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The Dress: RIP?
No . . . not that dress. I’m using the common noun, not speaking of an infamous dress in a shade of indigo. Guy Trebay writes in the pages of The New York Times about the coming doom of the time honored fashion article. This, at least, is the opinion (or is it the "will") of the fashionistas who now clutter up the runways with their creations. One always wonders, when watching these productions, whether these denizens of design ever bother to consult with the end users of their products. I don’t mean the models, I mean real women. Do designers ever try to make clothing with the idea of making real women look attractive, or is their goal something else? That certainly seems to be the case, particularly when you listen to the words of Anne Slowey, fashion news director for Elle magazine: “The eye is looking for something new, and so is the psyche . . . The dress has been done to death, not to sound really cliché.” She argues that women want to look, “a little more hard-core, a little more androgynous, a little more butch.” We do? Not to sound really "cliché" . . . but, I don’t think so! Trebay wonders about that too. He points to the skyrocketing sales of dresses over the last three years--all to a generation of women who have never really enjoyed (because it was never really an option) wearing dresses. These women have discovered, not only how attractive they look in a dress, but also how much easier it is to achieve both an attractive look and . . . well, comfort with a dress than with odd pieces thrown together in an "outfit" and cutting into your body in, well, odd places. The lines of a dress are meant to flatter a woman’s body--elongating the mid-section, for example, and shrouding in sweeping mystery hips and thighs that may be (or may not be) especially toned. There are very few women who do not look better in a dress. If you doubt this, start looking around . . . examine the back view of most women in pants. Note the "muffin tops" edging out over most of the waistlines . . . is that attractive? A dress, it turns out, can hide a lot at the same time that it showcases quite a bit. A few weeks ago, I was with some other mothers in the park. We were all, more or less, attired in the standard "Mommy" garb . . . which nowadays, unfortunately, means jeans or a sweat suit. These clothes have their uses and, perhaps, one of those uses (in addition to horseback riding or playing tennis) is the chasing around of wild children at a park. But as I looked around, I wondered whether function alone is overrated. And wouldn’t it be possible to design dresses that, in addition to being attractive, were also functional? In the meantime, since Ms. Slowey has pronounced the death of the dress coming sometime around August, I guess I’ll have to go shopping and stock up.
Posted by Julie Ponzi | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 4/25/2008 10:49 AM
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Noonan on Obama and Bush
Peggy Noonan has spent some time in airports, as (recently) have I. She thinks that her fellow travelers wonder whether Obama "gets" America and knows that the people she has been visiting are over George W. Bush. I finally understand the party nostalgia for Reagan. Everyone speaks of him now, but it wasn’t that way in 2000, or 1992, or 1996, or even ’04.
I think it is a manifestation of dislike for and disappointment in Mr. Bush. It is a turning away that is a turning back. It is a looking back to conservatism when conservatism was clear, knew what it was, was grounded in the facts of the world.
The reasons for the quiet break with Mr. Bush: spending, they say first, growth in the power and size of government, Iraq. I imagine some of this: a fine and bitter conservative sense that he has never had to stand in his stockinged feet at the airport holding the bin, being harassed. He has never had to live in the world he helped make, the one where grandma’s hip replacement is setting off the beeper here and the child is crying there. The last bit is a little unfair. We stand in lines and endure the indignities of the TSA not because of Iraq, but becuase of 9-11. Unfortunately, for better or worse, Iraq has made us forget 9-11, or rather our response to the latter is filtered through our opinion of the former. And whatever one can say about the decision to invade Iraq or about the reasons for finishing the "job," once it has been undertaken, the demoralized confusion of those of us trudging through the concourses is the President’s fault.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [26] | 4/25/2008 7:37 AM
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Civic education and liberal education
Thomas Lindsay (an old acquaintance now at NEH) makes the case for studying our founding documents and the most profound responses to them. They comprise, he argues, a crucial part of any genuinely liberal education. How could anyone disagree?
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 4/25/2008 7:35 AM
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News of the Weird
Okay, first item is Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who, in her Earth Day sermon, said that among the things children can do to save the planet is to use "sporks". No kidding:
"I believe children can tell us how to care for the earth," Jefferts Schori said in her sermon. She then proceeded to illustrate ways to care for the earth by showing items that can help the environment: re-usable grocery bags; long-lasting light bulbs; re-useable water bottles; and a spork (fork on one-side, spoon on the other).
