. Or, if people are aware, they don't care -- as long as they can get their gasoline and food, not to mention other more tantalizing goodies.
Some of us are aware of the system we have erected as a machine needing to be dismantled or changed into a living organism -- for the sake of our common survival and the health of the biosphere -- but we are all part of the system. A general is more part of it than a fruit-stand entrepreneur, but we are all mixed in or plugged in.
An illustration of that idea that's closer to home: I have been invited to give a speech at Congressman Roscoe Bartlett's energy conference this fall. What we are all starting to learn is that it doesn't matter if someone is more tied to the system than someone else when we have to come together to deal with an unprecedented crisis. We have to start redefining success and change the culture, as Congressman Bartlett says.
The positive, don't forget!
Just knowing we have built a machine that's humming along, one that is opposed to nature and our own needs as sensitive beings, is a start toward dismantling negative structures. Humans are clever and diverse, and a small number are speedily working on a non-machine approach to daily living. As they are outside the machine to a significant degree, their ways are not entirely workable according to the rules of the machine and those who serve it.
However, as an investment in the future, sustainable living and social tools for survival are to be valued as better than gold. Our next essay is on just this question: how do we behave and change our ways in order to achieve sustainability, simplicity and slower living? Please write in your suggestions for a fun concept: What would you like to see practiced on a "Petrocollapse Rehearsal Day"? I have selected Sept 21, the fall equinox, as the Beginning of (the) Fall. Obvious ideas include using no cars, electricity, running water or plastic. Perhaps such a day will even be observed, and the public will create notes and share the experience.
Being at one with the Earth has gone out of style according to modern society, as if manufactured contraptions and accelerated entropy are fair trade offs. However, there are some hard-core nature lovers who live close to nature, and their articulate expressions for their preferences and ethics may become all the rage -- at least in the hopes of this columnist. This is yet another area of inquiry that can use input from the Culture Change readership. Your comments are welcome. Look forward to another Culture Change report on returning to our hunter-gatherer roots despite the impending wreckage of petroleum civilization that has given us consumer convenience such as the cancer epidemic.
If the machine is humming its death song, we should recognize it and not just cover our ears. "Destroy what destroys you" is the response of anarchists promoting their own bravado, and it is unfeasible as well as uncompassionate. So, what to do? Gandhi's principles of noncooperation and nonparticipation, with village crafts for self-sufficiency, may still be the best strategy -- updated, of course, to our era of maximum pavement and machine domination. Monkey-wrenching the machine can be as simple as not buying a new car, if enough people participate consciously, or will come to pass soon enough: Financial meltdown of the economy and/or petroleum supply failure will hoist corporate globalism on its own petard. The machine paradigm will be its own undoing.
How To Save The World
By Dave Eriqat
10 April, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Preface
Awakening as the day’s first rays of sunlight brighten my bedroom, I dress hurriedly and run downstairs. Even though it’s a Saturday, I’m eager to get to “work.” Passing through the kitchen on my way to the back door, I notice that my wife, Anna, has already made some coffee. Pouring myself a cup, I take it with me as I head out the back door on my way to my workshop. My workshop is where I work. I’ve been self employed as a furniture maker for a couple of years now, and presently I’m working on a fine dresser for my neighbor, Sam. As I cross the yard on the way to my workshop, I see Anna tending our garden. Our young son William is feeding our small flock of chickens and other animals, intermittently playing with our two beautiful dogs.
We’ve had so many tomatoes this year that we’ve been trading them to the neighbors for their surplus produce. It’s been absolutely marvelous to enjoy such a variety of fresh, organic produce in this abundant year. I still recall the tasteless, wax-like produce we used to buy in the commercial grocery stores years ago, thinking that was normal. I’d never shop in another grocery store for produce after tasting what I and my neighbors can produce.
In addition to tomatoes, our garden produces several dozen other types of fruits, vegetables, beans, and herbs. Besides corn that we acquire from local farmers, we feed our chickens food scraps that we would otherwise throw away. In return our chickens produce the best tasting eggs imaginable, their poop is a surprisingly good fertilizer, and they are effective pest controllers. In all, our plot of land produces about half our food. The other half comes from my talent as a furniture maker. The dresser I’m making for Sam will provide us with meat from his farm for several months.
I used to work in Manhattan as an accountant for a large firm, where I was paid a large salary. My wife and I owned a great condo, a nice car, and had all the trendiest gadgets. We dined in the finest restaurants, went to Broadway shows, and occasionally flew first class to Europe. We really thought we were “fulfilled.” One day, while reading about the “downshifting” trend in Europe, I realized just how unfulfilling our life really was. I also came to appreciate how little control we had over our lives. I was totally dependent on my employer to maintain our precarious existence. Without my high paying job, we’d promptly be forced to give up our nice condo, car, and luxurious living. I discussed these thoughts with my wife, but it took many months for the truth of my words to sink in to both of us. We weren’t “living” in any real sense; we were existing. Worse, we were not in control of our lives, but existed at the whim of the executives controlling my firm. After much talk, we sold our condo and car, moved to rural Kentucky, and bought an old house with some land. It was a major transition for us, especially since we didn’t know a soul there, but the lifestyle quickly grew on us. The most surreal thing about our new life was the absence of stress about finances, job security, noise, crime, etc. I daresay, we had unwittingly found paradise. While we never thought about having children when we lived in Manhattan, somehow, living in the country made childrearing seem like the most natural thing in the world, and it wasn’t long after we moved to that paradise that Anna became pregnant with our first child.
