Fashion-challenged, and proud of it.

Today's Boston Globe features a roving-reporter piece interviewing Bostonians about their home town's recent selection as both the crabbiest and worst-dressed city in the country.

The crabbiness is another question for another day; suffice to say that I would a whole lot rather be crabby than artificially and intrusively "friendly" like some other parts of the country. (Yes, there is a middle ground. It's called Chicago, and if we could borrow a little of that town's unforced congeniality, we would be the better for it.)

But the fashion bit? I acknowledge it. In fact I celebrate, nay, revel in it.

There is nothing in the universe sillier than fashion. (Well, OK, maybe libertarianism.) Clothes exist to keep us warm, to protect us from the elements, and to hide the parts of ourselves that are considered taboo because they remind us of sex and we have enough trouble keeping our minds off sex as it is. They have no higher purpose, and in the absence of any higher purpose, we should feel free to please ourselves.

There is, therefore, one simple criterion to be met by any piece of clothing we put on: we should feel comfortable in it.

Now, it's true that "comfortable" is a multi-faceted concept. It encompasses not simply physical comfort--the garment should be of the appropriate weight for the season and somewhat less scratchy than 150-grit sandpaper--but also psychosocial comfort. We should feel that the clothes we wear are well suited to the situations we will face in them, and that they make us look (within the limits of the possible) good.

But the fashionistas miss a simple truth: that last part is for us to decide, and no one else. I don't care whether the shirt I'm wearing fits someone else's concept of what looks good, as long as it fits mine. If I feel like a presentable person in it, that's enough. Others are certainly entitled to their opinions, and if they want to have a good laugh at what presentability means to me, they should absolutely enjoy it.

But that's not good enough for the fashionistas. They want to set up a quasi-objective standard (which changes every few weeks), judge people's wardrobe choices by it, and, if those choices are found wanting, subject them to criticism that often seems to go right past the aesthetic to the moral, as if wearing pleated trousers were not just in questionable taste, but really wrong. They talk about fashion errors as if they were an urgent social problem to be solved, somewhere on the same priority list as homelessness and global warming.

What a perverse waste of time all of this is. And the fact that Bostonians, by and large, couldn't care less about it speaks to our good sense and our well-ordered priorities.

Comparisons legitimate & illegitimate

Last night I enjoyed one of my favorite evening pastimes, watching Jon Stewart nail Bill O'Reilly's head to the floor. In this case, the carpentry was occasioned by O'Reilly's typically blustering response to Stewart's earlier skewering of Megyn Kelly for insisting, in the face of comically overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that Fox doesn't compare people to Nazis. Kelly was, of course, alluding to remarks by Steve Cohen (D-TN) earlier in the week, which compared Republican disinformation on health care reform to the fabled "big lie" tactics of the Nazi propaganda machine.

What struck me about the whole exchange was that everyone took it for granted that Cohen was out of line simply for making a comparison to the Nazis. I saw little effort to elucidate the reasons why the comparison was invalid; it was judged to be so, prima facie, simply because of its object.

I was reminded of an exchange during a Senate hearing a long time ago, on some security issue or other, when a witness pointed to an inconsistency between US policy and our pronouncements on Soviet policy, and a Republican senator harrumphed, "Are you comparing the Soviet Union to the United States of America?"

Damn straight he was, Senator.

Allow me to state, as a categorical principle, that anything in the universe can be compared to anything else in the universe. The comparison may or may not be valid; that must be judged by examining it. It will be valid to the precise degree that the object of the comparison resembles, in salient, relevant aspects, its subject. It is never invalid merely by virtue of the object's identity. I can compare you to Hitler, Jesus Christ, Mae West or Fred Flintstone, and in every case the comparison must be judged on its specific merits.

The contrary principle, as observed by all parties in the Stewart/Fox brouhaha, provides wonderful cover for evildoers and hypocrites. Comparison is fundamental to human communication: we understand things in terms of their resemblance to other things much more readily and deeply than in terms of their abstract attributes. When you declare certain persons or phenomena off limits for comparative purposes, you make it more difficult to describe anything that resembles them. If comparisons to Nazis are inherently beyond the pale, then those who behave, to any significant degree, like the Nazis will be that much harder to call out.

Perhaps Cohen's comparison was off base--but if so, we need to hear why. Simply saying, "Oh! He said they were like Nazis! How dreadfully inappropriate!" is mere noise. Stewart, if no one else, should know better.