Thuggo and Sluggo

July 2, 2007
     As someone who spends a fair amount of time in airports, I marvel at the way my fellow citizens present themselves in public. I see middle-aged women who appear to have left home in their pajamas. But it's the costume and demeanor of American young men especially that raises interesting questions about who we have become.

     The fashion and body language of male youth in 2007 comes from three sources: prison, the nursery, and the pimpmobile. It's an old story now that many conventions of gangster fashion come out of the jail experience, where they take away your belt and shoelaces so you won't hang yourself. Apparently, at some point in US history, they stopped giving the belts and shoelaces back on release, and it became stylish to wear your trousers falling down below the top of your underpants (or butt crack as the case may be). Jail being a kind of accreditation device these days, the message may be: I passed the entrance exam.

     Less obvious is the contribution of the nursery. Pants that are ambiguously neither long or short, worn with XX-large T shirts, tend to make grown men look like babies. Babies have short legs and large torsos compared to grown men. They also make big awkward gestures and touch their sex organs a lot. Add a sideways hat and unlaced sneakers and you have the complete kindergarten rig. Why a 20-year-old male would want to look five years old is another interesting question, but it may have a lot to do with the developmental failures of boys raised in households without fathers. They simply don't know how to be men. They only know how to behave like five year old boys. They even give themselves nursery school nicknames. But they are men, and what could be more menacing than the paradox of a child bent on homicide.

     Tattoos used to be pretty much the sole fashion statement of merchant seamen or people who have served in the armed forces (or people who live in jungles). Now they are common among career girls. The tattooed guys I see down at the gym are ordinary young men who work in cubicles. Tattoos on sailors used to celebrate places they had been or people they had loved. The tattoos I see now are meant to convey fierce and barbaric statements of superhuman power: look at me, I'm a Power Ranger! It's understandable that someone who spends most of his waking hours in a cubicle wearing a telephone headset in order to swindle old people out of their savings might fantasize about rising above all that. But the tragic thing, of course, is that getting tattooed is not quite the same as accomplishing something with your life. In the end, you're just another loser with a grandiose and ridiculous tattoo.

     The pimp connection is too obvious to belabor -- meant to mock normal executive attire while signifying an existence of total leisure and the enjoyment of unearned riches. The trouble is that the worship of unearned riches -- based on the belief that it truly is possible to get something for nothing -- has now become normal at all levels in American life. Everybody from the lowest whoremonger on Hollywood Boulevard to the Wall Street hedge fund managers believes in unearned riches plucked from "suckers." The catch is that men who live by this code almost always come to a bad end. They get their throats cut with razors, or go to prison, or manage to lose all their unearned riches (and the investments of many strangers, too).

     The portrait of the young American male in 2007, therefore, is of an impotent, infantalized being lost in grandiose fantasies of power and importance. It's a picture of men without real confidence, and no idea how to achieve it, who wish to project a transcendently ferocious image complete with odds-and-ends of manner taken from comic books and movies based on comic books, in order to be taken seriously.

     The rest of the world must tremble to contemplate the picture we present. The Nazi soldiers of 1944 were glamour boys compared to the riff-raff that American young men have become. As for those who actually do make it into the army, you wonder how they appear to the locals overseas -- they're probably taken seriously as exactly what the present themselves to be: manifestly evil beings who really need to be blown up. Back home, I look around at the thugs and sluggos at my gym, and I'm ashamed to be a citizen of the same country they live in.

Comments

[Rhisiart Gwilym]

"....I'm ashamed to be a citizen of the same country they live in."

Why not the same world Jim? It isn't just USAmericans. Look at the shambles we're making of everything worldwide.

[Larry Cooper]

I've shared the same feelings for years. Can you imagine how those guys would feel as 5th graders if their mom got them out of bed in the morning and dressed them like that for school? Social graciousness is going away as buttcracks appear and hands rub away at crotches. It's sad that we've gotten to this point and the eyes of the world are on us... all the time.

[asoka]

Asalam waleikum.

Inject an organizing principle and things change.

See the movie MALCOLM X for an example of how thugs, hoodlums, gang members, and pimps become well-groomed, disciplined, caring, and spiritual beings.

[Dave]

The lot of young men is that the role of father and provider in a world of massive school debt, ridiculous housing costs, suburban apathy and a depoliticized culture of individualism mans a life of "having fun" for a long long time. They seem to have a fatalism about them and they know that they will be scraping by most of their lives. So sluggo and thuggo drink a lot go Nascar, football and hear about the their friends coming back from wars they don't understand and can't explain to themselves or others.
Whats needed is a real political movement to address the country's ills which we will get when things get really desperate. The challenge will be if the younger folk will be able to rise to the occasion.