Today we largely support ourselves. We produce much of our own food. My talent is in great demand. I currently have orders for half a dozen pieces of furniture from my neighbors, all in exchange for products of their labor. I no longer have any fear about my job security.
Moreover, we’ve shunned much of the materialism we once regarded as essential to living. We don’t subscribe to cable television; our television is used only for watching movies on DVDs which we share amongst our community. We got rid of our fancy car and bought an old pickup truck, but we rarely even drive that because pretty much everything we need is near enough that we can use our bicycles. We have no technological gadgets, not even a mobile phone. We have a computer and a dialup Internet connection, which we use for e-mail and reading news online. Our life is much simpler than it was, but we are happier. Looking back, it’s surprising how much stress came from having to acquire and maintain all those gadgets we thought were so vital. Besides working, we spend a lot of time talking to each other, visiting with our friendly neighbors, playing cards with them, and reading books that we also share amongst our community. Even our limited dependence on our neighbors has reintroduced us to the concept of tolerance for others’ differences. Anna is now learning to knit sweaters from one of our neighbors, whom in New York we would have considered too odd to associate with. And now my brother, who is worried about his own job security, has decided to move here. We’re looking for a house for him now, and it will be wonderful to have him and his wife living near us.
Introduction
Responding to my essay titled “The End of Civilization”, some people suggested I should write about the solutions I referred to in passing. The foregoing fiction is meant to introduce readers of this essay to what I see as one solution to the many crises facing humanity and our planet. In a nutshell, my solution to what ails us and our planet is this: reject consumerism, globalization, corporatism, and government, and return to localized, productive, community-oriented, sustainable living. The purpose of this essay is not to condemn, criticize, or judge anyone, but to get people to open their minds to the possibility of a different way of living than what they’ve been taught to pursue. Although I frequently refer to the United States, much of what I have to say applies to the whole industrialized world.
Production Versus Consumption
The United States economy today largely revolves around consumption. Everywhere one turns in this country they are bombarded with messages telling them to consume, consume, consume. One can even see such advertising today on the risers of steps in subway stations! And we have responded as prodded, consuming to no end. But are we happy? I don’t think so. In fact, it seems that the people I’ve known to consume the most are the least happy. It’s as if their consumerism is a surrogate for happiness.
By contrast, enormous satisfaction comes from producing something, especially if the product embodies one’s own special talent or skill or is inspired by one’s own initiative. This, of course, is the opposite from conditions in the United States today. Listening to people talk about their jobs, it seems that most people in this country hate their jobs. Can you blame them? They are not actually producing anything of value, unless one considers working as a retail sales clerk, serving food in a restaurant, or riding telephones on a cube farm to have great value. In order to produce something of real value, one needs a skill, and possessing such a skill affords one a sense of self worth and job security. I’ll bet plumbers enjoy more job satisfaction than stock brokers.
Although people consume and consume, few, it seems, question whether their consumption is making them happier, or whether it might actually be making them unhappier. For example, you buy a mobile phone and it comes with an allotment of minutes each month and a two-year contract. Now, in order to get the maximum value out of your purchase, you feel pressure to use your full allotment of minutes, but at the same time you fear exceeding that allotment because you’ll get reamed. Later you decide you want to get a different mobile phone service, but too bad, you’re trapped in a two-year contract. Mobile phones are certainly convenient, but think back before we had them. We also didn’t have to worry about receiving phone calls at unappreciated times, getting work-related calls at home, remembering to pay another monthly bill, using up our allotted minutes, or being locked in a contract. Or take that latest trendy gadget you bought. Did it work perfectly, or did you pull your hair out trying to get it to work satisfactorily? And how did you feel when, right after you spent your hard-earned money on that gadget, a better model came out at a lower price? Six months later, was it sitting dormant on a shelf in a closet? Might you have been happier if you simply hadn’t bought it in the first place? Consider that if you had not bought that gadget, you might have experienced less stress and have more money in the bank or less debt on your credit card today.
Obviously, we need to consume some things, such as food, in order to survive. Clothes to wear are nice too. But needless consumption, either because we’re programmed by advertising to consume or because we’re searching in vain for something to make us happy, merely increases our debt and depletes our planet’s vital resources. If instead of indiscriminately consuming everything in sight, we consumed only what we really needed, and then produced ourselves that which we consumed, we’d be a lot happier and wealthier, and our planet would thank us for it.
Local Versus Global
I’m not suggesting that we should each manufacture everything we use. What I’m saying is that we should look to ourselves first; if we cannot provide what we need, then we should look to our neighbors; then our town; then we should reconsider if we really need the thing; finally, and only as a last resort, look outside our local community. Imports should be the exception, not the norm. Some people might argue that imports result in cheaper products. This is precisely the problem with our way of life. Because everything is too cheap we consume and consume. If things cost more, we’d consume only what we needed, and when we did consume locally produced products, it would benefit our families and neighbors, not faceless corporations in faraway lands.
Twice in the last year I’ve seen in local grocery stores garlic from China for sale! Think about that for a moment. This tiny bag of garlic, which is being sold for about one dollar, traveled more than five thousand miles from China to California. Does that make sense, especially when the town of Gilroy, California, just four hundred miles away, is a major producer of garlic? This is an example of what’s so terribly wrong with globalization. It may well be cheaper in the cold, hard accounting of dollars and cents to farm garlic in China and ship it all the way to California, but what about the precious oil consumed and extra pollution generated by shipping it? What about the jobs lost in the United States? Just because we don’t have a good way to quantify these costs doesn’t mean that their cost is zero, that we can simply ignore them. I think most people would intuitively agree that shipping garlic from China to California makes no sense. This story about garlic is a trivial example, but multiplied by thousands of other products being shipped and sold in fantastic volumes and the problem becomes considerably more serious.
