Because Daniel Akst's twenty-five day-old Wall Street Journal screed about denim wasn't going to lazily re-write itself for Fred Hiatt, super-genius George Will has done the world a favor by regurgitating Akst's piece through his own hack prism for the Washington Post. And like, many hack columns, it begins with a metaphorical trip to the airport:
On any American street, or in any airport or mall, you see the same sad tableau: A 10-year-old boy is walking with his father, whose development was evidently arrested when he was that age, judging by his clothes. Father and son are dressed identically -- running shoes, T-shirts. And jeans, always jeans. If mother is there, she, too, is draped in denim.
Exactly! Surely the majesty - the divinity! - of twenty-first century air travel, with its useless TSA goons pawing you for your bottle of nail polish remover and forcing you to remove your shoes like kindergarteners, is a venue that calls upon us all to wear only our finest breeches and spats! "Jeans come prewashed and acid-treated to make them look like what they are not," Will complains, whilst prewashing and acid-treating Akst's idea for your easy consumption, "authentic work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil."
Trenchant! And it just goes on and on from there! Poll taxes for video game enthusiasts! The "sin of lookism!" "Two and a Half Men!" Paul's letter to the Corinthians! I think Will's main problem with jeans is how much they impede him from pulling strange and ill conceived cultural referents from out of his ass. Like this one:
For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don't wear it. For women, substitute Grace Kelly.
Aye, verily, in today's economy, you can't not afford to look like you're on your way to the Easter Parade. We are just a nation of swells!
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DICKEPEDIA: George Will
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