UNIFORMS: WHY WE ARE WHAT WE WEAR by Paul Fussell

I would be avoiding the pink elephant in the room if I didn't just say this: This book needs pictures. Badly. As "Team America: World Police" would say, this book needs pictures "like Ben Affleck needs acting school." Maybe even more. I know, the implications are startling. Paul reviews a pretty hefty sampling of uniforms in 35 very short chapters, from the pink officers' pants of the Old Empire to the immaculate toques of chefs (did you know they're disposable now?) to the traditional business suit and tie to Catholic robes. I became very good friends with Google Images while reading this book. Sample the following passage: "Thus, he ordered a total change in the bluejackets' uniform, beginning with a new white dress shirt with buttons and black necktie instead of the dark blue jumper with rectangular collar overlapping the shoulders. New also were the ordinary black trousers with zipper fly instead of the wonderfully odd thirteen-buttoned 'broad fall front'..." Unless you're in the Navy (in which case you're saying, "Hey, that's the Zumwalt uniform!"), you're probably starting to feel that little guilty tickle to flip ahead to see how many more pages are left. I know I was.

I'm not naive--I know that adding pictures would have caused the publication cost to skyrocket, and for a book that didn't really need hefty investment: Fussell wrote the hilarious analysis of the American class system, called, of course, Class, back in the eighties, and even (sort of) coined the term "Generation X." In short, Fussell's already famous, and most people, like me, will pick up this book based on his name alone. As long as the bar code runs across the scanner, the publishing company's happy--frankly, they couldn't care less if you use it to unclog your toilet once you get it, as long as you've paid for it. Still, I was disappointed. I had to keep my laptop nearby so I could look up, say, "the Zumwalt uniform" or the traditional sailor suit. Sure, I vaguely knew about most of these things (the chapter entitled "Blue Jeans" was the easiest read), but he went into OCD detail: numbers of buttons and their significance, designs of patches, blazers and blouses and trousers (oh, my!). Occasionally, the book started to seem like those songs where the artist adds in some "shout-outs" to different cities in the middle of the lyrics, just to make people feel a sense of belonging with the song and, of course, buy the album. Fussell reviews transportation uniforms and Boy Scout uniforms, describing them in painful detail, sometimes, it seemed, just to make some Boy Scout reader/buyer feel a sense of attachment to the book ("Hey, I'M in here! I'm getting this just for MY chapter!").

By the middle of the volume, I was sufficienty tired of hearing about military uniforms. At the risk of offending people rabidly loyal to their particular branch of the armed services, they all started to sound the same, probably because, on a layman's level, they pretty much are. Yes, yes, the medals, the "epaulets," the blazers, the quirky hats, the old colonial colors, the shoulder boards, the symbolic numbers of buttons--okay, already. The Chicago Sun-Times described the book, on the jacket, as "a jolly, witty, often wicked little volume," but I guess I missed most of the wit. Fussell came off sounding like a cloistered tailor, a military one, in a long-winded chat with bored people at a fashion party. What I wanted (and as an American, I expect what I want NOW) was a quick description of the uniform and then some speculation about its effect on the wearer, its overall use for society, and some assorted witticisms on the kinds of people who wear them. And, while we're at it, MUCH less military.

I've decided this is my fault. Paul's title, Uniforms, is meant to be taken literally--he really means OFFICIAL uniforms, and while he does branch into the voluntary, less-defined but more-interesting realms of civilian everyday wear, he doesn't go where I expected. For example, why do people wear pajamas? How do they differ the world over? What about Goth attire, or people who wear full skiing outfits but sit in the lodge with cocoa all day? I know he couldn't encompass EVERYTHING, but he should have taken out some of the tedious military detail and added some more speculative blurbs. I can look at uniforms any time I want (thank you Google Images!) but I can only get Paul Fussell's expert speculation and analysis on them from him, and he didn't exactly deliver.

