Dedicated Followers of Fashion

It’s kind of depressing, reading the various stories linked here and there by various blogs and social media about pro-Palestinian/pro-terrorist orgies of protest on the grounds of various colleges and universities, and in the streets of certain big cities. This reminds me of the anti-war demos of the Vietnam War era. Massive turnout, lots of signs, lots of free-floating rhetoric … which turned out to mean absolutely nothing at all, in the long run. Much of the ruckus wasn’t motivated by sincere conviction about the welfare of the South Vietnamese, or the lives of our military troops. It was all just the followers of fashion, making a show of their fashionable conviction.

That it seemed to be mostly motivated by a certain class of college-aged young males and their friends objecting to having their lives interrupted, rather than concern for the lives of ordinary Vietnamese was sort of proved when the draft ended … and suddenly all the protests died away, even as the war itself continued. It was only a popular thing because it was a popular thing. Everyone was protesting, so why not get with the trend … along with the whole tie-dyed, hippy counterculture scene, and then following along almost seamlessly when the pop-culture trend went to an affection for disco, harvest gold and avocado green kitchen appliances, men’s suits with extraneous ruffles and all.

Sigh. I can only assume that a large portion of any given population, to include a large portion of my fellow Americans are like sheep … dedicated to following the current fashion, in anything. Less trouble, going along to get along, because that’s what everyone else is doing. Trends in fashion, political beliefs, interior decoration … all the same, innit? Going along because everyone else is, and you don’t want your friends to laugh at you behind their hands, do you? Sheep, who go along to get along, along with all their friends.
Then there are those who are contrarians; who for whatever reason, personal quirk, specific knowledge/experience or just a naturally rebellious nature who stand aside from current fashion in anything, and go their own way in anything or everything, disregarding the current fashion/zeitgeist. It doesn’t matter – no matter what the current fashionable trend might be, in aesthetic tastes or political beliefs. Goats, rather than sheep. A curious thing is that those natural rebels and non-conformists are often lauded in retrospect long afterwards, usually, for being independent of the crowd … not easily driven by peer pressure or fashion. Like, in one extreme example – the German unionist in the 1930s photo, where everyone else is giving the Hitler straight-armed salute, but he stands there with his arms folded.

There are mild hazards in being excessively trendy, as extreme trends in anything tend to look pretty risible in a decade or two. One’s offspring, or grand-offspring tend to giggle uncontrollably at looking at one’s high school prom, or wedding pictures, and comics like James Lileks has mined laughs by the mile in websites and books, poking good-natured fun at once-trendy but in retrospect horrible interior decorating trends and in home cooking. Nothing looks quite so dated as a fashion ten or fifteen years after peak trend. But those fashionable, widely popular trends in clothing and all are small stuff, in comparison to political fashion, when events suddenly or gradually render that fashion desperately unfashionable, even embarrassing (or worse) for those who were prominent in upholding them or making a show of their devotion to them.

I am thinking of all those prominent men – and this includes Trump himself, I must fair to admit – who had better things to do than submitting to the draft, when they were of the age to do so. A lot of politically prominent men who were of age in the 1960s to have been drafted – were claiming fifteen or twenty years later to have had bone spurs, a high/low draft number, sole support of a family … whatever. They had been caught in the whiplash of fashion changing. It was de rigueur to have avoided military service … and then suddenly it was acceptable, required, even to have served honorably… and guys who had better things to do in the late 1960s were suddenly judged in a mild way for not having a stint in the military on their resume.

It could have been worse, though – they could have been Germans, of the 1935-1945 version, explaining to the Americans, British, French and Russian occupying forces that they really-oh, truly-oh had been anti-Nazis all along. I wonder if it will be the same, for all those American-born, not-Islamist academics and students currently going all out for Hamas, on campuses and city centers everywhere in politically-red cities.

Comment as you wish.