Imagine, on the other hand, that you exchanged some tomatoes you grew in your yard for garlic that your next door neighbor grew in his yard. How much more efficient and sustainable is this hypothetical scenario, compared to the absurd real-life scenario described above?
One of the greatest tragedies of modern America is the decimation of its small town “Main Streets” through globalized competition. It used to be that a small business owner would set up a business in their local community, the employees of this business would be family members or neighbors, the profits would be reinvested in the local community. The prices might have been higher than those of globalized businesses, but a higher level of service would have been provided as well. Such businesses fostered community stability and created a decent standard of living for generation after generation. Many of the people who once owned their own small businesses in such small towns now work for the very globalized corporations that helped put them out of business. In our consumerist frenzy to find the lowest prices we have unwittingly put ourselves out of business, so to speak.
We could return to the days where we shopped in local stores, owned by our neighbors, and which sold locally manufactured goods. We can afford to pay higher prices to local merchants by shopping more judiciously, by recognizing that there is intangible value in dealing with someone we know, and by appreciating the benefits afforded to our communities by such local businesses: community stability, increased standard of living, educating our young about responsibility. It’s our choice.
Community Versus Selfish Isolation
For the last century our technological innovations have helped increasingly isolate us from one another. Automobiles have afforded each person a private protective cocoon, shielding them from having to learn to interact civilly with others, as one must do on public transit. Video and music players have permitted people to enjoy movies and music at home instead of having to be respectful of and courteous to others at the theater. Telephones and e-mail have made it possible for people to avoid face-to-face communication, or confrontation, as the case may be. I have to confess that I’m guilty of excessive reliance on some these modern technologies myself. I use e-mail extensively, and for years I have preferred to watch movies at home. In my defense, however, e-mail is more efficient for transmitting and receiving detailed information, such as work specifications, and my preference for watching movies at home is due to the exorbitant cost of movie tickets compared to the low price of DVDs, not to mention the barrage of advertisements I’m forced to suffer in the movie theater. I would, however, happily give up these technologies in exchange for being a member of a real community.
These technologies have insidiously undermined our sense of community, without which there can be no tolerance, empathy, sharing, or charity. Indeed, for the last century what we have seen in our society is a gradual erosion of these traits of civil society. Instead of making “community” our personal responsibility, we’ve “outsourced” it to the government, relying on government to establish and enforce our moral boundaries, negotiate and mediate our relationships, and provide support to those members of society who need help. But can government really do as good a job at these things as a genuine community comprised of compassionate and engaged people?
Communities come in may forms. Some are geographical – that’s what most people think of when they think of the word “community” – and some are abstract, such as the “gay community” (I’m still trying to figure out what this is, by the way, as well as what is this “gay agenda” I keep hearing about). But the essential characteristic of a community is that it’s a group of people who voluntarily choose to associate with one another and work together, whether as a town, a neighborhood, a multi-generational family, or a hippie commune. Human beings are social creatures. We should want to associate with each other, and we are more productive and strong when we work together. That so many of us, myself included, elect to isolate ourselves is a symptom of the toxic and unhealthy social environment that we live in today. I blame this toxicity on our lazily substituting government, corporations, and consumerism for actual community, which takes hard work and a willingness to compromise to maintain.
Should we choose to return to a genuine community-oriented way of life, I think we’d all be a lot happier. In order for this to work, however, we also need to be willing to be more tolerant of each other, especially those of us who are the most different; it’s easy to tolerate those who are like you. Not only does diversity make life, particularly our social life, more interesting, but an outgrowth of tolerance is peace and harmony, something we desperately need today.
People Versus Government and Corporations
Governments and corporations seek only to dominate, control, and exploit people. Governments do it for power, while corporations do it for profit. Either because of forethought or spontaneous discovery, governments and corporations have for a century-and-a-half been wed in a symbiotic relationship that serves the principal goals of each, at the expense of people and the environment. It could be said that governments and corporations are the antithesis of life.
Today the governments of several of the world’s most industrialized countries are running amok, terrorizing their citizens, trampling their rights, seemingly desperate in their pursuit of power. As our own tolerance for each other has diminished, government has happily assumed the role of brutal enforcer in our “zero tolerance” society.
Similarly, corporations are engaged in a free-for-all exploitation of the planet and its people, aided and abetted by governments, for the profit of a few corporate executives and wealthy shareholders, and most seriously, without any regard to the future of our world. The problem with corporations today is that they no longer seem to have any restraint. The attitude seems to be not just that “greed is good,” but that if they aren’t as rapacious as they can possibly be, then one of their competitors will be. It’s almost as if corporations are in a war with one another to see which can be the more exploitative.
What can we do about this state of affairs? I really don’t know. Governments and corporations hold all the cards today. For now, though, we still own our own minds. The first step in restoring the preeminence of life over government and corporations is to recognize how much they control us. As I alluded in the preface above, when we buy into the “American Dream,” we actually become subservient to the government and corporations. We don’t need a fancy house, a fancy car, or a mobile phone with a built-in camera and Internet access to be happy. Sometimes, less is actually more.
Once we recognize that we’re being programmed to behave in ways that benefit governments and corporations, to the detriment of our very selves, and honestly address the question of what would truly make us happy, maybe then we can start taking steps in the right direction. Timothy Leary once said, “turn on, tune in, drop out.” This maxim is amazingly relevant today, and is the first step toward a healthier tomorrow.