Now you have some idea why I (and millions of others) have left the Episcopal Church in disgust. Did I mention that Schori had never led a parish before being given the top job in the Episcopal Church? Can you say "PC hire?" The Midwest Conservative Journal comments: "Hopefully, she was wearing a skort when she said it or else what’s the point?"
Meanwhile, in Indiana, a clueless Republican congressional candidate (but I repeat myself) spoke to a group of Nazis on Hitler’s birthday, apparently unaware that, you know, Nazis are bad guys:
"When asked if he was a Nazi or sympathized with Nazis or white supremacists, Zirkle replied he didn’t know enough about the group to either favor it or oppose it. “This is just a great opportunity for me to witness,” he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief. He also told WIMS radio in Michigan City that he didn’t believe the event he attended included people necessarily of the Nazi mindset, pointing out the name isn’t Nazi, but Nationalist Socialist Workers Party.
Ed Driscoll reminds us that this sounds like a Mel Brooks sendup: As the director of the play within the movie The Producers said after reading its script, "Did you know, I never knew that the Third Reich meant Germany. I mean it’s just drenched with historical goodies like that!"
Finally, a probably apocryphal story from Europe goes as follows:
We in Denmark cannot figure out why you are even bothering to hold an election.
On one side, you have a bitch who is a lawyer, married to a lawyer, and a lawyer who is married to a bitch who is a lawyer.
On the other side, you have a true war hero married to a woman with a huge chest who owns a beer distributorship.
Is there a contest here?’
Now back to book-writing for me.
Posted by Steven Hayward | Link to this Entry | Comments [7] | 4/24/2008 8:56 PM
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Petraeus’ promotion
Robert D. Kaplan has a few clear paragraphs on what the Gen. Petraeus promotion to be the new head of Central Command means. The last is especially notable:
"That they [Petraeus and Odierno] will again constitute a team overseeing the Iraq war, now at an even higher level of command, means the Bush administration is going for victory in Iraq over all other priorities. Indeed, the personnel changes indicate that the administration is desperate to show enough improvement in Iraq by the end of the year that an incoming Democratic president wouldn’t dare reduce troop levels precipitously and risk being blamed for a dramatic security meltdown. To wit, these appointments demonstrate that, irrespective of who will be the next president, the presidential transition has already begun -- on this administration’s terms."
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments | 4/24/2008 8:33 PM
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Barone Says Hillary Can Win
Michael knows his stuff, and so maybe you should listen to him. Obama is the candidate of blacks and academics and other Bobos--including big-time bureaucrats. Hillary is favored by everyone else (at least in PA). She is the candidate, right now, of the Jacksonian Democrats. She can also end up winning the popular vote, giving a moral impetus to the superdelegates to prefer her.
BUT: There is no real popular vote. And there are competing theories of how this mythical entity is to be calculated. Consensus will not be reached, and Michael does a great job of explaining why. Obama will be ahead in the only real category--delegates won. As long as he is ahead there, he can’t be denied, for reasons I’ve already explained.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [3] | 4/24/2008 11:17 AM
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Rove and Henninger on Obama and Clinton
Two columns worth reading, although we Georgians are offended that Henninger doesn’t know that Sam Nunn (an honorary alumnus of my institution) represented us in the Senate. They’re both right that Clinton is beaten and Obama is beatable.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 4/24/2008 6:30 AM
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Tenured Radicals
Several blogs, including Powerline have linked to material about William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, noting that Dohrn and Ayers helped Obama start his political career in the 1990s. The focus on Obama, and whether there is any significance to his connection (whatever it is) with Ayers, has obscured the real scandal here. Both Ayers and Dohrn are now faculty members in good standing at Universities in the Chicago area. Their views are virtually unchanged from those they held in their younger days. Moreover, their views are probably hard to distinguish from those held by a significant number of their colleagues. The scandal, in other words, is that no one has asked why that is the case, and how we might change it. Are our colleges and universities damaged beyond repair.
Posted by Richard Adams | Link to this Entry | Comments [10] | 4/23/2008 2:51 PM
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McCain’s Character
The more I see of McCain, the more I suspect that he is, in part, the product of two things. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1958. Before that, he attended a good prep school in northern Virginia. That means that his understanding of goverment probably owes a good deal to the consensus liberalism that was the reigning idea in the schools in the 1950s. McCain also seems to have the bull dog stubbornness and "don’t tred on me" attitude of Keltic culture. This is conjecture, but it might explain some things about him. Update: I probably should have used the title, "McCain’s Political Character," as it would do a better job describing what I’m suggesting.