I started to suspect, around the time I was close to tossing the book if I saw one more description of a British officer's boots, that Fussell focused so much on the military because he so enjoys taking shots at it, and the people who join it. Despite the tango he does around actually insulting anyone, we all know just what Paul thinks about soldiers, and the Army in general, by the end of the book. I'll give you a hint: Fussell's a social sciences professor at a university. The fact that that statement is a dead giveaway of Paul's opinions says more about society than this entire narrative. There are numerous little ironic jabs about the "illogic" of the military throughout, but at the end, Fussell finally stops dancing and says, "the military is a showcase of anomalies, as might be expected in a 'profession' [elaborate scare quotes, of course]--its word [just to make sure we understood]--devoted, in the long run, to killing other people, and not feeling much distress about it." This reviewer was, at the last, slightly insulted. I could lecture Paul about the occassional necessity of "killing other people," preferably BEFORE they fly planes into skyscrapers, but I know better. It would have made reading a tiny bit more enjoyable if he'd kept his political opinions out of the writing, as it ALWAYS does. If I want to hear about politics, I'll turn on CNN.

Topped off by the snide anti-military comments, the book was in some places tedious and in others downright pretentious. Especially annoying were all the unnecessary obscure words. If I married Google Images during this reading, then I had an affair with the Google "define" function. Maybe I'm philistine, but I had never heard the word "viand" before (roughly, an article of food) or "poetaster" (in short, a bad poet). You could get by on context, but why couldn't Paul have just put "food" or "bad poet"? It was a minor annoyance, but when you're as obsessive as me, those blow up quickly. As a quick aside, the book included some interesting factoids, especially about the history of the NFL, the origin of the Boy Scouts, etc. All in all, though, Paul's just going on his good name with this one.

If you really want to know the significance of uniforms, try wearing one.

NOT RECOMMENDED

THE SIXTIES: YEARS OF HOPE, DAYS OF RAGE by Todd Gitlin

"All times of upheaval begin as suprises and end as cliches," Gitlin says, and thus begins the most massive and thorough review of "the sixties" ever written. Part of the reason this book was so excellent, so authentic, so inspiring was that Todd had the RIGHT to write it; he was THERE. As one of the early members of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and on a first name basis with the likes of Tom Hayden and I.F. Stone as far back as 1963, Todd brings perspective on a decade that has too many narrow, factional interpretations. Writing in the late eighties, he takes a two-way flight across the landscape of the decade, observing all the in-fighting, out-fighting, successes, mistakes, riots, demonstrations, news clips, drugs, music, politicians, betrayals, friendships (made and broken) and conspiracies, and this book is the travelogue. And what a travelogue it is!

Here's the clincher: You know how the story ends. The Movement dies. The reason "the sixties" hold so much allure is the same reason the conformist jock always ends up with the rebel artist chic: people revel in contrast. The concept of students closing down universities a la Columbia in 1968 or, even more laughably, the CIA bugging phones in college dorms (now THAT would be a sweetheart assignment) is so far into The Twilight Zone for today's students that reading about it from the sixties is like reading a horror novel, with the same mix of excitement, exoticism, unreality, and fear. And yet, there it was, the "Alphabet Soup" decade, awash in acronyms: the SNCC, SDS, LID, PYM, CORE, VDC, FSM--most of these student organizations. Student-started, student-planned, and student-executed.

As a college sophomore, that was the lasting impact of the narrative. Today, the most "activist" organization on campus is problably Amnesty International, the epitome of "quiet" activism, mostly hanging some "Stop the Darfur Genocide" posters, lighting some candles for an end to the death penalty, and passing out some leaflets about Gitmo on weekends when only the dorky frats are having parties. Throwing rocks at police? Marching on Washington? Being taken seriously by the CIA? Lobbying Congress? These are no longer pasttimes of the American College Student. Even today, with another war on, who do you see protesting? OLD PEOPLE--in other words, Todd Gitlin's generation, redux. And so the inevitable question, for better or for worse: What HAPPENED?

He starts answering that question in, of all places, the Fifties, explaining how minor undercurrents, like Mad magazine, medium undercurrents, like the Beat poets, and major undercurrents, like fear of nuclear annihilation, all played their parts in priming the Baby Boom generation (which already had the as-yet unseen advantage of pure numbers) for subversion and rejection of authority. When these kids turned students, brimming with the fat of postwar "post-scarcity" affluence, left suburbia and hit the nothing-better-to-do, no-responsibilities years (sometimes called college), it was "The Revolution" waiting to happen.

