[Obama] skips the tie at major indoor events, not just outdoor rallies and Rock the Vote concerts sponsored by MTV. He goes tieless not merely in his shirtsleeves, or even with a blazer. He carries the open-necked look into a realm it was never meant to go: with the two-piece, dark business suit.
This heresy earns the young senator praise from today's keepers of the style tablets. The Washington Post's Robin Givhan -- the acid-penned Madame Blackwell of the Beltway -- could hardly contain herself. "[Obama's] tieless suit," she gushed, "[is] a cross between the style of a 1950s home-from-the-office dad and a 1990s GQ man about town. It is warmly, safely, nostalgically . . . cool."
Others have noticed something else. Take the impeccably liberal Jeff Greenfield. Ask yourself," he challenged his CNN audience, "is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of GQ to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable." We can thank Mr. Greenfield for being reckless enough to say what many were thinking. But he mistakes Mr. Ahmadinejad's source. Mr. Obama may have gotten the idea from GQ, but the Iranian President got it from the Ayatollah Khomeini.
One of the lesser-known outcomes of the 1979 Iranian revolution was the stigmatization of the tie as a tool of Western Imperialism. The Ayatollah even denounced some of his perceived enemies as "tie-wearing cronies of the West." Today in much of the Islamist world, the tie is seen as not merely pro-Western but anti-Islamic, even though no prohibition of the garment can be found in Islamic law. There is a stricture against men wearing silk, but Muslim dandies can get around that by wearing cashmere or linen ties -- and many do.
It's hard to think of anything less hip -- or less intended to be hip -- than Islamist dogma on personal grooming. Yet despite traveling radically different routes along the way, Messrs. Obama and Ahmadinejad somehow manage to wind up in the same sartorial spot. Sort of like the way Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich share virtually identical foreign policies.
My goodness that's a good piece. In one piece they imply that Obama may not wear ties out of some fealty to Khomeni (perhaps his bare neckedness is supposed to be to Muslims what Bush's "Don't put a period on the sentence..." bullshit is to fundamentalist Christians?), but also equate Ron Paul with Kucinich. That is professionalism. That is efficiency. My one critique is that they never got Obama's middle name into the piece, but perhaps they thought it would be too obvious?
This is an embarrassment, even by the low standards of the WSJ editorial page.
1 comment:
This variant does not approach me.
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