Posted by Richard Adams | Link to this Entry | Comments [10] | 4/23/2008 2:45 PM
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Why Hillary Can’t Win
The most reasonable quick summary of the facts is given by, believe it or not, Dick Morris. It would tear the party apart not to nominate an African American with the most elected delegates, and the Democratic system of proportional representation makes it impossible for Hillary to catch up on that front. Not only that, PA was Hillary country, in part, because of the closed primary and the very elderly electorate. NC and IN will have open primaries and considerably younger voters. Obama’s strengths are among the young and the independents, which is why, of course, he remains the stronger candidate against McCain. Each party is going to nominate a candidate who didn’t really win the support of its rank-and-file.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [5] | 4/23/2008 2:39 PM
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Poor Hillary
1. Her fairly impressive "technical landslide" in PA means she must stay in the race. But her victory wasn’t big enough to give anyone real confidence that she could actually win the nomination. She’s stuck with being perceived as mean and negative for at least two more weeks. And the odds are close to even that she’ll win in Indiana and really be stuck with going all the way to the convention that’ll have no choice but to deny her the nomination. (Obama’s has no momentum at all right now; the late deciders in PA went for Hillary.)
2. The old line on the Democrats this year was that voters were having a tough time choosing between two fine candidates. But Democratic voting has obviously become rather negative: Lots of white, working class, Catholic Pennsylvanians voted for Hillary although they don’t really like her and don’t really think she can get the nomination. They were very often voting AGAINST Obama and for, as they say, the lesser of two evils. (I would actually prefer to say they were choosing their manly, witty, and effective Governor Ed Rendell over the wimpy and boring Senator Casey Jr.)
3. For a variety of reasons, Obama has become ever more clearly both an AFRICAN AMERICAN and CULTURALLY ELITIST candidate. This combination, of course, is the recipe for Democratic defeat for the last generation. The sooner the nomination process is over the better for Barack. He needs to return to unity, change, and hope that transcends... And he can’t do that as long as the Clintons are around to exploit his every misstep. All in all, Republicans have lots of reasons to praise the Democratic devotion to proportional representation.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [5] | 4/23/2008 9:10 AM
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Hillary’s strength
Clinton’s near ten point victory means these things, in my opinion: 1. She is staying in ’till the convention; 2. An awkward feeling has settled in on the Democrats that she has a right to because she is tough, and this is combined; 3. With the sense that Obama is much more fragile as a candidate than we have thought; 4. This is connected with the sense mentioned by Peter Lawler that Obama has gone from inspirational to boring. The problem with being inspiring is that you need to keep it up, and if you can’t, and if there is nothing else in your arsenal but inspiration, you become dull; 5. The massive fact that Hillary is able to get the core constituencies in the party (save African-Americans) suggests strongly that Obama cannot beat McCain.
This uncertainty about Obama might be overcome by victories in Indiana and North Carolina, but it might not. It is possible that the gnawing feeling about him will settle in and winning late primaries in Oregon and New Mexico will not overcome it, and then it will come down to a knife fight in Denver over superdelegates. And who will bet against a Clinton in a knife fight?
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [3] | 4/23/2008 8:44 AM
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John M. Olin Foundation, R.I.P.
I enjoyed--and I do mean enjoyed--the support of the John M. Olin Foundation once upon a time. It has made its final grant, to the Manhattan Institute’s Veritas Fund, to continue, in a way, the Foundation’s work in promoting genuine intellectual diversity on campus.
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 4/23/2008 6:40 AM
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Secularity and religious questions in higher education
Having written on these matters, I’ll be interested in the results of the study described in this article. Does secularity mean "open to all kinds of religious discourse" or "closed to all kinds of religious discourse"?
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 4/23/2008 6:33 AM
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Pennsylvania
HRC wins. Here are the exit polls, which show the usual suspects in both camps. Assuming that Obama is the presumptive nominee (for reasons that have been discussed ad nauseum and that credit neither Democratic procedures nor the backbones of the superdelegates), the question is whether and to what degree members of the Clinton coalition will support him in November. Whither, above all, the Catholics, working class and otherwise? Whither white men? (Remember when, as in New Hampshire, Obama received more votes from white men than did Clinton?)
