My new jeans are really quite peculiar. They have been thoroughly sand-blasted, implying that I have given them much good and hardy use. They have also been sandpapered for a similar effect. And perhaps most curiously, they were torn in many places -- some tears the size of two fingers, others only small snags. All of this is what we would expect from someone who gets in a lot of adventures, or is okay with letting their clothing get torn and worn. Just as scars on a man's skin might imply harder times in his past -- perhaps from hard labor, outdooring, or fights -- these pants also imply that we are macho men. My pants tell others that I have been a rebel, a ruffian, or at least someone not afraid to get dirty.
Yet clearly I am not too much of any of these things. My skin has suffered few scars, and nearly all of what's there is from childhood playing (tug-of-war, bicycle-riding, et cetera). I, like most men with similar upbringings, am quite intact and clean. I have the mildest of calluses on my palms from the past two years of gardening and urban farming, and my feet are a bit rougher because I enjoy going barefoot in warmer climes. But other than that, I really am quite unmarked.
Yet I wear these pants that say I'm more adventurous than that. What irony! Funnier still to me is my beloved mother's concern for my older khakis that I have had from high school. They are all still quite wearable and fit me well enough. But from hundreds of hours of wear back in my days on litter crew at the Oregon Zoo, they are quite used. Snags around the cuffs, the occassional small stain or blemish. Why do I need to replace these pants, if their replacers are going to come pre-cut and pre-stained?! I have earned these stripes, and so I certainly don't need to give any money to Levi Strauss to do that for me.
This all points to one of my favorite postmodern critiques of our times -- we are unable to differentiate between the map and the territory. We have become so enamoured with the artificial and the fabricated that we have lost sight of the original 'real.' Jean Baudrillard calls this the "precession of simulacra" and "the desert of the real" -- a phrase you might recall from The Matrix.
With my professionaly ripped-up pants, I am letting people confuse the map (well-worn pants) for the real (pristine skin). I've not really earned those pants -- I've not gotten into the bar-fights, motorcycle accidents, chases, or other misadventures which would create such blemishes. I am, summarily, not that person. Yet when we see people wearing them, that is the image that is implicitly conveyed. Wearing these Bad-Ass pants does not make me a Bad-Ass any more than wearing a trucker hat makes one a trucker.
This issue was most brought home to me on Sunday, when my mother and I drove through Geneva, Illinois. Geneva is an old farming town which is being swallowed up by suburban sprawl. By some means or another, it has managed to have a vibrant downtown which is maybe 25 blocks in all. It looks like the idyllic American small-town Main Street. Gourmet bakeries, ice cream parlors, well-maintained sidewalks, and beautiful storefronts. It all looks quite healthy.
For a moment, I will admit, I thought this was what we'd been missing and losing in America. "See, Mom, why can't we have more of this? This is so gone, so lost; how did they manage to keep or save it here?!" She told me it is a tourist town, where rich people like to come and shop. Indeed, I noticed everyone there were very clean white people. And so I had to look past this map, this simulacra, of a healthy community and local economy. It really is anything but.
If you mean that a health economy is one in which money is being made, then it certainly seems that Geneva is quite healthy.
But if you mean that a healthy economy is a local people mutually interconnected, trading locally-grown things, and generally tending to local people, then Geneva's well-designed building facades are a deceitful sham. These stors were selling goods produced hundreds if not thousands of miles away, baking wheat and rye grown in another state, brewing coffee grown on another continent, and serving food with no nativity to Geneva or its county or state whatsoever! Geneva just became a particularly attractive focus point in the economics of empire. Food and goods from all over the world were shipped to Geneva's downtown, where they were sold to people who drove several miles to get there. The people that made the stuff have no investment in Geneva, and the people that bought it have no investment there either, except that it is still able to provide their Cheese-Puffs and Doodle-wacks in a pleasant and safe and white place.
Geneva, then, is really not a place at all, nor does it have any health of its own. It is only a context for artificiality. It is a map that calls itself a territory.
Bad-Ass Jeans and Geneva, Illinois -- paradigms of my postmodern angst! Everything feels and is fake.