Even if you are not willing to “drop out,” or live “off the grid,” simply examining how much governments and corporations control your daily existence will be instructive. For example, how much time do you spend in any given day complying with government rules or dealing with corporations? Just yesterday I spent about three hours preparing my income taxes, on top of the ten hours I had previously invested in that task. I also had to obtain a loan from a corporation to pay my income taxes to the government (Alas, I poorly managed my finances last year). And, in the past week I’ve had to pay bills to six different corporations. In light of all that utterly unproductive effort, I ought to be asking myself if what I’m getting in return is worth the effort.
It would be nice if we could “opt-out” of supporting the government through paying taxes. Unfortunately, the government is probably not going to go along with that idea. But we can look for legal ways to reduce our taxes. For example, by living a simpler lifestyle and augmenting our income by growing our own food, we can take a job that pays less and thereby pay less tax, while increasing our independence and sense of self-efficacy. Bartering with your neighbors is a good way to avoid taxes too, as there are no practical means for the government to tax bartering. Sharing things with your neighbors, besides fostering a sense of community, reduces spending and hence, sales taxes.
“Participation” in the political process through voting is a facade. Not only are some elections in the United States blatantly rigged today, but it really doesn’t matter who you elect to office anyway. Once in office, a politician is beholden to those who pay his or her campaign bills, which are primarily corporations and their lobbyists, and they are always working behind the scenes, pushing their agendas, not just on election day. Thus, regardless of what platform a candidate runs on, once in office, their platform quietly shifts to that which best serves their corporate sponsors. It’s a waste of time to vote. People who vote are consoling themselves with a false sense of participation, when in fact, their votes are irrelevant. If you want to participate in the political process, then give money to organizations that will lobby continuously on your behalf. Recognizing this reality of American politics, I stopped voting a decade-and-a-half ago and have since given money to organizations, such as Greenpeace, the NRDC, the NRA and the ACLU, to lobby on my behalf. Not playing the government’s election game is wonderfully liberating. Perhaps if enough people stopped “participating” in the political system, the mere lack of participants would send the loudest message of all.
I used to ridicule home schooling as quackery or paranoid anti-government posturing. Today I’m an ardent fan of home schooling. Besides the now obvious failure of public schools to actually educate students – the United States is nearly last among industrialized countries – it’s clear to me now that public schools are increasingly used as a vehicle for inculcating in young minds conformity, as well as devotion and obedience to the state. If I were to have children, I would absolutely school them at home. In fact, collective home schooling of several neighborhood children would be a great example of a community working together. As an interesting aside, governments seem to be waking up to the threat posed by free-thinking graduates of home schools, and are now starting to impose oppressive regulations on home schoolers, apparently with the hope of driving them out of “business.”
As for rejecting corporate influence from your life, it’s easy: simply don’t give them your money. Before spending money, ask yourself if you really need the thing or service you’re contemplating buying. When you do spend your money, spend it at local businesses as much as possible. In cases where you are forced to give your money to corporations – such as by laws requiring you to buy automobile insurance – then find a way to minimize the amount of money you give them. Buy a cheap car for which you can skip the comprehensive and collision coverage.
Sustainable Versus Unsustainable
Throughout time and place, indigenous people have usually developed the wisdom to live in harmony with their world. Most likely this wisdom ensued from their observation over a long period of time that communities that failed to live within their means perished. Our world today is much bigger than the confining worlds that indigenous people lived in long ago. Thanks to globalization, today it’s possible to create the illusion of limitless bounty. If we live beyond our means in America, we can simply import more resources from elsewhere on the globe, and never mind the impact outside our borders. Out of sight, out of mind. We live here in blissful ignorance.
Few people are aware when they buy a neat technological gadget, that toxins from the factory in China that manufactured that gadget pollute the river that the local people get their drinking water from. Rural people in China are suffering more and more to fuel our consumptive way of life. Yet because we don’t see these costs, we don’t realize that our way of life is not sustainable. One of the benefits of a localized economy, versus a globalized economy, is that it’s far easier for people to do a cost-benefit analysis of their systems of production.
Of course, in so many ways our exploitation of our environment is unsustainable. We are obviously overly dependent on fossil fuels, which are rapidly being depleted and which produce a lot of pollution. We can reduce our consumption of fossil fuels by traveling and transporting less, which implies more localized living, working, and production. Consuming fewer manufactured goods also reduces consumption of fossil fuels. Our oceans are dying from pollution, but mainly from overfishing. Fishing methods, such as rapaciously destructive bottom trawling and the use of indiscriminately lethal drift nets are killing the oceans. While such efficient fishing methods may make a corporate accountant’s heart jump with joy, how long will it be before the oceans are devoid of life? People have to eat, but they need to do so in a way that can be sustained. We burn down Amazon rain forests to make way for cattle ranches so that fast food restaurants can manufacture cheap, toxic burgers. What if we obtained beef from a local farmer instead and ground it ourselves to make burgers? Would that not be cheaper overall, more healthful, and more sustainable? Would that not benefit our local community? Would that not have a less adverse impact on our planet?
If we grew produce in backyard gardens instead of importing it from abroad, it would obviously be far more efficient energy-wise because we would not have to ship that produce all over the world, nor even make trips in the car to buy it. What’s more, grown without pesticides, such produce would be more healthful. It would be tastier and probably more nutritious, as well. By recycling organic waste in a compost pile and combining it with waste from small animals, such as chickens, we can create a perpetually sustainable ecosystem in our own backyards. Replicating this model over the entire planet would substantially improve our harmony with our world, and go a long way toward making our existence sustainable.