As Gitlin puts it, the campus mood "shifted" in 1960, as the election of Kennedy prompted new "hope." Fear of The Bomb in the youth turned to demands for disarmament. In Greensboro, spiffy young black men staged the now-famous sit-in at a lunch counter, bringing civil rights to the fore. Affluence had come of age, Gitlin tells us, and now the generational caucus began to coalesce around groups like SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) which aimed to smash the status quo by challenging Jim Crow laws. To the rebellious students, smashing the status quo sounded almost as great as helping the Southern blacks.

Gitlin plunges you into the elusive "zeitgeist," describing the "fused group" of early SDS, which eventually shattered into a thousand militant, factionalist, neo-Marxist pieces in the late sixties.

The 1964 DNC, lesser known than its Party-splitting 1968 cousin, seemed to be the real turning point of the decade, the moment that sealed the fate of the sixties' legacy. Once the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was hoodwinked by the Mainstream Liberals, all hope of a peaceful fadeout of the radicals was through. This is the moment when SNCC began having "floaters," the "let-it-all-hang-out" type of people who became the vanguard of the counterculture, which rapidly diverged from Gitlin's more Eastern Intellectual political radicals. I opened this account expecting to find it rife with bitterness and feuds between the self-described "New Left" (which, like many a mass movement, eventually begat its own enemies) and the Right, but was suprised that most of the bitterness and feuding was between "radicals" and "liberal" politicians in Congress. In other words, the Sixties, in Gitlin's view, wasn't so much about polarization of the country as about polarization within the Left itself. Conflicts between counterculture radicals like Timothy Leary and political radicals like Tom Hayden go back to the early sixties, eventually growing in proportion to the New Left itself and destroying the Movement.

Gitlin describes the late sixties as "a cyclone in a wind tunnel," its climax, of course, being the famous 1968 DNC, with its signature tear gas and billy club beatings. By this point, Gitlin is disgusted with the Movement and its drugged-out, non-political, violent turn. In one of the most poignant scenes of the book, Todd is on Michigan Avenue, running from tear gas, when he runs into the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, who, years ago, in another universe, had sketched a cartoon satirizing one of the Movement's early, innocent protests. President Kennedy (yeah, that early) had sent the protestors coffee, and there had been debate about whether or not to drink it (most did). Feiffer had drawn a little cartoon with a protestor holding a picket sign that said "COFFEE." Now, those innocent days far behind, Feiffer was running in 1968, too, and as they run together, hearing the smashing of windows all around them, Feiffer tells Gitlin that he's scared. As Gitlin says, "a circle closed." It's the moment when Todd, and the reader, realize how far this peaceful, dissenting Movement has come from its innocent little picketing days. And for better or for worse? As Gitlin describes the people throwing up from tear gas, the bloody beatings, the barricade of Grant Park, you know it's for the worse.

Throughout the last, terrible years, as the Movement spun off terrorist groups like the Weathermen (think Bill Ayers), you can feel Todd's pain, his bewilderment, his fear. Just reading the extremely detail-packed text had me holding my breath. Bombings of ROTC buildings, more than half the campuses in the nation demonstrating and over a fourth on strike altogether, "police riots," mass marches, the RFK assassination...and then, finally, the "fadeout," a slow and thrilling denouement, and then this: "The war fizzled to its uninspirining end. At the last, there was no Nixon and no national will to intervene again and keep Vietnam divided. The movement could claim its victories--but there was not much movement to do the claiming, only a few small rallies, a collective sigh of relief, and Chinese boxes full of endings."

WHEW!

After the ride Gitlin takes you on, through the civil rights movement, underground newspapers, arguments with liberal commentators in New York apartments, SDS conventions with Abbie Hoffman jumping on tables and Leninist factions nominating garbage cans for office, molotov cocktails, the writing of the idealistic Port Huron statement, National Guard deployments, LSD--not necessarily in that order, but who's keeping track?--the end is the victory lap, and the stunning developments of the era continued to run around my head for hours afterward.