[DaveL]

They're redundant, and they know it.

DaveL

[just john]

Did you actually poll these guys to find out their ages? Or was the possibility that these guys may have been aged anywhere between 20 and 50 just TOO DEPRESSING?

[ken ytuarte]

please remember the insanely stupid clothes worn by many of us young males during "flower power" and disco days. I cringe with embarrassment when I recall. The thug thing, however, is a genuine sypmtom of a sense of failure and exclusion. So you get a B on this one.

[American]

I can relate emotionally, but I'm not sure whether this targeted attack is any more valid than a generalized misanthropism.

When you see groomed, trust-fund preppies, e.g., Mitt Romney's five sons, do you sense some American pride returning? How about the sight of Brooks Brothers-clad elders toddling into the Bohemian Club, or the Somerset? Does that give you more comfort?

People are ridiculous, pathetic creatures, nearly all of the time.

I recently re-read King Lear. The character Kent moved me, as always, but not having read the play for a few years, I was surprised by how remarkable I found him, how refreshing he was, how much I wished real people acted and thought more like him.

But they don't. By and large, they are shitheads, signaling their uselessness and malignancy via a wide variety of outward garmenting.

[teddyboy]

i work in a large urban high school , where we get the worst of the lot . JHK has presented nicely the reality of urban youth .

the darker side is that the prison gangs are well repersented in urban high schools . along with regular gang activities . drugs are huge . with pain killers being the drug of choice .

there is prostution and violance like you can not imagine . it is a grim picture , but it is a prison culture that has permated urban youth and has become a perment part of the american culture .

[Teabow]

I bet adults were saying the same sorts of things about our (Vietnam/baby boomer) generation when men started wearing their hair long and women burned their bras!!
Where were you at that time, Mr. Kunstler?

[Kickaha]

I've often thought that if you feel compelled to advertise it, you probably don't have it.

Like real estate developments named after things they've destroyed (e.g., whispering oaks) and vanity car tags that proclaim qualities that the owners can only dream they have (e.g., LUVRBOY), our manner of dress has come to reflect what we are not.

Still, hasn't this always been true to some extent with people? Remember the codpiece and the powdered wig?

[thal]

The only organizing principle I see here is thermodynamics as it relates to entropy. Once spent, the greater percentage of available energy is unusable. All these observations are signposts to the fact that we've blown our wad, and we're spent.

[thal]

Kick,

"Like real estate developments named after things they've destroyed (e.g., whispering oaks)"

Good one. Development named after the one last oak standing.

Thal

[JS]

I recommend everyone rent "Idiocracy." Quite a great and funny commentary and attack on the dumbing down of our culture.

[jan]

Speaking as a brit, I believe you are being misled. It's purely how they behave that matters, not how they dress nor how in general they appear. Too many times I've judged by the inappropriate measure of immediate appearance, and so misjudged.
Maybe some have earned your contempt by their behaviour, but it must only be for that reason. You cannot damn some by their wardrobe alone, then damn the rest because their tastes are similar. Skin colour is seen by many now (not all, I grant) as irrelevant to personality and humanity, so why does clothing differ? Never mind that it can be changed more easily than skin colour, it signifies just as much - precisely nothing.
Likewise tattoos, piercings, etc.

[merciful]

Oh, what a weak entry. I don't disagree that most people one sees are useless, stupid, grasping (and probably fat, don't get me started there) but the leap to correlate fashion and societal malaise is just too much. Balding old guys who write op-ed columns have always complained about how the nasty lazy youth style themselves, and always will; it's got nothing to do with what's inside.

[foreversincebreakfast]

Young men with tattoos? What about old men with earrings?

[Laura Louzader]

Jim, I'll leave the commentary on male fads to others. Most of the men I know dress like normal, adult males, either in suits (white-collar managerial), work uniforms (blue collar) and dignified grown-man leisurewear.

It's the women who floor me. "Middle-aged women who look like they left home in their pajamas". Jeez, if some of them looked that good. I am APPALLED at the way most women these days present themselves at the office and in the world. You can sure tell the "women" (managerial, aspiring) from the girls (all the other dumb women) by the attire.

Worst of all are the housewives. The most sickening thing is to see a slim young teen with a $300 coach handbag, a $400 Baby Phat cell phone (pink with rhinestones)and a glossy new car, while her mom looks like the nanny from the wrong side of town, dressed in sweats, or a dingy skirt and cardigan for the office, carrying a plastic 10-year-old handbag.