Summary
I hope the foregoing essay has slightly stimulated the imagination of some readers. Obviously, my point of view is biased by my negative view of government and corporations. I didn’t always harbor such negative biases, but over time I have seen the light.
Do I practice what I preach? Well, I’m working on it. Being a product of the very world I inveigh against, it’s hard for me to simply change overnight, but I am working on it. I am self employed as a craftsman of sorts: I make a comfortable living at home as a computer programmer writing software for a local company that manufactures air pollution monitoring equipment. I do own a house in rural Kentucky and I plan to set up a backyard garden and try to become as self sufficient as possible. I’m always looking for ways to minimize my impact on the environment (see http://dave.eriqat.name/DE_Environmentalism.html for my tips). I do minimize my association with government and corporations to the extent possible. I do try to shop at local businesses instead of stores belonging to globalized corporations. I do have a mobile phone, but it has no camera or Internet access, it’s a prepaid phone which I bought for emergencies, I hardly ever use it, and I would not miss it if I got rid of it. And I do shun consumerism, except for my fondness for DVDs, but as I said, I could live without even those.
What about people in far off places, such as Africa? What can be done to help them survive? I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers. Perhaps if we just quit meddling in the affairs of such people and magnanimously assisted them when they asked for assistance, they could figure out their own solutions.
Dave Eriqat can be reached at dave@eriqat.name
By Dave Eriqat
10 April, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Preface
Awakening as the day’s first rays of sunlight brighten my bedroom, I dress hurriedly and run downstairs. Even though it’s a Saturday, I’m eager to get to “work.” Passing through the kitchen on my way to the back door, I notice that my wife, Anna, has already made some coffee. Pouring myself a cup, I take it with me as I head out the back door on my way to my workshop. My workshop is where I work. I’ve been self employed as a furniture maker for a couple of years now, and presently I’m working on a fine dresser for my neighbor, Sam. As I cross the yard on the way to my workshop, I see Anna tending our garden. Our young son William is feeding our small flock of chickens and other animals, intermittently playing with our two beautiful dogs.
We’ve had so many tomatoes this year that we’ve been trading them to the neighbors for their surplus produce. It’s been absolutely marvelous to enjoy such a variety of fresh, organic produce in this abundant year. I still recall the tasteless, wax-like produce we used to buy in the commercial grocery stores years ago, thinking that was normal. I’d never shop in another grocery store for produce after tasting what I and my neighbors can produce.
In addition to tomatoes, our garden produces several dozen other types of fruits, vegetables, beans, and herbs. Besides corn that we acquire from local farmers, we feed our chickens food scraps that we would otherwise throw away. In return our chickens produce the best tasting eggs imaginable, their poop is a surprisingly good fertilizer, and they are effective pest controllers. In all, our plot of land produces about half our food. The other half comes from my talent as a furniture maker. The dresser I’m making for Sam will provide us with meat from his farm for several months.
I used to work in Manhattan as an accountant for a large firm, where I was paid a large salary. My wife and I owned a great condo, a nice car, and had all the trendiest gadgets. We dined in the finest restaurants, went to Broadway shows, and occasionally flew first class to Europe. We really thought we were “fulfilled.” One day, while reading about the “downshifting” trend in Europe, I realized just how unfulfilling our life really was. I also came to appreciate how little control we had over our lives. I was totally dependent on my employer to maintain our precarious existence. Without my high paying job, we’d promptly be forced to give up our nice condo, car, and luxurious living. I discussed these thoughts with my wife, but it took many months for the truth of my words to sink in to both of us. We weren’t “living” in any real sense; we were existing. Worse, we were not in control of our lives, but existed at the whim of the executives controlling my firm. After much talk, we sold our condo and car, moved to rural Kentucky, and bought an old house with some land. It was a major transition for us, especially since we didn’t know a soul there, but the lifestyle quickly grew on us. The most surreal thing about our new life was the absence of stress about finances, job security, noise, crime, etc. I daresay, we had unwittingly found paradise. While we never thought about having children when we lived in Manhattan, somehow, living in the country made childrearing seem like the most natural thing in the world, and it wasn’t long after we moved to that paradise that Anna became pregnant with our first child.
Today we largely support ourselves. We produce much of our own food. My talent is in great demand. I currently have orders for half a dozen pieces of furniture from my neighbors, all in exchange for products of their labor. I no longer have any fear about my job security.
Moreover, we’ve shunned much of the materialism we once regarded as essential to living. We don’t subscribe to cable television; our television is used only for watching movies on DVDs which we share amongst our community. We got rid of our fancy car and bought an old pickup truck, but we rarely even drive that because pretty much everything we need is near enough that we can use our bicycles. We have no technological gadgets, not even a mobile phone. We have a computer and a dialup Internet connection, which we use for e-mail and reading news online. Our life is much simpler than it was, but we are happier. Looking back, it’s surprising how much stress came from having to acquire and maintain all those gadgets we thought were so vital. Besides working, we spend a lot of time talking to each other, visiting with our friendly neighbors, playing cards with them, and reading books that we also share amongst our community. Even our limited dependence on our neighbors has reintroduced us to the concept of tolerance for others’ differences. Anna is now learning to knit sweaters from one of our neighbors, whom in New York we would have considered too odd to associate with. And now my brother, who is worried about his own job security, has decided to move here. We’re looking for a house for him now, and it will be wonderful to have him and his wife living near us.