Yippie to yuppie, Gitlin tells us, is cliched. Many old Movement people still sign petitions, still give money to Greenpeace, are still somewhat active. Many turned to New Age techniques, trying to calm their overly-politicized, disillusioned, drugged-out minds. Reading this in 2008, I could tell that all of this was more relevant in the eighties than it is now. Most of the old Movement people are dead now, of course, including Tom Hayden, who Gitlin seems to have had a painful ideological separation with during the sixties.

Maybe it seems like some of this isn't relevant at all anymore. Sure, the Movement played a huge part in civil rights in the South and women's lib (for the better) and drugs, AIDS, and moral degradation (for the worse) but things are on the move. Things are changing. But here's the bottom line. In 2004, the Democrats were shocked when John Kerry lost the election to Pres. George W. Bush, who was already fairly unpopular because of the Iraq War. Democrats, and some snobby Europeans, wondered out loud: Why? The most direct answer to that question: The Sixties, that's why. The 1968 DNC was when the Democratic Party lost mainstream America, and it has never regained it. People see Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Alec Baldwin, and all the other less-visible but just as theatric radicals that attach themselves to the Democratic candidate and immediately pull the other lever. The 1968 DNC was horror, in technicolor, pumped into the houses of every "prairie power" hippie's parents and their younger children (the next apathetic generation), tearing apart the Party, and it's yet to put itself back together. If the Democrats want to know why they keep losing elections, they should read all 438 pages of this book.

Just a warning: If you're a conservative Republican (like me), be prepared for "liberalism" (even when it's used as a dirty word) to be tauted as the Only Ideology for Smart People. The Right is so contemptible, it's barely mentioned. Gitlin is still a liberal at heart. It didn't ruin my enjoyment of the book, since Gitlin avoids bashing and sticks to mostly the facts, but if you're touchy about these things, beware. Still, he manages to tear the cliches of the sixties off their pedestals and turn them around, examine them, explain them, extrapolate them into the larger world, and pull you into their formation. That's more than most writers can do, sadly. It truly feels like a journey, one that requires patience (there's A LOT of detail, so be prepared to learn everything you ever wanted to know, ever, about the sixties), but that is mind-blowingly worth it.

Especially to college students: Read up. These are your predecessors. Conservative or Liberal, Democrat or Republican, do you measure up? THAT should prompt some soul-searching.

STRONGLY RECOMMENDED

THE CHEESE MONKEYS by Chipp Kidd

Listen, Chip, I have a question: What were you trying to prove by writing an entire novel about a kid's freshman year at "State" without ever once mentioning the actual name of the university? Of course, being from Pennsylvania, I had you at the Rathskeller reference. Penn State students had you at the first mention of Mifflin Hall. The kitschy reference to the Beaver Bus Terminal topped if off. Those poor people in Idaho and Wisconsin, though, with no frame of reference--they probably just thought you were making this stuff up as you went along, spicing in these details for artistic show. Poor them. And when Himillsey (I didn't check the spelling on that and don't care if it's wrong, Chip, because I'm still mad at you and all authors who give characters unpronouncable names) gets a waffle shaped like "the school mascot," my Pennsylvania pride just blossomed from my bosom: Yes, the nittany lion! How cute.

You have to give Chip a break--writing about freshman year at college is tough. Even in the fifties, when being eighteen was just a smidge less complicated than it is now, the scope of the experience can be overwhelming. I suppose you can come at it from a few angles: You could step back and try to get the whole act--the juggler (in this case, the nameless Art Major, eventually nicknamed, in order, Spewy and Happy) and the million new people, places, ideas, and beer brands he's trying to rotate, or focus on one aspect, zero in on one of the objects he's juggling.

Chip takes the second, and I applaud him there. I don't think I can sit through one more college novel that's all about fraternities, sex, drugs, alcohol, and jilted relationships. These seem to come out by the thousands, so it's no wonder kids get to college and look on these things called "classes" in a bit of confusion. They don't seem to make it into any of the movies. But they ARE what you're paying for, and Chip chooses to base the book around two of Happy's classes: Intro to Drawing and Intro to Graphic Design (AKA Commerical Art). Don't worry, there's a good scene of Happy vomiting his first binge out the window of a proto-hippie's car and even a vaguely homosexual scene of him straddling his drunk, unconscious professor in his bed and taking a picture of his dick. Good old Hap doesn't get laid his first year (it IS the fifties) but there are are some offhand references to sex (Himillsey AKA "Mills" apparently gets around, notably with her and Happy's Tough Cop Graphic Design Professor), but there is at least one good frat party, although, unlike most college novels and movies, it's presented as only a small part of college life instead the whole point of going in the first place. Thank God. Reality--what a concept.

