Damn. There's Ink All Over My Jeans

Last week, I went clothes shopping with my wife.

She picked out two pairs of jeans; brand new, but made to look faded, and with little frayed bits carefully sewn on here and there. I asked her why she wanted to buy new pants that looked old and worn. She answered, “it’s the fashion.”

Indeed it is; as it has been for perhaps fifty years.

Jack Kerouac did this; it shows how powerful is the pen. With one book, he dictated the fashion sense of Filipinas clothes shopping in Qatar sixty years later. Everybody everywhere wants to look like the people he described in On the Road. Or like Marlon Brando in The Wild One—in which Brando was reportedly imitating Kerouac’s own dress.

Kerouac, of course, would hate this. He wanted to escape conformity, not to promote it. The frays in the jeans of his Mexican fellaheen, and in his own jeans, were real; it was not fashion, but necessity.

Artificially worn and frayed jeans are the perfect symbol of how Kerouac’s ideals have become perverted; how the Pharisees always take over.

For his ideals were the traditional ideals of Roman Catholicism: Blessed are the poor. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are you who are hated and persecuted, for so they persecuted the prophets before you…

These are not the people buying these faux-frayed jeans today.

But the social world is the world of illusion. It is a world in which only the clothes matter; a land of masquerade. The poor pretend to be rich, while the rich pretend to be poor. The ruling classes claim to be oppressed, while the oppressed try to pass as members of the ruling class. Racism is called “anti-racism,” discrimination is called “equality,” conformity is called “non-conformist,” liberalism is called “conservative,” conservatism is called “liberal,” the selfish are called compassionate, and the compassionate selfish.

The pen is powerful. But it can produce one hell of a backfire.