mainstream american values

Of all the ways a citizen can gain social approval from peers, perhaps the one that puzzles me most is the choice to Be Fashionable. I have trouble thinking of fashion as anything other than planned obsolescence, so to be lauded for being tricked into buying something you'll mock yourself for wearing within a decade just strikes me as odd. But there's a certain triumphalism in Being Fashionable - I remember this from the period in my life when I was still making unsuccessful attempts to use clothing as a social lubricant. This sense of knowing purpose is especially directed at older generations, often parents, who seem so completely out-of-touch with the obvious value of a Polo shirt. But now, as I get older, I begin to understand what this "out-of-touch"-ness is about. The most salient example is the prominence of "trucker hats" in the modern fashion hierarchy. These are the ones with plastic mesh at the back, and attractive random words like "Von Dutch" at the front. It's when you see an item go from childhood ridicule to adulthood eminence that you realize the inherent randomness and conformity in "fashion sense".

So now we have Extreme Makeover. This is where people discuss how face-altering surgery will raise their self-esteem. Then a qualified surgeon hacks them into painful disfigurement, wraps them like a caterpillar, and after these messages they bloom into a.....well, a fake-looking scary person. Nevertheless, a party is arranged, and society's values are reinforced as people express explicit approval for the larger breasts, the smaller nose, the binded feet. Everyone claps their hands and feels badly about themselves. It's good fun. Nobody swears, the sex is only implicit, and we all have something to talk about besides that gnawing feeling that there may not be an afterlife after all.