"I feel like if they want us to dress a certain way, they should pay for our clothes," he said.
Just ask any receptionist or maybe the clerk at Barnes & Noble and I'm sure they'd be glad to tell you just exactly how difficult it is to afford a 'business casual' wardrobe on an annual salary of $12.4 million.
Ann Althouse links this morning to a Robin Givhan article in the LA Times on the Dove advertising campaign featuring "real" women's bodies.
There's no real disagreement here with the conclusion:
It's healthy to occasionally pull back the curtain and remind readers of what most of them already know. Fashion is not truth. That has always been the operating principle of the business. Fashion is extravagance and incongruity, elegance and rebellion. It is envy and exclusivity. All of that may have been epitomized by Richard Avedon's 1955 image of the lithe model Dovima posing in a Christian Dior gown in front of a line of elephants.
All it takes to verify that fashion and reality have a limited relationship is an occasional visit to Manolo's Shoe Blog.
It is reassuring to occasionally see the machinations of the magician. It's nice to be presented with a female physique that is a little more accessible. And it is good to see the beauty fantasy broadened to include attributes such as strength and endurance. But no one wants to feel as though they've stumbled into the ladies locker room or caught their neighbors in their skivvies.
Given the news stories I’ve read about unauthorized photos of everyday people in just such situations showing up on porn sites, I wouldn’t go so far as to say no one wants that.
And just to prove that reality according to Dove may very well be inspiring, just take a look at their portrayal of Real Beauty:
Not exactly disheartening, are they?
However, if Nike listens to Givhan,
Perhaps Nike's next ad blitz should include a chubby lady with wobbly thighs. Her arms could be raised in victory as she wheezes across the one-mile marker.
I'll be there auditioning for that spot.
I haven't seen all the spy movies Ace lists, but he's so right on his number one pick (and for the right reasons too!) that I'll trust his judgment on the ones I haven't seen.
And he's right about Robert Redford too.
In the Future, Everyone Will Be Hitler For 15 Minutes.
Back in the 80's, in a discussion of my management style, I was called a Hitler. Those who personally know me will not be surprised that I was 'fashionable' long before it was fashionable. Or, something like that.
Reverence for those who came before us ensures humility about our own limitations. It restores confidence that far worse crises than our own — slavery, the great flu epidemic, or World War II — were endured with far less resources.
By pondering those now dead, we create a certain pact: We, too, will do our part for another generation not yet born to enjoy the same privilege of America, which at such great cost was given to us by others whom we have now all but forgotten.
I don't have HBO, so I was spared Jane Fonda's appearance on Bill Maher's HBO show last week. Judging from what Ann Althouse has written about it, I saved myself not only the monthly cost of HBO, but also an unhealthy spike in blood pressure.
Maher has just said that since a veteran spat on her at a reading, she can say that's "penance enough." Fonda says "hundreds" of Vietnam vets have come to her readings in the last few weeks "and they've been fabulous... They have forgiven me. So there are some who are stuck back there. But most are not." Then Maher has this:
Yeah, it really is on them at this point, isn't it? If somebody can't get over something in 35 years.
Somebody? Something? Maher didn't go to Vietnam. Who is he to say get over it? Sure, there are "things" that if you're still stewing about them 35 years later, you've got a problem, but if you haven't gone to war, have the decency to refrain from telling people who have that they need to get over it.
Who is Fonda to tsk at people who are "stuck back there"? She does a big shrug and says, "Well, you know the problem is, we've never really come to terms with the war," (emphasis mine)...
Fonda means Vietnam, but it's more than that. Both the Civil War and the Vietnam War drove wedges in the ideological split that continues today from the time "when the first Scots-Irish parcels from Ulster — turned away from the Puritan settlements in Massachusetts — headed for the hills of New Hampshire",
James Webb, in Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
One does not need to defend the conduct of those who opposed racial integration in order to understand it, and one does not need to condemn the actions of those who pushed for integration in order to call into question some of their long-term motives. After a hundred years this issue was balled up in a Gordian knot that was almost impossible to untie. One could never question the motives, or even the tactics, of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose equanimity was Lincolnesque in its breadth of vision. But others, white and black alike, were bent on using the issue to foment a larger revolution. (emphasis mine)
The Students for a Democratic Society - the SDS - a major player in the Vietnam anti-war movement, formed in 1962 to bring 'revolution' to America, using race as the primary issue... "the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbolized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry" was one of these 'others'. (Tom Hayden, a key leader of the SDS, with Jane Fonda ran the Indochina Peace Coalition.) These were the 60's core of the cultural Marxists and activist Left radicals whose influence and power had been growing for decades in academia.
Who was the enemy "poster child" of the civil rights movement? The Southern Redneck, the cultural descendant of the Ulster Scot and the iconic Confederate Soldier, whose only visible advantage over Southern blacks was not being excluded from the front of the bus and the "Whites Only" bathrooms and lunch counters. As Webb puts it:
...if these were the people who took something away from black America, where did they hide it — inside their corn-shuck mattresses?
And who are the Vietnam veterans that Fonda wants to forgive her? According to Webb, the South had a 32% higher casualty rate in Vietnam than the Northeast, with West Virginia's higher than any other state.
...these casualities, were occurring at a time when the draft laws gave liberal exceptions to those who remained in college, and when the more advantaged members of the age group were actively counseled on how to avoid military service. Only 11 percent of the draft-eligible males ... actually went to Vietnam, and only 33% served in the military at all.
Vietnam Veterans, as the military of this country has always been, are more often than not, Jacksonian populists -- the natural enemy of and greatest obstacle to the activist Left, of which Jane Fonda is still a member in good standing. While one motto of the Jacksonian populist might be "No Surrender" another might be "Never Forget". This doesn't mean Jane Fonda can't or won't be forgiven. Yet, is the forgiveness asked for because she has seen the error of her ways, or because... damn, it's been 35 years!
Or is this forgiveness being sought because, as Mead says, "...Jacksonian political allegiance will be one of the keys to the politics of the twenty-first century."
I expect we will see a lot more not-so-humble pleas for forgiveness before the 2008 elections.
Sissy Willis has posted some wonderful photos from Iraq, and I learn that Michelle Malkin is asking for links to deserving photos that weren't selected for a Pulitzer. My son-in-law has been safely back home for a while, but this self-portrait he sent back remains one of my favorite Iraq photos.
SemiOnager
