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 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 have mined laughs by the mile in websites and books, poking good-natured fun at once-trendy but in retrospect horrible interior decorating trends and 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.

16 thoughts on “Dedicated Followers of Fashion”

  1. “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.”

    “The Paris Peace Accords (Vietnamese: Hi?p ??nh Paris v? Vi?t Nam), officially the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet Nam (Hi?p ??nh v? ch?m d?t chi?n tranh, l?p l?i hòa bình ? Vi?t Nam), was a peace agreement signed on January 27, 1973, to establish peace in Vietnam and end the Vietnam War. ”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords

    U.S. military draft ends, Jan. 27, 1973

    https://www.politico.com/story/2012/01/us-military-draft-ends-jan-27-1973-072085

  2. Watergate
    Hearings opened on May 17, 1973,

    …Watergate led to Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Watergate_Committee

    “In the fall of 1974, Nixon resigned under the pressure of the Watergate scandal and was succeeded by Gerald Ford. Congress cut funding to South Vietnam for the upcoming fiscal year from a proposed 1.26 billion to 700 million dollars. These two events prompted Hanoi to make an all-out effort to conquer the South. As the North Vietnamese Communist Party Secretary Le Duan observed in December 1974: “The Americans have withdrawn…this is what marks the opportune moment.” (4)”
    https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/what-happened-when-democrats-in-congress-cut-off-f

  3. Then as now, haven’t anti-American demonstrators tended to represent a small and noisy, rather than representative, fraction of American youth? Perhaps it’s too soon to know regarding today’s young leftists, or so one hopes.

    Also, re the draft. Stipulating that prominent early-Boomers such as Trump, Bill Clinton and many others who could do so, avoided military service in Vietnam, is it the avoidance of service per se that is the problem? The govt terribly mismanaged the war. Maybe the problem was more the draft system that facilitated student deferments and other forms of evasion by people with means while the poor and working-class men couldn’t escape.

  4. My original point was that when the fashion for patriotic military service came around again (after Desert Storm and 9-11) there were a fair number of prominent men with slightly embarrassed excuses for not having done a stint in service in the 1960s, when they were of an age to have done so.

  5. “My original point was”

    I don’t disagree with you. I do think the history of that time is interesting. So, Agnew is eliminated in 1973. Funny how Wiki does not tell who the ” United States Attorney for the District of Maryland” is and who put him in that position. Early lawfare?

    “In the presidential election of 1972, Nixon and Agnew were re-elected for a second term, defeating Senator George McGovern and his running mate Sargent Shriver in one of the largest landslides in American history.

    In 1973, Agnew was investigated by the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland on suspicion of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion, and tax fraud. Agnew took kickbacks from contractors during his time as Baltimore county executive and governor of Maryland. The payments had continued into his time as vice president, but had nothing to do with the Watergate scandal, “

  6. While that picture of the German refusing to give the Nazi salute is striking, I would also recommend Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” which is about resistance to totalitarianism. In it Havel describes the simple green grocer who refuses to put up a mandated sign in his shop window, not as dramatic as that German, but still refusing to live the lie.

    In truth, most totalitarians and revolutionaries don’t start off giving people dramatic choices. They need the help of that engineer or doctor or farmer to make things work, and so they basically co-opt through a simple choice of they can continue their life somewhat as before, they don’t have to be a party member but they like the green grocer need to show they are with the program. Of course later on the screws tighten and it becomes more explicitly a choice along the lines of “silver or lead”

    Our revolutionaries of today don’t have the full control of the state apparatus but they have other ways of applying coercion. Education administrators, college presidents or even K-12 superintendents, are not radicals themselves but the radicals understand those administrators’ primary weakness which is by temperament and position they are maintainers; their job is not to rock the boat. As a college president once mentioned to me the worst you can do is get on the wrong side of your faculty. Administrators abhor controversy because no one wants that. The CRT, DEI, LGBT+ Alphabet people understand that and therefore offer those administrators or their governing boards a choice of allowing them to establish a toe hold or they’ll make the papers in the wrong way; a workshop for faculty on recognizing racist or LGBT bias and it grows from there

    Another example closer to the one about the draft happened a few years ago in northern Virginia after Youngkin clamped down on schools and transgender policies. Across a number of northern Virginia high schools, there was large walkout of students estimated at 5,000 to protest those policies. Of course some just wanted to get out of school but the organizers understood that phenomena and that once the supporters were able to get a critical mass of students, things would grow rapidly. They would pick up a larger group of students who not only wanted to just skip school (analogous to draft avoiders who didn’t feel social pressure to conform) and those who were pressured socially to conform.

