making ourselves OBSOLETE

vintage wedding dress by designer Akira Isogawa

Dictating thought by Patriotism 

There is an appeal to vintage wedding trends I like to savor not only because of history, but because old styles tell stories we hide from ourselves! But, fashion can be a trick of perception. Fashion connects dots in American sensibilities in important ways. In the American lexicon there is a deep seated vagueness about what is hip, and what is important. Fashion's appeal is in these same virtues. Fashion, as I will describe vaguely, is woven throughout American culture beyond cloth and heels into politics, poverty, the whims of the elite, race issues and into the why of who gets served and who doesn't.

Being morose and fatalistic was en vogue during the decade after the second World War. The Jimmy Dean and Marlon Brando characters sulking about the conditions of 'society', or how their families misunderstood them, or being despondent after the war's end about their place in the world set in the minds of youth how to be dangerous and rebellious. But, these were white men. They were the heroes dominating the screen and magazines with their brooding good looks and the charm of a vague roughness. They were not Colored men, who were continually in the way of white men's progress and subject to invisibility, hangings, and second class treatment. Negroes challenged the notions of supremacy white man felt they could squander through the new generation's sulking heroes. How did an Indian man on a reservation or a Black man in a ghetto feel about a white man with all his privilege and his power to kill an Indian and a Black when he killed any of us? We knew he'd get away with it! It was his world!

This is a long story, but in the 21st century the reins of cultural, economic and military powers held by white Euro-Americans are still in their hands protected by time rights, and their insistence that it should be that way always. Today's whining white men have taken up rallying calls about losing America to others and keeping America for real Americans. That is always a nostalgic nod towards Jim Crow's day with a murderous overtone, if you listen carefully. Millions of whites are overwhelmed by diversity. Color barriers made the world a simple place for them. It was a time white men and women knew where they stood. Today the skeleton of Jim Crow and the apartheid system set up over the Palestine people in Israel are comforting forces for many of today's Euro-Americans. If it weren't for the growing numbers of ethnic groups in the country many whites feel they could better order the world into their designs of the world-at-large.

flag worn as t-shirt by African Brazilian woman

Maybe a lot of Americans sleep a lot, but the dismantling of the Constitution has been a decades long process that has become an anthem of millions of white Americans. Either political party can take blame for it, but most I place on the American pastime of being notoriously uninformed about the crucial things citizens of a super power should know and fully understand.

The Patriot Act was one instrument removing our so-called rights. Think of the regulatory rules we allowed to be dismantled that affect our freedoms. What of our propensity to war and our insistence on punishment, and commitment to allowing others to make decisions for us? We, more often than not, enjoy the luxury of being under informed and are not alarmed how badly we fare in the arena of analytical thought. If the ingredients are set and in place for us to relinquish claims and rights whose fault is it, and what guarantees that our freedoms will be in place for our grandchildren if we are asleep?

Gregory E. Woods
9.8.14

flag draped around woman's naked body !!!!

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