Most of the characters are sort of cookie-cutter. Happy, the naive kid from The East, Maybelle, the even more naive down-home Georgia peach, and even Mills the Unpronouncable, who's presented as a quirky nonconformist, quickly fits the bill of the angry rebel nauseatingly-unique cool girl who's really dreadfully insecure on the inside and is just bursting to unload some of it on Happy. Mills has her funny moments, like when she carves midterm answers onto pencils and calls them "Dodd Cheat-n-Chews." Incidentally, she also introduces the novel's puzzling title, in the form of one of her pieces on exhibit: an empty pedestal, intended as a mockery of "modern" art, which she subtitles "The Seventh Circle of the Cheese Monkeys." The issue of the title is up to you to decode: At the end, I had about five different perfectly acceptable theses about what it signified, but eventually decided it was the final critique of modern literature, with me trying to figure out its meaning just like all the idiot art critics that Mills hates trying to figure out the meaning of "abstract" Picassos. A stretch? Sure. But this is Summer, not AP English.

The best character, by far, is the Graphic Design professor, Winter Sorbeck. Maybe I related to Happy's situation because I had a teacher like Winter once: Absolutely Unforgiving, Sarcastic, Makes Kids Cry, but, in the end, it's all tough love. You end up worshipping him, partly because you know that no one can ever scare you again. It's over. The poor teacher that will stand in front of you after him--they've got nothing. Life seems pretty easy, at least academically, after someone like Winter Sorbeck. He's the kind of guy whose class you off-handedly mention having passed at parties: "Yeah, I got a B in Sorbie's. Tough, but I guess I succeeded." Unlike some other critiques of this novel, I wasn't bothered by Winter's late arrival. He's introduced just as Mills the Unpronouncable's arrogance and self-righteousness starts to grate. It's enjoyable to hear him tell her that she likes "to fart [her] fake fictions and let everyone get a whiff." He only shows up in the second part of the book ("Spring Semeseter"), but the funniest parts involve him. One hilarious episode involves matches and Bestine (if you don't get it, look it up.) Another has them in the middle of central Pennsylvania, designing messages that will get them picked up by strangers (boy, can you imagine an assignment like that now?). There's more. Even if you think the rest of the novel is crap--it's not, but it's not Tolstoy, either--read it for Winter Sorbeck. Of course, if you read it, that'll be obvious.

The end seemed sort of contrived--I won't give it away, but it sort of seemed like he got tired of the story and quickly finished it so he could move on to something else. Some of the references to artists and use of slang started getting denser at the end, until I had to read some of Mills' famous rants a few times to wade my way through all the witticisms. Still, especially for a college student, it's a fun, easy read. And even in the slightly awkward parts, I remembered my favorite part of the book, at the very beginning: "Majoring in Art at the state university appealed to me because I have always hated Art, and I had a hunch if any school would treat the subject with the proper disdain, it would be the one that was run by the government. Of course I was right." Chip definitely treats college with the proper disdain--the sequel picks up after Happy is already graduated. It's always freshman year. What do people do during, say, sophomore year, besides recover from freshman year? The mystery remains.

Just as a final aside: Chip convinced the publishers to add in a deleted chapter at the end of the softcover edition about a sorority initiation rite in a nursing home, and it's HILARIOUS. Read it right after Page 74. As for the entire novel, you won't regret it, overall--good beach read.

CAUTIOUSLY RECOMMENDED

A PERFECT MESS by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman

If, like me, you're one of those people who has a meticulously arranged, categorized, and alphabetized list of favorites on your web browser, now would be the time to hide it. You're about to be told why you're neurotic, obsessive-compulsive, closed-minded, uncreative, conventional, uninspired, and possibly even fascist. You get the impression that you can ignore the little disclaimers to the effect of "sometimes mess CAN be dysfunctional" that pop up along the way: they're just for show. Mess, and implicitly the Right Brainer who thrives in it, are the focus of Abrahamson and Freedman's new religion, and this book is its sacred text.

