How Would They Act if They Were Well-Dressed?
Posted on August 15th, 2009 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
The Washington Post reviews the style choices of vociferous protestors at health care town halls.
By and large, the shouters are dressed in a way that underscores their Average Guy — or Gal — bona fides. They are wearing T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm. They wear fuchsia bandannas and American-flag hankies wrapped around their skulls like sweatbands. A lot of them look as though they could be attending a sporting event. ….
What would happen if all those unhappy townspeople showed up for these meetings in suit jackets, like high school debaters prepared to take on their opponents with facts and nimble intellect rather than histrionics? Would they garner more respect? Would they compel more lawmakers to rethink their positions rather than merely repeat, again and again — in a voice that has the tone of an impatient kindergarten teacher — the same core points?
This is one of the weirder but more thought-provoking perspectives on the town hall brouhahas I’ve read. As someone who believes that presentation is half the battle, I wonder: If people dressed for these events like they dress (or used to dress, I haven’t been in a while) for church, would the level of mutual exchange be elevated?
I know that, on some level, I take these people less seriously not just because of their lunatic-fringe rants about Hitler and death panels, but also because they look like slobs.
4 Responses
8/15/2009 4:48 pm
I didn’t read the article, but the excerpt is stupid.
These folks’ style of participation is dictated by its content: they are wildly misinformed and have no practical objections to what is being proposed. They have ideological objections that amount only to vague associations between health insurance reform and bad things through history. There is no sober, intelligent way to present such a case. If they were speaking civilly and attempting to be persuasive it could only be the result of their having something else to say, something tethered in some regard to reality.
And the reality is that it’s the current system that is hurting people.
The correct rejoinder to most people who say they’re satisfied with their current health insurance is: “Are you satisfied with your current airbags?” And then, “How do you know?”
If airbags worked as badly as health insurance does there would be incredible uproar. Unfortunately the only crash-test dummies is us.
SE
8/16/2009 9:46 am
SE, either you just solved the old chicken and egg problem, or you’re wrong. “These folks’ style of participation is dictated by its content”. Gee, that sounds right, but try reversing it: “these folks’ content is dictated by their style of participation”. Kinda works that way too. I think the writer is on to something, even if there is, I suspect, an interesting consequence that would flow from his suggestion. If these wackos showed up dressed properly, they’d likely just shut up.
8/16/2009 2:28 pm
The sentence you formed works grammatically, but is false. One clue to its falseness is the silly corollary it leads to.
It’s true that I haven’t proved that beliefs dictate style rather than vice versatile, but I hope I learned in grad school not to try without a properly constrained set of textual evidences. I’ll leave it to the intuitions of you mini-Foucaults out there to adjudge whether the following two sentences can be inverted with equal plausibility:
1) “He shouts because he has nothing persuasive to say.”
2) “An egg is a chicken’s way of making another chicken.”
I find the inverse of 2) mind-blowing, because it’s just as plausible in most ways as 2) itself.
But the inverse of 1) is just silly in most real-world situations.
Standing Eagle
8/16/2009 2:30 pm
For ‘versatile’ of course read ‘versa.’
silly iPhone!
SE