In order to solve what had become a minor wardrobe emergency, I was forced to go to the mall this evening to seek out something which would match my awkward body’s need for covering as well as my wallet’s usual slim credentials. I was putrified and dumbfounded to find that the mall is an even scarier place than I remember from the last time I spent any significant amount of time there (a year at least).
I noticed all the gangsta clones, faggot clones, hip-hop clones and stoner clones, all standing and posing in an orgy of debt-financed consumerism, huddling in their little cliques with no regard to how silly they all looked. I’ve always seen clothes shopping (in fact most shopping) as a relatively solitary endeavor. Whether I need to try on clothes in order to buy or spend hours searching the used bins at a record store, I’m usually more comfortable spending money without any poor soul in tow. Why is it that this is commonly seen as unusual or uncomfortable with most people?
And I also came to a realization of what all these gangstas and preppies personify: retard-worship. I have often wondered exactly what inspired this ubiquitous fashion of crooked baseball caps, low-rider trousers, stumbling and slow-paced walking, ebonics and otherwise incomprehensible gutter-slang, and other statements of anti-individualism so prevalent in our youth culture… Now that I think about it, it seems that the youth today are mimicking retarded people, or autistic people. They make sudden jerks of their limbs in a strange method of gang symbolism, and they wear their caps and clothes as if their mother dressed them with awkward aging hands and couldn’t quite get things on straight, but their physical and mental incapacitation prevents them from correcting it.
This “retard-mimmicry” is similar to the general trend in society today of underdog-worship. We make icons out of the cripple next door and deride the successful upper-class blonde (see the movie Legally Blonde for an example). We prefer the criminal that loves his mother to the self-made industrialist. I think the adoption by the youth of their particular current trends is indicative of the final phase of this cultural disintegration: admiration for the mentally retarded. It is a pure hatred of the mind and all it is capable of that makes us see the retarded as an ideal to aspire to. It’s sad, and it repulses me more than anything I’ve thought of in recent months.
Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind this evening. But I should be in better spirits tomorrow, with the mall far behind me and Sioux, Steve, Budgie and Knox close ahead. Getting my hands on David will be good, too.