Posted by Joseph Knippenberg | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 4/22/2008 10:45 PM
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Mr. Pot, Mr. Kettle Calling
Bill Clinton’s comments that the Obama campaign "played the race card" on him reminds me of this piece by Dick Morris who said, around the time of the South Carolina primary, that the Clinton strategy against Obama was to turn him into the "black candidate," hoping that that would turn whites against him. Who is right, I have no idea, but it is worth remembering Morris’ take on it.
Posted by Richard Adams | Link to this Entry | Comments | 4/22/2008 7:42 PM
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Flower Child Obama
Just a few quick questions as I’m on the run but listening to Hugh Hewitt’s very good program today on Barack Obama and his connections to Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. What does this do to the perception of Obama as the "Post-60s" candidate? Is he really as "post-Boomer" as he would have us believe? Is he about as post-boomer as he is post-racial? Is the mask slipping as much as it appears to be slipping? Isn’t it becoming ever more clear that he is really just a more aggressive and more left wing version of the politics of the 1960s. He’s everything they always wanted to be but never had the chutzpah, actually, to become. The fig leaf that generation of pols (i.e., people like the Clintons) used to cover their true politics was evasive action, lying, and good old-fashioned trimming. Obama uses pretty words and soaring speeches . . . you have to be sophisticated to understand him and his associates. (So far, he’s done a better job of this even than the Clintons and with their multiple choice definition of "is.") It’s all very complicated . . . "God damn America" doesn’t really mean "God damn America" and, anyway, he’s not really as tight with these folks as the right wing attack machine would have you believe . . . He’s beyond race and beyond generational discord. Well, he’s beyond them because he is the embodiment of them. He is the wolf the Left has by the ears . . . they can neither hold him nor safely let him go. He is the real flower child of the 60s generation. Better still, he is their Frankenstein. What will they do to him when it becomes clear that his bride won’t have him for her bridegroom?
Posted by Julie Ponzi | Link to this Entry | Comments [6] | 4/22/2008 6:48 PM
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Random Observations
1. For one reason or another, beginning with the "technical difficulties," I haven’t time to ramble about nothing.
2. Assuming Obama loses in PA, what’s most noteworthy about the result would be his lack of momentum. He caught up several weeks ago, after all. The MSM has been toughly pro-Barack and pushing the Hillary is mean and can’t be trusted line. The pressure on her to drop out is understandable. At this point the inevitable nominee is being hurt significantly by her prolonged campaign. But why should she drop out after winning a primary? That she can stay in until she loses somewhere else is just good manners.
3. Obama is gone from inspirational to boring, in my book. That doesn’t mean he can’t retool and come out with some new material during the down time after he secures the nomination.
4. Let me say one more thing about David Brooks’ character analysis of the candidates at Berry: He really got me to feel the like he has for McCain. Mac, it turns out, is really, really sloppy and disorganized. He can’t even dress himself presentably unless handlers take over, and his office and living spaces would be utter disasters without similar expert help. Not only that, he instinctively rebels against any and all authority: So he was a jerk in prep school, a big-time underachiever at the Naval Academy, a hero as a POW, and the very opposite of a team player as a senator. I don’t mean any of this as personal criticism: When listening to David recite these facts, my gut response was "Now, there’s a real man."
5. It might well be the case that both Obama and McCain are more than a cut above the usual presidential candidate as human beings, but neither obviously possesses executive competence.
6. One ambiguous sign of McCain’s possible success is Jonathan’s Rauch puff piece on him in THE ATLANTIC. Mac isn’t an ideological or revolutionary conservative, but a true or Burkean conservative. I would flesh out the distinction in Rauch’s mind, but you could do it as well I could. The MSM may end up hearting Mac more than Barack by October.
7. And I haven’t been able to thank Rob Jeffrey and various other professors and students at Wofford for treating Pat Deneen and myself with such attentive respect. Dr. Pat and I pretty much agreed about the many downsides of our techno-nihilism or Lockeanism run amok. But I’m a bit more positive on the upsides of living today (as a naturally sloppy and incompetent guy), and to some extent we disagree about what free and virtuous men and women should do now.
Posted by Peter Lawler | Link to this Entry | Comments [7] | 4/22/2008 2:22 PM
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