I simply could not choose between these two images. Feel free to debate on which one best represents the nebulous concept of "Business Casual."
Sometime during the 1990's, IBM relaxed its legendary dress code. Out with the dark pinstripe suit and white shirt, in with the khaki and button-down look.
That, my friends, was the beginning of the end. Symbolic, yes, but isn't the beginning of the end always so? And don't the people who are living in the period usually miss it, bigtime?
Well, I didn't. Took me a few years, but I'm pretty sure I've found the exact point of the downfall of the human race as we know it. IBM, and business casuals. I will now use a diverse series of analogies ranging from fat kids to Frank Purdue chicken to illustrate my point. It all comes together, I promise.
The Japanese have a concept/expression pronounced "dara dara." Loosely translated, dara dara means or symbolizes a few ideas:
--not taking care of one's personal appearance.
--not putting one's best foot forward.
--having a generally slovenly, slacker-y attitude.
Let me offer an image of an extreme example of dara dara:
An overweight high school kid with a hat on backwards, baggy sweatshirt and jeans hanging off him, big headphones blasting in his ears, dragging his untied Nike hightops along the sidewalk as he eats a candy bar and lets the wrapper drop in his wake. That is dara dara. Got it?
So. Onto Frank Purdue.
I remember growing up there was a Frank Purdue chicken commercial that had a song which began with the line, "It's the pride of this great country, that makes it the best it can be." (I can't recall how they went from there to chicken breasts, but I suppose it doesn't matter.) Anyway, I was a young kid watching TV with two sisters from England, friends of the family who had come over to visit. I remember one of them saying something like, "you would never hear something like that in a commercial in England." The images in the ad were of a wholesome, spotless farm somewhere in the midwest. Whitebread family, sunset over the paddock.
So, to segue, in a conversation I had recently, Buddy Evan said that the most common first impression of America from the international students he used to teach was that they couldn't believe how dirty this country was. The streets of New York. They'd grown up watching films and television shows featuring a clean America. Even the gritty, street-level gang flicks didn't really give a sense of the rubbish at your feet. They were shocked at the lack of care. Granted, many of them had come from places like Korea and Japan, where cleanliness is a national pastime, but even the Europeans were taken aback.
(As a little homework assignment, next time you're walking down a city street or even through someplace like a mall parking lot, mentally calculate the number of standard-sized trash bags you could fill up with the garbage on the pavement and along the curbs of any football field-ish sized area.)
There is a LOT of talk about the pride of this great country these days, and not just in Purdue chicken commercials. It's blowing from the politician's mouths straight on down to Average Joe at the watercooler dutifully supporting the troops. Everybody's a patriot. Right?
Well, if we care so much about our country, why can't we even keep it clean? I'm not talking Singapore Immaculate here, either. I'm talking, you know, tidy. Isn't it the least we can do?
There are a lot of major problems with our country and our government our world. They are so big and so pervasive that I have a hard time even identifying them (which is why I write on this blog; it helps me to organize my thoughts). In attempting to diagnose these problems, I try to look at obvious symptoms.
Trash on the streets is an obvious symptom.
Trash on the streets tells me that there are certain things about which we no longer care. And not just appearance things. This is not a campaign to recycle. It goes much, much deeper than that.
We have plundered the earth. Plundered the damn thing. Raped and pillaged. But this is not an indictment of oil companies and mining companies and big business. It is much more personal than that.
I think I can understand why the streets are not clean. People do think about oil companies pillaging the earth on some level. And they think, "if we're destroying the planet anyway, what is one more candy wrapper going to hurt?"
Maybe they don't think about big business on a conscious level when they're eating their Snickers, but I'm certain that it plays a part.
And you know what? Who can blame them? When I envision myself telling that kid not to throw his candy wrapper on the ground, you know what answer I envision getting back?
"Why should I give a shit?"
Hmm. Why should he give a shit? Any thoughts?
Another answer I envision:
"It's not my responsibility."
Hmm. Another good point. Whose responsibility is it?
I don't like pointing fingers, but I'm going to point some fingers.
The aging segment of the population grew up on a planet that, as far as they knew, was not yet decaying. Those under, say, 20, grew up in a world that was decaying no matter what we did about it.
But there's that middle ground there. The first Earth Day celebration in 1970 put the health and appearance of the planet into the national consciousness, made it a necessary plank in the platform of every politician worth a salt.
For all practical purposes, middle-aged America should be the most environmentally conscious group of people on the planet. And, to a large extent, we are. Clap clap clap.
But this brings us to business casuals and the downfall of western civilization.
Here's what probably happened there, with IBM:
Some HR guy somewhere analyzed some statistics and figured out that people would be more productive if they didn't have to wear a three-piece suit every day. Productivity increased, but the price was appearance.
For me this begs the question of how the guys who built IBM managed to be so darn productive despite their uncomfortable pinstripe suits. Are we that weak-minded that we actually think and work better in cotton rather than wool? How much more comfortable do we need to be? How soft are you, corporate America? Shall we go to work in our pj's? How high do our workplace environment standards need to be? Is this what our Unions are defending, the right to wear business casuals? Don't give me child labor laws. Don't give me big business abuse of the common worker. Those days are long gone. At the moment, it seems like a lot of people nitpicking because we live in a country where everyone is entitled to absolutely everything, including the right to wear Dockers and Old Navy in the office. What about the guys standing in the wind and rain on top of the skeleton framework of a new IBM office building in Dubuque. How much workplace comfort do you think they have? And we're bitching about wingtips?
Now, one could argue that those guys in the pinstripe suits had a lot to do with the plundering of the earth that I talked about above. They looked good, but they made the earth ugly in the name of making a profit. Fair enough.
But this is a post Earth Day world. We know how to make business and keep things relatively clean.
To me, the decision by IBM to soften the dress code is not the cause of the downfall of western civilization, it is merely a sign of it. A big sign. A sign that says that it's ok to be dara dara. It's ok not to be 100% all the time. It's ok not to look 100% all the time. It's ok to carry yourself with a little less panache.
I'm not going to try to figure out where it started, whether it started with the people on the street throwing their garbage on the ground or with big business sinking their wells into the earth. Whether it's trickle up or trickle down is irrelevant. What matters is that it has reached the middle class, the middle aged, the masses. You're always going to have diversity on the fringes. Fascists, communists, tree-huggers, moonshiners. But when any movement reaches the meat of a society, it has truly taken hold.
Dara dara has taken hold in middle America.
Let's get back to our fat kid dribbling his candy wrapper onto the street.
Me: "Why did you let your candy wrapper fall onto the street, young man?"
Kid: "Everybody else is doing it."
