Loser Chic

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike Straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

-Gwendolyn Brooks-

It's not so much that Frantz Leger acts like an asshole; it's more that nobody really wants to look at his bare ass while they're eating. Frantz was arrested the other day at a nearby mall that had banned him for repeatedly grossing out the paying food court customers by parading around with his baggy pants halfway to his knees and baring his buttocks to the breeze. Naturally, he thinks it's about race. That's what he told the cops.

Is this the pathetic moon shadow of what started as a youth movement 40 odd years ago? Annoying our gray flannel, close cropped, buttoned down elders was the byproduct of a Liberal political and cultural movement as well as a change in sartorial viewpoint that appears to have been permanent. That wasn't a new idea. It must have been equally as astonishing when kids stopped wearing ruffled collars and leggings and switched to black suits , but that was slightly before my time. Still, these were statements and strong statements; powdered wigs are so out, man. Questioning old values and assuming new ones is usually a mark of progress, but not all change is progress, or the product of enlightenment.

Facial tattoos, bits of metal run through eyebrows and noses and lips and worse; an anus in the face in a public place. Is this part of a natural progression where generations reject the axioms of their elders, or is this the latest devolution of a society in which "fuck you" is not only a motto, but the only discernible theme?

Damned if I know, but pointless provocation as a goal in itself, is an admission that one and one's peers have nothing further to say but to display the finger of speech. It's no longer a rejection of the politics, music and culture of the past; at least not a rejection that offers a replacement, unless you consider consumerism, ignorance, gangs, violence and rectal displays to be such.

Still, sending 20 deputies, a helicopter and canine units to arrest some brainless bozo looking for attention through staged victimhood is not a solution, but rather a way to give some meaning to the empty egotistical provocation; to play into the hands of those trying to create a racial incident out of a proctological display. There's really only one way to deal with it and that's the way America dealt with hippies back in the day. When most of us remember hippies, we remember affluent suburban kids with long hair who bought their beads and sandals at Sears and watched Hootenanny on TV. They were flotsam in the wake of the real, but moribund thing. They were the death of it all, not the crest of a wave.

You guessed it, that's just what I'm suggesting. Stores from The Gap to Dolce & Gabbana to Old Navy have to start selling baggy pants with sewn in boxer shorts and we've got to jump on the bare ass band wagon en mode de parade until America has more moons showing than the rest of the solar system. It's the only way and only you can take back America. OK, you Northern people can wait for spring. I'm not heartless.