The Fashion of Freedom...

I'm currently doing something I very rarely do, to wit browsing the offerings on a fairly major fashion blog.  Fashion is something that is a non sequitur in my life, I'm about as far removed from that world as it's possible to be.  But fashion is a major power player in many people's lives, sets attitudes, defines directions, and as a philosopher I can't let the person I am limit the scope of my thought concerning the rest of the world. (ok, that one's a keeper, her eyes don't look like the others, and the hat is cool...kieiping a copy of a magazine cover… omg, is this stuff contagious?)

 

 

Anyhow, what I'm noticing most is a serious dichotomy between the primarily feminism inspired text and the commonalities in what seems to be reflected in the model's eyes, the message riding out to the world on their glance.  The feminist dialog is all about woman as a free creature, self willed, self reliant, responsible for her own actions and her own fate, and yet to my eyes the ladies in the pictures are usually projecting some mixture of a thought formed on a line running between the pathos of "help me, help me please, I'm being crushed by this endless meaningless charade"  and  the irresponsible arrogance of "I can do as I damn well please because you can't see me, I'm invisible, I'm safe, all you can see are my clothes." 

Seems like a pretty damn good jump between the two, the attitudes of feminism and the attitudes of fashion.  Yea, the kind of a jump even old Evil Knieval would have thought twice about.  Makes me wonder if fashion has become the foil of feminism, makes me wonder if the feminists of the world are totally exploiting fashion, and the women who are the slave victims of fashion, as the ultimate negative example of what feminism says a truly liberated woman is supposed to be all about.  I mean really, how can a woman feel herself a free and liberated creature if all society has to do to enslave her thought is have someone say "this is how you should look" and she is compelled by a lifetime of compliance into overhauling her wardrobe?  Hmmmm...

But then again, I don't suppose the jump between fashion and feminism is any more severe than the jump between the old male establishment's desire to marry a virgin so her ignorance will allow him to keep a veteran lady of the evening for his mistress.  Looks to me like the two contradictions run a very, very similar wave-form and polarity, all things allowed for.  People.  Give me a hatful of hot nitro glycerin, I know what to do with that.  But the contradictions society impresses on people are substantially less stable, and a whole lot trickier to work with. Oh, well.

Mitt Romney is who Dwight Eisenhower was worried about…

Social Recon Droid
by CDM.MMX

The first presidential debate of the 2012 election is in the history books.  I watched most of it, read all of it, and my conclusion?  Romney is the antithesis of what a genuine conservative is all about. 

Just for the record, I don't really subscribe to the established political stereotypes and so I call myself a pragmatic idealist.  In other words, do the most good you can with the resources you have to work with.  That's do the most good mind you, not do the most good for this group or that group, but just the most good across the board.  An attitude closer to good parenting than the conventional template of governing.  This usually puts me leaning a bit more towards the conservative side than the liberal, but not this year.  Romney doesn't represent what I call a conservative approach, I find him just an echo of the radical evil that exploited the internal naiveté of the conservative segment to attempt an economic rather than military coup on the United States of America.  The Republican's are not fielding a conservative candidate this year.  Their man is as radical as they come, in radical denial of reality if you want it defined.  In point of fact the actions and attitudes of President Obama come much, much closer to a genuine  conservative stance than any of the half formed, undefined pie in the sky emotional  euphemisms being offered by Romney. 

If I were an old school liberal I'd most likely be rather upset with President Obama, after all, all he is promising is that with forethought and diligence it is possible for America to pull itself out of the hole left in our history by an almost successful attempt to convert the nation into a wholly owned subsidiary of the global corporate establishment being used and misused as their  mercenary army.  He offers no miracle cures, no miracle programs, no glitz and glamour special effects on behalf of a few to blind the eyes of the many.  As a liberal President Obama is at best kind of mediocre.

But that is fine by me since I am not an old school great society liberal any more than I'm an obsolete soldier suffering the consequences of the victor's paranoia the world came to call the cold war. I find his pragmatic approach to restoring and maintaining the well being of the nation  quite in keeping with my own attitudes.  I think he's done a good job and see no reason at all to change managers at this point in time.  That is after all the job we hired him for, management. 

If I were being asked to elect a puppet king or an almost benign tyrant I'd vote for Romney, he'd be better suited to those jobs than would Obama, but thankfully those jobs aren't up for grabs, at least here in the United States.  I'm looking for a truly gifted manager, a finesse job blending fiscal wisdom and acute people savvy who can double in as an effective commander in chief.  That's the job of the President and there is no doubt in my mind President Obama is by far the better qualified.  He has my vote.  I'm willing to bet he'd get Ike's as well.