Sweatpants, Flubber, And Flip-Flops - American Inclusivity Dresses Up

American movies of the 40's dealt with serious issues, studied character and conflict, and never flinched from moral and ethical dilemmas. Casablanca, The Third Man, The Maltese Falcon, and Citizen Kane were the best of the lot, but  They Drive by Night, a story of truck drivers fighting corrupt businessmen was the best of the lot. 

After Bogart, Joan Fontaine, Lauren Bacall, Cary Grant, and Humphrey Bogart, there were the clothes! Everyone looked great in tuxedos, long dresses, tailored suits, fedoras and snap-brims, overcoats and scarves, mink stoles and hats with veils, long gloves, silk stockings, and high-heeled shoes; riding outfits, hunting outfits, afternoon wear, pearls, earrings, umbrellas, and top hats. 

Everyone dressed up in those days.  No man or woman would ever think of going out without dressing up.  Whether to the department store, the movies, or the club; or whether on trains or airplanes, men, women, and children looked good. 

Americans now shop in cutoffs, sweatpants, flip-flops, raggedy T-shirts, and tank tops. They never dress up for travel. They dress down. Why bother getting all cossetted and dandied for the back of the plane? Summers are hot, so chop the Levi's down a few more inches and lose the sleeves on the T-shirt. “What’s the point?”, Americans ask. 

And then there's flubber - the great rolls of belly fat hanging out the sides of halters and cutoffs, great shelves of fat, enormous walrus folds, fantastic Jabba the Hut mountains of it, stuffed into airline seats, great overhanging slabs of it on diner stools, huge pendulous mammoth things hanging down below the waist, enormous flanks and withers, great hocks and thighs.  

Jean-Louis de Miramon-Fargues, descendant of Parsifal Miramon-Fargues de Chatelaine leader of Pope Gregory's Third Crusade to the Holy Land and Parisian aristocrat of impeccable taste and manners, found him one summer day on the National Mall. 

He grimaced - a slight, reserved reaction characteristic of a man of impeccable bearing and demeanor, but a show of revulsion nonetheless.  'This is what Tocqueville meant', he said, referring to the journals of the young Alexis de Tocqueville who came to America, observed, and commented on the new country recently free from British rule.  

Tocqueville had not commented on obesity, of course.  The new Americans were anything but, having survived hard New England winters, the savage winds of the prairie, the malarial fevers of the Carolinas, and the broiling heat of the Gulf.  Yet he did see something in the fierce sense of individualism enshrined in the Constitution, the ethos of the land, but which anticipated an anything-goes culture, one which would necessarily end up in a hodge-podge of lowest common denominator ideas, attitudes, and fashion. 

 

This sentiment was first expressed by Alexander Hamilton who argued with Jefferson about the nature of the new democracy.  While Jefferson, a populist, believed in the absolute wisdom of the majority, Hamilton saw nothing but ignorance, turpitude, and bottom-feeding instincts.  God forbid, he said, that America should be ruled by such unenlightened (a deliberate reference to the hallowed principles of The Enlightenment which provided the philosophical foundation for the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights) populace. 

A compromise was reached, but one which proved to be no brake to the rancid, overblown, ignorant ideas of the masses.  The Senate, originally designed to be a body of well-born and well-bred men of status and influence to act as a filter, a sieve, for what detritus would certainly come from 'the people', has of course turned into the same unconscionably political, venal body as the House of Representatives. 

In any case, both Tocqueville and Hamilton would be not be surprised to see how their predictions of insensate, grossly ignorant rule had come to be in modern democracy.  'Of the people, by the people, for the people' was the motto of the new American republic, transformed into a great catch-all bin of nothing of distinction.

 

Now, the most sanguine of social observers have said that this inchoate mess is the cauldron of genius.  American diversity and inclusivity are like big data - the collectivity will always have the right answers although great numbers of individual contributors will be as dumb as stones.  More importantly, out of this very seedy, impossible heap will come the new Einstein, Bach, and Michelangelo. 

'In your dreams' said Jean-Louis marveling at how thousands of people could look so miserably awful.  Worse, this national camping ground, the destination that Americans from all corners of the country want to show their children, was just a sample of America.  These busloads of tourists come to Washington and leave tens of millions of their relatives - as ignorantly, brutally ugly as they - behind. 

Unkind, perhaps, Jean-Louis thought to himself, but true.  He shook his head thinking of the inroads this benighted 'diversity' had made in his beloved France.  Millions of immigrants from Africa, the Maghreb, and the Middle East had crowded into the northern suburbs of Paris and made their way into the old, reserved, magnificent arrondissements of the city and turned them into souks, bazaars, feeding troughs. 

The fashion of St. Laurent, Givenchy, and Dior was a thing of the past, as these....Here Jean-Louis stopped himself, tamped his thoughts down before they turned nasty; but still and all in all, la belle France was no longer belle. It was eroded, no longer the hallmark of high culture.  America's fault, Jean-Louis considered, a bloody, warped sense of democracy.  Phooey, he spat like an American. 

France has always had a very low obesity rate - part of the Gallic version of bella figura, looking svelte, and women did everything to be able to fit into designer dresses.  Slenderness was an essential part of French culture, a universally subscribed-to ethos. Diversity eroded whatever universal respect for and adherence to core principles, attitudes, and beliefs that still might be in America.  Not only did higher ideals of patriotism, honor, discipline, selflessness, courage - core values that have been at the heart of all European civilization since Ancient Greece - disappear but nothing replaced them.  

While the rest of the world began to look to the greatness of the past - Imperial Russia and Dynastic China, the Ottomans, the Mauryan, Gupta, Persian empires - America dismissed its European heritage as colonialist, racist, oppressive, and predatory.  An all-welcoming, all-inclusive, free and open democracy was the way forward, the only way. 

No civilization or society has prospered when its core values have been lost, giving way to a divisive, contentious array of competing demands.  The identity culture of America, focusing as it does on race, gender, and ethnicity rather than on a set of foundational principles, is a further step in degrading the country's stature and influence. America stands for nothing except some hastily engineered, temporal, and often quite fictive notions of life, rule, and governance. 

Jean-Louis left the Mall, Washington, and America all in one day. 'Ça suffit', he said, enough; and scribbled something in his notebook, thinking this is what Tocqueville might have done when he walked these very paths, noting the strange bits of Americana which suggested something universal and telling about the new land.

He was no Tocqueville, just a surprised and nonplussed foreigner who wanted to see what all the fuss was about, saw it, considered it, and was happy to return to the fragmentary piece of France that was still left after yet another wave of Africans and Moors destroyed most of it.  There were a few boulangeries, charcuteries, and épiceries left in the neighborhoods - the old France of independent shops - but they were filled with pita, shawarma, and manioc. 

His neighborhood in the 7th, an arrondissement still untouched by 'inclusivity', was a refuge, a redoubt, a haven against the corrosion and pollution of his beloved Paris.  There were still elegantly dressed women on the streets, fashionable, beautiful women in carefully assembled ensembles, classic, proud, and defiantly aristocratic women who gave Jean-Louis a start on his first day back.  'Ah', he said out loud to no one in particular, 'La France'.