Introduction
Responding to my essay titled “The End of Civilization”, some people suggested I should write about the solutions I referred to in passing. The foregoing fiction is meant to introduce readers of this essay to what I see as one solution to the many crises facing humanity and our planet. In a nutshell, my solution to what ails us and our planet is this: reject consumerism, globalization, corporatism, and government, and return to localized, productive, community-oriented, sustainable living. The purpose of this essay is not to condemn, criticize, or judge anyone, but to get people to open their minds to the possibility of a different way of living than what they’ve been taught to pursue. Although I frequently refer to the United States, much of what I have to say applies to the whole industrialized world.
Production Versus Consumption
The United States economy today largely revolves around consumption. Everywhere one turns in this country they are bombarded with messages telling them to consume, consume, consume. One can even see such advertising today on the risers of steps in subway stations! And we have responded as prodded, consuming to no end. But are we happy? I don’t think so. In fact, it seems that the people I’ve known to consume the most are the least happy. It’s as if their consumerism is a surrogate for happiness.
By contrast, enormous satisfaction comes from producing something, especially if the product embodies one’s own special talent or skill or is inspired by one’s own initiative. This, of course, is the opposite from conditions in the United States today. Listening to people talk about their jobs, it seems that most people in this country hate their jobs. Can you blame them? They are not actually producing anything of value, unless one considers working as a retail sales clerk, serving food in a restaurant, or riding telephones on a cube farm to have great value. In order to produce something of real value, one needs a skill, and possessing such a skill affords one a sense of self worth and job security. I’ll bet plumbers enjoy more job satisfaction than stock brokers.
Although people consume and consume, few, it seems, question whether their consumption is making them happier, or whether it might actually be making them unhappier. For example, you buy a mobile phone and it comes with an allotment of minutes each month and a two-year contract. Now, in order to get the maximum value out of your purchase, you feel pressure to use your full allotment of minutes, but at the same time you fear exceeding that allotment because you’ll get reamed. Later you decide you want to get a different mobile phone service, but too bad, you’re trapped in a two-year contract. Mobile phones are certainly convenient, but think back before we had them. We also didn’t have to worry about receiving phone calls at unappreciated times, getting work-related calls at home, remembering to pay another monthly bill, using up our allotted minutes, or being locked in a contract. Or take that latest trendy gadget you bought. Did it work perfectly, or did you pull your hair out trying to get it to work satisfactorily? And how did you feel when, right after you spent your hard-earned money on that gadget, a better model came out at a lower price? Six months later, was it sitting dormant on a shelf in a closet? Might you have been happier if you simply hadn’t bought it in the first place? Consider that if you had not bought that gadget, you might have experienced less stress and have more money in the bank or less debt on your credit card today.
Obviously, we need to consume some things, such as food, in order to survive. Clothes to wear are nice too. But needless consumption, either because we’re programmed by advertising to consume or because we’re searching in vain for something to make us happy, merely increases our debt and depletes our planet’s vital resources. If instead of indiscriminately consuming everything in sight, we consumed only what we really needed, and then produced ourselves that which we consumed, we’d be a lot happier and wealthier, and our planet would thank us for it.
Local Versus Global
I’m not suggesting that we should each manufacture everything we use. What I’m saying is that we should look to ourselves first; if we cannot provide what we need, then we should look to our neighbors; then our town; then we should reconsider if we really need the thing; finally, and only as a last resort, look outside our local community. Imports should be the exception, not the norm. Some people might argue that imports result in cheaper products. This is precisely the problem with our way of life. Because everything is too cheap we consume and consume. If things cost more, we’d consume only what we needed, and when we did consume locally produced products, it would benefit our families and neighbors, not faceless corporations in faraway lands.
Twice in the last year I’ve seen in local grocery stores garlic from China for sale! Think about that for a moment. This tiny bag of garlic, which is being sold for about one dollar, traveled more than five thousand miles from China to California. Does that make sense, especially when the town of Gilroy, California, just four hundred miles away, is a major producer of garlic? This is an example of what’s so terribly wrong with globalization. It may well be cheaper in the cold, hard accounting of dollars and cents to farm garlic in China and ship it all the way to California, but what about the precious oil consumed and extra pollution generated by shipping it? What about the jobs lost in the United States? Just because we don’t have a good way to quantify these costs doesn’t mean that their cost is zero, that we can simply ignore them. I think most people would intuitively agree that shipping garlic from China to California makes no sense. This story about garlic is a trivial example, but multiplied by thousands of other products being shipped and sold in fantastic volumes and the problem becomes considerably more serious.
Imagine, on the other hand, that you exchanged some tomatoes you grew in your yard for garlic that your next door neighbor grew in his yard. How much more efficient and sustainable is this hypothetical scenario, compared to the absurd real-life scenario described above?
One of the greatest tragedies of modern America is the decimation of its small town “Main Streets” through globalized competition. It used to be that a small business owner would set up a business in their local community, the employees of this business would be family members or neighbors, the profits would be reinvested in the local community. The prices might have been higher than those of globalized businesses, but a higher level of service would have been provided as well. Such businesses fostered community stability and created a decent standard of living for generation after generation. Many of the people who once owned their own small businesses in such small towns now work for the very globalized corporations that helped put them out of business. In our consumerist frenzy to find the lowest prices we have unwittingly put ourselves out of business, so to speak.
We could return to the days where we shopped in local stores, owned by our neighbors, and which sold locally manufactured goods. We can afford to pay higher prices to local merchants by shopping more judiciously, by recognizing that there is intangible value in dealing with someone we know, and by appreciating the benefits afforded to our communities by such local businesses: community stability, increased standard of living, educating our young about responsibility. It’s our choice.