One of the first things the writers do (after vilifying Americans for the amount of money they spend on professional organizers) is to characterize "mess" into about a million different categories. I called this chapter "the list chapter." From "Types of Messy and Neat People" to "Ways People Can Be Messy," the lists were fun, if not a little overwhelming back-to-back as they were. I did start to notice my academic autopilot switching on; for anyone who hasn't been a student for awhile, this is when your brain decides something you're reading requires memorization for a future test and immediately starts classifying and organizing all of it. I found myself repeating the list terms back to myself as though this were required material, forgetting, for a moment, that it was for fun.

While the slightly textbookish feel of a few of the chapters grated a bit, it certainly didn't ruin the book, and even the overly-academic lists had their funny moments. I laughed out loud when they talked about people who treat their piles of clutter "like nuclear waste--something that requires a massive, costly cleanup and until then must not be trifled with." The sentiment was nearly word-for-word what I thought about my pantry in my former dorm room. Still, the lists can be tedious, but if you're comfortable skipping over certain parts of a book (I'm half OCD, so I read every word), you can just skip over them, no harm done. There are plenty of good parts to skip to.

Also, if you're a trivia junkie, you'll come away with some interesting facts: Did you know, for example, that background noise is artificially added to cell phone conversations? That's just a sampling, but there are a few "REALLY?!?" moments that make it worthwhile, too. And, keeping in step with the times, they employ a whole range of pop science to support their pro-mess stances, some of which are interesting and some of which are a stretch.

As a fairly organized (but not hyper-organized) person, I picked up and appreciated the irony of the stories of mess-obsessed people in the modern world. One hilarious story involved a woman in New York City who called in a "professional organizer" (if this book were a novel, this would be its antagonist) to try to "help" her with her perceived mess. The writers walk you through a pathetic story about how much humiliation a little bit of clutter has been causing her. The story is witty and worthwhile, and the message resonates throughout the book: IT'S ONLY CLUTTER. It doesn't make you a bad person, a stupid person, or even necessarily a disorganized person. Basically, CLUTTER HAPPENS, especially when you have kids, pets, and a full-time job. And as long as it isn't impairing your ability to function, it's probably fine. They support this general message through a comforting quote by Einstein, the Icon of Smart People: "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what then, is an empty desk?" That's right, the junk wizards of the world are saying in unison, you said it, Einstein!

The scope of the book is huge, ranging from "messy homes" to "messy thinking" and from clutter in business organization to clutter in politics. At times, it can be somewhat overwhelming, but the prose is breezy and the frequent human-interest anecdotes kept me engaged. I enjoyed the story about the founder of The New England Mobile Book Fair (AKA Strymish's) in Boston, where inventory is arranged nominally by publisher but effectively randomly and where the chief operating officer today operates off of a staircase landing in the back of the store. Indeed, highly-ordered organizations are another object of the writers' wrath. They dissect another common sense notion: Bureaucracies are inefficient. "IBM," they point out, "adopted a management structure that took the form of an eight-dimensional matrix, whose working presumably would have been perfectly transparent to anyone conversant in string theory." These sorts of quotes are what really move the book along and kept me reading. I was suprised at how much of this book seemed to be a business book. There were places where it read more like a "corporate leadership" guide than a layman's beach read. Not to say that the chapters on business organization weren't interesting, but you had to have some patience to appreciate them, something Americans are running short on.

Ultimately, the last few chapters provide a good closing, focusing on achieving an "optimal" level of mess. They acknowledge that there is such a thing as "pathological" mess (they stray into some ADHD talk here), but generally focus on how these forms of mess can be put to good use.

At the end, I agreed with them: Society does have a bias in favor of organization and neatness, even when that preference is illogical. A Perfect Mess should be on the wish list for managers, parents, and government officials. While the offhand association of organized people and Nazis may have been a little offensive at times, the writers had a point: People and organizations might just run a little better (and be a little less anxious) if they stop worrying and enjoy their clutter--after all, most people in the Third World would take that problem any day.

CAUTIOUSLY RECOMMENDED