  7. In a similar vein…
    It has occurred to me in recent days that every society has a percentage of what I call “nut cases”, mentally and emotionally unstable people who find it difficult-to-impossible to understand reality.
    Poor societies have fewer, as they just don’t have the resources to accommodate a lot of nut cases, while affluent societies have more, and actually as it were cultivate nut cases.
    But in either instance, “the nut cases you have with you always”.
    But the outward manifestations of their nuttiness follow fashion trends, just as teenagers’ clothing and hair styles do. The nut cases desperately need some clue as to why they suffer, some ostensible reality that they can employ to explain their unhappiness, and are ever on the lookout for that plausible explanation.
    The current fad among the nut cases is “transgenderism”.
    This explains why there has been a thousand-fold increase in the incidence of “gender dysphoria” in recent years. The nut cases have gotten the message that they’re unhappy, not because they’re nuts, but because they are in the wrong bodies.
    And our society encourages them in that belief.
    Different psychotic behaviors come and go, but it’s always the same contingent of nut cases displaying them.
    It really is time to bring back the mental hospital model of dealing with our nut cases.

  8. I am reminded of the british scifi/comedy series Red Dwarf where the evolved cat species would punish criminals by making them wear fashions 2 seasons out of date.

  9. The backlash to the trans fashion trend is going to be nasty. I’ve already seen memes of “do you have your excuse ready?”

  10. It really is time to bring back the mental hospital model of dealing with our nut cases.

    Bingo.

    But there’s more to it. Alex Jones famously noted that a certain chemical turns frogs gay. It turns out that chemical is a food additive known to reduce testosterone and thus banned in many countries- but not the US. I’d bet that’s a factor in the astonishing increase in the number of people who can’t figure out their gender.

    If we had a functioning government it would have already brought back mental hospitals and would have already banned many potentially dangerous food additives.

    Alas, we do not.

  11. Some sizeable proportion of these latest lemmings on arrival in “palestine” would be invited to admire the view from the penthouse level, assuming there are any buildings left. To die for, in a manner of speaking, don’t you know.

    It’s often amusing when these followers of fashion thrust themselves directly on the peoples they are agitating for. Where Jane Fonda was admitted into the highest levels of North Vietnamese policy the less newsworthy were probably relegated to more mundane tasks in service to the proletariat. Possibly collecting night soil to fertilize the paddies.

  12. Riffing off what Mike said about the grocer refusing to post the sign – yes. Simple refusal to go along. Reminds me of something that happened during the Covidiocy, when Governor Abbott ditched the state-wide requirement for masks, yet almost everyone was still wearing one, going into stores, save a handful of what I think must have been the naturally rebellious. My daughter and I refused to wear the stupid things, and it was often fraught, going into the grocery store, anticipating someone being ugly about us going maskless. I really didn’t enjoy the prospect of a Karen giving me public grief about it – but I didn’t want to wear the damn thing … and it was kind of fun, meeting the eyes of other maskless shoppers and passing a sotto-voice remark about being revolutionary, while everyone else gave us the stink-eye.
    We talked one day, with another one of those rebellious maskless, in the parking lot of the local HEB – another military retiree, as it turned out. He said something rather cogent about going maskless – that it was important to be seen to do so, in order to hearten the rest.
    It’s important, sometimes – just to give heart (and courage) to others.
    This is the way that preference cascades start … with the handful who have the nerve to start the first pebbles rolling.

  13. a large portion of any given population, to include a large portion of my fellow Americans are like sheep
    Yep. It’s human nature.
    Vietnam War baaaad.
    War baaaad.
    Nuclear power baaaad.
    Fossil fuels baaaad.
    Orange man baaaaaaad.

    Especially if you get some sweet emotional satisfaction out of it, like feeling morally superior to all the squares.

  14. In the fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, the little boy, too young to know the socially correct thing to say, utters the truth instead. In modern America, the “little boy” role often belongs to those “on the spectrum” from mild social disability through Aspberger’s to high-functioning autism. They (perhaps I should say “we”) have trouble discerning the socially correct thing to say, or place low importance (perhaps too low) on the personal consequences of speaking the truth instead.

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