Community Versus Selfish Isolation
For the last century our technological innovations have helped increasingly isolate us from one another. Automobiles have afforded each person a private protective cocoon, shielding them from having to learn to interact civilly with others, as one must do on public transit. Video and music players have permitted people to enjoy movies and music at home instead of having to be respectful of and courteous to others at the theater. Telephones and e-mail have made it possible for people to avoid face-to-face communication, or confrontation, as the case may be. I have to confess that I’m guilty of excessive reliance on some these modern technologies myself. I use e-mail extensively, and for years I have preferred to watch movies at home. In my defense, however, e-mail is more efficient for transmitting and receiving detailed information, such as work specifications, and my preference for watching movies at home is due to the exorbitant cost of movie tickets compared to the low price of DVDs, not to mention the barrage of advertisements I’m forced to suffer in the movie theater. I would, however, happily give up these technologies in exchange for being a member of a real community.
These technologies have insidiously undermined our sense of community, without which there can be no tolerance, empathy, sharing, or charity. Indeed, for the last century what we have seen in our society is a gradual erosion of these traits of civil society. Instead of making “community” our personal responsibility, we’ve “outsourced” it to the government, relying on government to establish and enforce our moral boundaries, negotiate and mediate our relationships, and provide support to those members of society who need help. But can government really do as good a job at these things as a genuine community comprised of compassionate and engaged people?
Communities come in may forms. Some are geographical – that’s what most people think of when they think of the word “community” – and some are abstract, such as the “gay community” (I’m still trying to figure out what this is, by the way, as well as what is this “gay agenda” I keep hearing about). But the essential characteristic of a community is that it’s a group of people who voluntarily choose to associate with one another and work together, whether as a town, a neighborhood, a multi-generational family, or a hippie commune. Human beings are social creatures. We should want to associate with each other, and we are more productive and strong when we work together. That so many of us, myself included, elect to isolate ourselves is a symptom of the toxic and unhealthy social environment that we live in today. I blame this toxicity on our lazily substituting government, corporations, and consumerism for actual community, which takes hard work and a willingness to compromise to maintain.
Should we choose to return to a genuine community-oriented way of life, I think we’d all be a lot happier. In order for this to work, however, we also need to be willing to be more tolerant of each other, especially those of us who are the most different; it’s easy to tolerate those who are like you. Not only does diversity make life, particularly our social life, more interesting, but an outgrowth of tolerance is peace and harmony, something we desperately need today.
People Versus Government and Corporations
Governments and corporations seek only to dominate, control, and exploit people. Governments do it for power, while corporations do it for profit. Either because of forethought or spontaneous discovery, governments and corporations have for a century-and-a-half been wed in a symbiotic relationship that serves the principal goals of each, at the expense of people and the environment. It could be said that governments and corporations are the antithesis of life.
Today the governments of several of the world’s most industrialized countries are running amok, terrorizing their citizens, trampling their rights, seemingly desperate in their pursuit of power. As our own tolerance for each other has diminished, government has happily assumed the role of brutal enforcer in our “zero tolerance” society.
Similarly, corporations are engaged in a free-for-all exploitation of the planet and its people, aided and abetted by governments, for the profit of a few corporate executives and wealthy shareholders, and most seriously, without any regard to the future of our world. The problem with corporations today is that they no longer seem to have any restraint. The attitude seems to be not just that “greed is good,” but that if they aren’t as rapacious as they can possibly be, then one of their competitors will be. It’s almost as if corporations are in a war with one another to see which can be the more exploitative.
What can we do about this state of affairs? I really don’t know. Governments and corporations hold all the cards today. For now, though, we still own our own minds. The first step in restoring the preeminence of life over government and corporations is to recognize how much they control us. As I alluded in the preface above, when we buy into the “American Dream,” we actually become subservient to the government and corporations. We don’t need a fancy house, a fancy car, or a mobile phone with a built-in camera and Internet access to be happy. Sometimes, less is actually more.
Once we recognize that we’re being programmed to behave in ways that benefit governments and corporations, to the detriment of our very selves, and honestly address the question of what would truly make us happy, maybe then we can start taking steps in the right direction. Timothy Leary once said, “turn on, tune in, drop out.” This maxim is amazingly relevant today, and is the first step toward a healthier tomorrow.
Even if you are not willing to “drop out,” or live “off the grid,” simply examining how much governments and corporations control your daily existence will be instructive. For example, how much time do you spend in any given day complying with government rules or dealing with corporations? Just yesterday I spent about three hours preparing my income taxes, on top of the ten hours I had previously invested in that task. I also had to obtain a loan from a corporation to pay my income taxes to the government (Alas, I poorly managed my finances last year). And, in the past week I’ve had to pay bills to six different corporations. In light of all that utterly unproductive effort, I ought to be asking myself if what I’m getting in return is worth the effort.
It would be nice if we could “opt-out” of supporting the government through paying taxes. Unfortunately, the government is probably not going to go along with that idea. But we can look for legal ways to reduce our taxes. For example, by living a simpler lifestyle and augmenting our income by growing our own food, we can take a job that pays less and thereby pay less tax, while increasing our independence and sense of self-efficacy. Bartering with your neighbors is a good way to avoid taxes too, as there are no practical means for the government to tax bartering. Sharing things with your neighbors, besides fostering a sense of community, reduces spending and hence, sales taxes.