Used to be the other way around. It was my mother who wore the Herbert Levine shoes and the good wools suits, while we girls had to wear what a small clothing allowance could buy and shoes from Baker's. "You haven't earned things like this", my mom said, and went on, "when you're grown up and paying your own way, you can have stuff like this." That went triple for the car.

The message we are sending our youth is that they have NOTHING to look forward to as they mature. Middle age no longer has dignity or authority. What you want to be now is a baby, a baby forever.

[bailey alexander]

I'm surprised at all the cleavage, guess it's the impact of the implants craze...

Well, can't see it getting any better after Murdoch, the base populist, gets the WSJ...

Funny how a right wing capitalist rag is so alarmed that a conservative, free marketeer is going to persuade the environs.

Great post...

[ryan]

The U.S. is unique in the world in that it is the most de-industrialized and wealthiest nation in the Post-Industrial Economy Global Community.

The absence of production of the things we actually consume leads the the emulation of things we consume(entertainment. engineered 'brands). Kids today grow up with a sense of reality nearly entirely informed by mass-media entertainment and socializing with other people with senses of reality informed the same way. We are living in the post-reality culture.

This goes for the middle classes and over achievers nearly as much as it does for the lower classes.

nearly Any dumbass in America can afford a car, and an excessively loud stereo system. usually both. And there are an abundance of dumbasses in America.

[Ilkka Kokkarinen]

Kunstler is channeling Theodore Dalrymple, I see. This is a nice change from the constant anti-suburbia and peak oil warnings which have their place but have become bit of a broken record.

[contango]

There's another meaining to the falling down pants look. It says "I'm poor and these are my big brother's pants and he and his friends protect me". This was the original ghetto explanation I heard.

Our culture is increasingly infantilized because marketeers like it that way. Adult thinkers don't buy so much crap because they have fewer insecurities to cover. Less people get to this stage now though through marketing. I have converstations with mid-forties guys and just walk away thinking " you're talking and behaving like a 14- year old". I see that everywhere nowadays.

Additionally, children are so scared about the demands and pressures of the adult world they refuse to join it if there's a way out. What they're saying is "this is not my responsibility" and avoid it.

Good reads about infantilised culture, "Big Babies" by Michael Bywater and "Sibling Society" by Robert Bly. Both essential for this fascinating and worrying topic.

[Jamie Bono]

I agree with most of your points except for the one on the XXL T-Shirts and baggy jeans. In my eyes (and the eyes of most of law enforcement) what has become fashion in this case has very practical origins. By wearing a T-Shirt (usually white) that is far too long and too bug the wearer effectively masks both height and weight. The optical illusion is created precisely by altering the ratio between torso and legs. If you multiply this by a dozen or two men wearing nearly identical outfits (XXL white T-shirt, stiff baseball cap worn high on the head and baggy black pants) the chances of making a clear identification of any one of the group is almost impossible.

[DanaJ]

"...but it is a prison culture that has permated urban youth and has become a perment part of the american culture".
Exactly, younger men I've talked to express the sentiment that "we've all become enslaved" by our society. But what happens when we have the big prison riot that happens periodically when they just can't take the environment anymore? You have all seen the results on the news, the prisoners destroy their living quarters, burn their beds, and waste the eating area. Of course now the enforcement and control system (prison guards, SWAT teams) clamp down hard. What do you think the result will be in the larger "prison" that people perceive the "Good Ol' USA" to be? Remember the Rodney King riots? That was small scale compared to what could happen.
DanaJ

[Nicholas]

My son went to high school just north of Chicago, where available cash was plentiful. As a very young father unable to keep up with the rather wealthy Jones’, it was odd to find out that my son was about the worst of the bunch with respect to the clothing his mother was all too happy to provide. But, showing wealth was sort of scorned upon by the locals. The kids also happened to be extremely considerate and cognizant of competition. I coached basketball and baseball making sure that everybody played, and aside from wanting to win, they quickly formed a support structure for kids who could not play well.

The dress was sort of prison inspired, since the trickle down was unavoidable. Most of the parents were pretty in control of this stuff. As a divorced parent, the dress code for my son simply became one of the battlegrounds.

Trying to get children to recognize that they have to work for what they want is hard. I am still doing this. In my mind most of these issues are about parenting, rather than the children. These kids are the way they are because of the models that they have followed, not some culture speak that tells them to behave like Paris. If the 80’s were any indication — I was a teenager — the message that I saw was that you, yes you, could be rich and should not be taxed. That you could have it all.

My dress was pretty horrific at the time, some strange cross between punk and new wave. Most of these kids were born well after that. But, the children are simply showcases for the wealth that they aspire towards. Hopefully, we’ll return to education and family as the things that are most rewarding.