Ask Gary Siplin, and he’ll tell you it’s all about sex. And not your mom and dad’s lights-out, face-in-the-pillow, let’s-not-discuss-it, missionary sex, either. No vanilla in this parlour. Rather, it’s about gay sex, the type of gritty and godless exchange that plays out in prisons all over the world.
Siplin is an Orlando senator, and he’s hip to the sultry back-story surrounding sagging pants — meaning he thinks prison folk styling that look when lifting weights and watching TV gets boring. If he can get the House of Representatives on his side, then school children throughout the state will be barred from sporting sagging pants in educational corridors across the jurisdiction. Budding futures will be plucked from the jaws of peril and returned to the promise only a tight-fitting wardrobe can guarantee. As for violators, they’ll be suspended.
“
All we're trying to do now is trying
to inform folks that we have a fad now that does not have a very good
origination," Siplin told Reuters news agency earlier this month.
Siplin isn’t alone in his quest. Just
a few days before the announcement, Riviera Beach, a municipality in Florida,
passed a similar law. Violators of that decree can end up in jail for two
months. Which is pretty ironic.
This kind of thing is common in Florida. About a year ago, Atlantic Beach Theatres was the chosen venue for a performance of The Vagina Monologues . They had it up on their marquee, in plain view, and a child wondered aloud about the definition of the V-word. Complaints followed, and the theatre company replaced the offending English with the word “hoohah.” And so it was that the theatre-going public was privy to a riveting performance of The Hoohah Monologues . Bet you wish you were there.
Strip away the specifics — including the sexual overtones, which comprise a whole other tangent — and these little dramas seem to be about controlling symbols floating around the public ether. Symbols are ubiquitous, but their meanings are far from universal.
Take Siplin himself. About a year
ago, he was facing criminal charges for some sketchy campaign practices. When
confronted by a battery of TV cameras, he bolted across a lawn, scaled a
chain-link fence and ducked into a waiting car. The action and its trigger
represent guilt, cowardice and corruption, hardly the stuff of a promising
future. Quite the opposite: Though his conviction was overturned, it would
appear Florida has a senator whose second term does not have a very good
origination.
But how should society react? Should
political campaigning be outlawed? Should legislators forbid themselves from
climbing fences, regardless of the situation? Should waiting cars and running
suits be banned because some people find their past contexts to be unsavory?
The word we’re looking for is
“subjective”. Each of us has interpretive machinery in our heads, and all those
gears and pulleys work tirelessly to produce meaning from the things we see
around us. But that meaning is usually personal, something produced from
individual life experience and the value systems developed therein. To me,
Ronald McDonald equals zits and lard. To lardy folk with zits, he might well be
an agent of peace and comfort.
In some cases, we look at symbols and arrive at a consensus. Take the swastika. It’s been banned in Germany since the close of the war. But the Nazis appropriated that icon from another culture, namely Hinduism, where it represents peace, not genocide. In January, Germany tried to get the European Union to ban the swastika. Hindu groups across Europe, big surprise, didn’t much care for another culture imposing its guilt reflexes on an ornament through which they channel some of their way of life. Consensus is one thing, cross-cultural consensus something else entirely.
There’s also Sao Paulo to consider. In 2006, the Brazilian city introduced a ban on billboard advertising, a hotbed for symbols. If you’re looking for justification, you’ll find it from the Adbusters set, which holds that surfeit consumer messaging is toxic to the mind. Too many people encourage you to buy a new razor, and you might find yourself using it on a brachial artery. And there’s no way you’ll be able to afford the ad space to call for help; rather, you get to bleed solo in your bathtub, with no one but the coroner to ponder the meaning of it all. Others among Brazil’s cognizanti say their ad culture is racist, as it regularly depicts light-skinned citizens at the expense of the country’s nearly 200 million black descendents, who happen to make less money. Whatever the case, a consensus was reached at city hall. Some people dig it; other people don’t.
So where does that leave us? Before the Gary Siplins of the world have their way with the culture’s symbols, more discussion is needed, and not just the elitist banter of dubiously elected representatives. Referendum-style inclusion fits the bill. And if it seems like a waste of money and time to apply such an apparatus to something as trite as baggy pants, well, then it probably is. If the issue is more intense, like, say, with the swastika, then maybe the public should have a direct say. Until then, fly whatever flag you like.