“Participation” in the political process through voting is a facade. Not only are some elections in the United States blatantly rigged today, but it really doesn’t matter who you elect to office anyway. Once in office, a politician is beholden to those who pay his or her campaign bills, which are primarily corporations and their lobbyists, and they are always working behind the scenes, pushing their agendas, not just on election day. Thus, regardless of what platform a candidate runs on, once in office, their platform quietly shifts to that which best serves their corporate sponsors. It’s a waste of time to vote. People who vote are consoling themselves with a false sense of participation, when in fact, their votes are irrelevant. If you want to participate in the political process, then give money to organizations that will lobby continuously on your behalf. Recognizing this reality of American politics, I stopped voting a decade-and-a-half ago and have since given money to organizations, such as Greenpeace, the NRDC, the NRA and the ACLU, to lobby on my behalf. Not playing the government’s election game is wonderfully liberating. Perhaps if enough people stopped “participating” in the political system, the mere lack of participants would send the loudest message of all.
I used to ridicule home schooling as quackery or paranoid anti-government posturing. Today I’m an ardent fan of home schooling. Besides the now obvious failure of public schools to actually educate students – the United States is nearly last among industrialized countries – it’s clear to me now that public schools are increasingly used as a vehicle for inculcating in young minds conformity, as well as devotion and obedience to the state. If I were to have children, I would absolutely school them at home. In fact, collective home schooling of several neighborhood children would be a great example of a community working together. As an interesting aside, governments seem to be waking up to the threat posed by free-thinking graduates of home schools, and are now starting to impose oppressive regulations on home schoolers, apparently with the hope of driving them out of “business.”
As for rejecting corporate influence from your life, it’s easy: simply don’t give them your money. Before spending money, ask yourself if you really need the thing or service you’re contemplating buying. When you do spend your money, spend it at local businesses as much as possible. In cases where you are forced to give your money to corporations – such as by laws requiring you to buy automobile insurance – then find a way to minimize the amount of money you give them. Buy a cheap car for which you can skip the comprehensive and collision coverage.
Sustainable Versus Unsustainable
Throughout time and place, indigenous people have usually developed the wisdom to live in harmony with their world. Most likely this wisdom ensued from their observation over a long period of time that communities that failed to live within their means perished. Our world today is much bigger than the confining worlds that indigenous people lived in long ago. Thanks to globalization, today it’s possible to create the illusion of limitless bounty. If we live beyond our means in America, we can simply import more resources from elsewhere on the globe, and never mind the impact outside our borders. Out of sight, out of mind. We live here in blissful ignorance.
Few people are aware when they buy a neat technological gadget, that toxins from the factory in China that manufactured that gadget pollute the river that the local people get their drinking water from. Rural people in China are suffering more and more to fuel our consumptive way of life. Yet because we don’t see these costs, we don’t realize that our way of life is not sustainable. One of the benefits of a localized economy, versus a globalized economy, is that it’s far easier for people to do a cost-benefit analysis of their systems of production.
Of course, in so many ways our exploitation of our environment is unsustainable. We are obviously overly dependent on fossil fuels, which are rapidly being depleted and which produce a lot of pollution. We can reduce our consumption of fossil fuels by traveling and transporting less, which implies more localized living, working, and production. Consuming fewer manufactured goods also reduces consumption of fossil fuels. Our oceans are dying from pollution, but mainly from overfishing. Fishing methods, such as rapaciously destructive bottom trawling and the use of indiscriminately lethal drift nets are killing the oceans. While such efficient fishing methods may make a corporate accountant’s heart jump with joy, how long will it be before the oceans are devoid of life? People have to eat, but they need to do so in a way that can be sustained. We burn down Amazon rain forests to make way for cattle ranches so that fast food restaurants can manufacture cheap, toxic burgers. What if we obtained beef from a local farmer instead and ground it ourselves to make burgers? Would that not be cheaper overall, more healthful, and more sustainable? Would that not benefit our local community? Would that not have a less adverse impact on our planet?
If we grew produce in backyard gardens instead of importing it from abroad, it would obviously be far more efficient energy-wise because we would not have to ship that produce all over the world, nor even make trips in the car to buy it. What’s more, grown without pesticides, such produce would be more healthful. It would be tastier and probably more nutritious, as well. By recycling organic waste in a compost pile and combining it with waste from small animals, such as chickens, we can create a perpetually sustainable ecosystem in our own backyards. Replicating this model over the entire planet would substantially improve our harmony with our world, and go a long way toward making our existence sustainable.
Summary
I hope the foregoing essay has slightly stimulated the imagination of some readers. Obviously, my point of view is biased by my negative view of government and corporations. I didn’t always harbor such negative biases, but over time I have seen the light.
Do I practice what I preach? Well, I’m working on it. Being a product of the very world I inveigh against, it’s hard for me to simply change overnight, but I am working on it. I am self employed as a craftsman of sorts: I make a comfortable living at home as a computer programmer writing software for a local company that manufactures air pollution monitoring equipment. I do own a house in rural Kentucky and I plan to set up a backyard garden and try to become as self sufficient as possible. I’m always looking for ways to minimize my impact on the environment (see http://dave.eriqat.name/DE_Environmentalism.html for my tips). I do minimize my association with government and corporations to the extent possible. I do try to shop at local businesses instead of stores belonging to globalized corporations. I do have a mobile phone, but it has no camera or Internet access, it’s a prepaid phone which I bought for emergencies, I hardly ever use it, and I would not miss it if I got rid of it. And I do shun consumerism, except for my fondness for DVDs, but as I said, I could live without even those.
What about people in far off places, such as Africa? What can be done to help them survive? I don’t know. I don’t have all the answers. Perhaps if we just quit meddling in the affairs of such people and magnanimously assisted them when they asked for assistance, they could figure out their own solutions.
Dave Eriqat can be reached at dave@eriqat.name
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