High life
The slob as hero
Taki Ever since John McEnroe burst into the tennis scene back in the late Seventies he's been my bete noir, an extremely talent- ed athlete whose behaviour on court set new lows in sportsmanship. Despite his genius with a racket, I found him a thor- oughly despicable, foul-mouthed, amoral opportunist who used his so-called will to win led him to excuse to intimidate umpires and force his opponents to lose concentration. At best it was gamesman- ship; I prefer to call it something else. Fortunately, his legacy did not survive. Players are as well behaved nowadays as the enormous sums of money they compete for permit them to be. This is the good news. The bad is that McEnroe was still around last week, photographed leaving San Loren- zo, one of my favourite haunts, holding a six-month-old baby and dressed like the brute he is: baseball cap in reverse, a Lenin- like goatee, the dourest of expressions, the obligatory filthy jeans, all topped by a shirt featuring crosses, a combination so egre-, gious that it came across as the last sour joke of the godless time we're living in.
Now don't get me wrong. McEnroe does not make fashion, he simply follows it. We are living in the age of the slob as hero. Once upon a time, in fact not at all long ago, the definition of a gentleman was a man in whose presence a woman felt her- self to be a lady. Back then people accept- ed the fact that no human society has ever existed, let alone survived, without a great many constraints on the behaviour of its members. Then came the ghastly Sixties in America, and it's been downhill ever since. The dress code was the first casualty.
If dressing up means self satisfaction, it also means self expression. The slob cul- ture is an aggressive one. Show me a man with a baseball cap in reverse, filthy baggy trousers and those grotesque oversized shoes, and I'll show you a man who is likely to mug an old lady. What has saddened me watching Wimbledon these last few years is the amount of people wearing just such a uniform. Mass culture and permissiveness have carried the day. And night.
I guess it all has to do with proletarian pretensions. Sucking down to the lowest common denominator. A sitcom scriptwrit- er I know in Hollywood says the network and the advertisers do not permit any intel- ligent thoughts to emanate from the char- acters, who might make members of the audience feel inadequate. All references and they are few — to anything literary or intellectual can be uttered only by a hand puppet. Apparently, the floppy creature is less threatening than a human being with an idea or an education. Needless to say, the characters dress like the pelvis-churn- ing disco freaks I've described above.
When the terrible troika of Steven Spiel- berg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen announced they were setting up a billion dollar entertainment company, they did so by showing up at the press conference dressed like the slobs they've always been and always will be. Following that fiasco they've yet to come up with anything, thank God — some jerk wrote that informality is the American spirit. Horse feathers, says yours truly. The America I loved and lost was an extremely formal place, and woe to the slob that showed up at work looking like a Geffen.
First to go, of course, was the military uniform. The Buster Browne belt, the boots, the waisted jackets and the creased breeches were replaced by shapeless olive green jump suits that made a soldier look more like a garbage collector at best, a convict at worst. They knew what they were doing. Take the romance out of a uniform and you've taken the romance out of duty and honour. Vietnam didn't help. (Of course, the guys that won wore black pyja- mas.) The so-called relaxation of the dress code in schools, restaurants, even churches, brought on the alternative uniform, that of the anarchist. Contrived dishevelment ruled, and after a few more years we got a slob in the White House that cemented the victory of the vulgar. As someone far wiser than the poor little Greek boy once said, The great- est threat of our time is neither Aids nor nuclear war, but the encroaching proletari-
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