Dressed to Kill: The Conservative Exterior

...Still, he does not do so without a good reason...

...Whereas most customers of a tailor merely order a suit, the conservative dictates one...

...This gave rise to somebody's observation that liberals give their old clothes away to help the poor, while conservatives wear theirs...

...He knows he cannot say the same of the people he is likely to face in the street...

...His identity is at stake, the conscious possession of his individual character...

...That isn't to say that stick-in-the-muds do not serve a useful purpose...

...These were long ago unpopularized by the Prince o f Wales (Edward VIII), on whom they were taken as evidence of an unstable temperament...

...it strikes me as being not so much idolatrous as incomprehensible...

...Hepatitis A is also common in homosexuals...

...Common sense suggests that sexually active gays have no business in any of these occupations...

...Dandyism is the diametrical opposite of the "bohemian hedge...

...they like to read about themselves in Forbes...

...Personally speaking, I prefer Burke to Smith, but I am not about to sport a neckcloth of maroon sprinkled with his micrographic profile in gold...

...The facts are beginning to bear out the contention of one leading British expert, writing in the British Journal of Venereal Diseases in 1982, that the common mouth-anal contact of active homosexuals carries "the almost inevitable risk of transfer of bowel pathogens...

...Along with ghetto swells and urban cowboys, the conservative is among the last persistent wearers of the hat, though he is much more courteous than the others about removing it...

...Modern Times is now available to American Spectator readers for half price with a new one-year subscription or renewal...

...Every once in a while you see a man wearing one with proper dignity and not as a spitefully degraded addition to bohemian costume...

...A 1979 study of gay men in New York City turned up an infection rate of 39 percent for amebiasis or giardiasis (that was using only a single fecal specimen...

...The New England Journal of Medicine reported in 1980 that in San Francisco an average of 10 percent of persons reported as having amebiasis, giardiasis, or shigellosis were employed as food handlers...

...Hollywood and the media under the tutelage of the Gay Media Task Force have done their part, portraying gays in programs like "Dynasty" as allAmerican types with boy-next-door good looks...

...Syphilis, an old disease that was in decline, is also making a comeback...

...only half the men were aware of their infection...

...No doubt he found the baggy trousers of those latter days effeminate and ridiculous, the colors drab and characterless, the abandonment of ruffles an admission of the triumph of democracy, the hard, cylindrical collars and waistless coats rectilinearly representative of the age of machinisme...

...According to TV Guide, we can expect to see many more "almost commonplace" gay characters...

...So does magnitude...

...Among gay men attending a venereal disease clinic in Seattle there was evidence of previous hepatitis A infection in 30 percent...

...His Mecosta was an ancestral village in Normandy, where he wrote ghost-stories about defrocked priests and counterrevolutionary secret agents...

...The Adam Smith tie is the unofficial o f f i c i a l tie o f the Philadelphia Society, of which Mr...

...Johnson's constant awareness of magnitude runs contrary to the current wisdom that modernity has made the world shrink...

...We are told that S & M "is rising from the underground--it's becoming street-level"--as tight black leather clothing with studs and spikes is hitting the boutiques...

...What do you do...

...consider also that, in the modern age, blasphemy may be the last available experience of the numinous...

...They can sustain a decent holding action against the cultural revolution if, to begin with, their eyes are open...

...He may think that he is simply being great-souled in his indifference to so small a matter as his appearance, but ror and sees himself in his threadbare coat and his faded tie, he knows that this man is the same one who looked back at him yesterday, that his beliefs and loyalties are none the worse for wear, and that words will still mean the same thing to him tomorrow that they mean today...

...I t ' s really odd, but you can have fun if you're willing to be a bit pretentious...

...To him, those are two reasons for not buying new clothes...

...I prefer to think that they are sticking their tongues out at the Adam Smiths...

...Nonetheless, the conservative is prepared to make personal sacrifices in the defense of order...

...Of the movie Making Love, he added, "the people who made this picture are determined to prove that 'nice boys' do, that homosexuals can be as welladjusted and as middle-class as anyone else...

...Faced with awesome magnitude, the mind takes refuge in comfortable abstractions...

...There are several conservative ideologies of dress, and one can learn to decode them...

...Max Beerbohm, whom Rebecca West described as "the last civilized man on earth," was indignant and disgusted at their appearance and politics while staying in that district of London during a brief return from his self-imposed Italian exile...

...hence a democracy tends to exhibit every possible type of human character, and resembles " a garment of many colors, embroidered with all kinds of hues"-a pleasant sight to women and boys...

...Nothing can be left to chance...

...Back in 1974 shigellosis began to turn up as a common homosexual infection, first in San Francisco and later in New York, London, and elsewhere...

...Above all, the top hat had to go...

...That was the idea of "respectability...

...fifty billion is just a sound...

...Now Barbey developed his personal costume as a~toung man in the 1830s...

...Lipsett is the perpetual secretary...

...Clearly, homosexuals no more belong irl the food-handling business than they do in the blood banks...

...F i n a l l y , gonorrhea is also rampant in the homosexual community...

...Color choices do not interest him much...

...Truly these were words from another age, an age when bourgeois cmformism might have 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 been a sort of moral safeguard, when people did live like other people, and not living like other people was indeed cause for suspicion of depravity or madness...

...If heredity makes you the man your grandfather was, then it also makes you able to wear his clothes...

...It seems to me that the sartorial image occurred to Plato because he knew that, in a democracy, dress is "optional...

...only be sure that the form of enthusiastic activity you-choose yields the fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness --and that you can buy clothes and equipment for it...

...We're very pleased,' says Chris Uszler, chairperson of the Alliance for Gay A r t i s t s . . . 'there are [going to be] more of what we call "happens-to-begay" characters.' " Perhaps so, Chris...

...assemblage of subcultures, each having its own richly symbolic dress code to establish its identity before the public...

...The general public has been grossly deceived about the gravity of this homosexually engendered public health menace...

...If he is wearing his kilt, and you have your copy of The Clans, Septs, and Regiments of the Scottish Highlands close at hand, you can identify his tartan...

...If it's worth it to you...

...Even while recounting in rich detail the events that have directly shaped our world, Johnson is engaged in a larger struggle of ideas...

...it was meant to keep people he didn't care to deal with too angry to speak to him...

...Needless to say, the conservative gets his clothes made for him, since the mass market would never be able to anticipate his demands...

...three are usually required to be sure of not missing the diagnosis...

...I fear, however, that propinquity to the corridors of power is already exercising a chastening influence upon conservative individualism, and this is tragic...

...His appearance is timeless...

...9 Enterprises T. John Jamieson DRESSED TO KILL: THE CONSERVATIVE EXTERIOR You can spot a conservative by the raiment...

...But I speak too quickly...

...when I met him, he was wearing suede wingtip shoes...

...Barbey's version of The Conservative Mind was a book called The Prophets o f the Past and included essays on de Maistre, Bonald ~, Chateaubriand, and Lammennais...

...It could be wind-surfing, flash-dancing, non-polluting vegetarianism, occidental guru-worship, voluntary pedophilia, sadomasochism, or satanism...

...Successful businessmen are an interesting American subculture...

...and, in myriad ways, technology enables us to control space, "save" time, and feel at home in the remotest corners of "spaceship earth...

...Material, however, is important: Natural fibers require the subjugation of man and beast...

...Seventeen is a figure I know intimately as a friend...

...The stick implies the threat of possible use, as when the Baron de Christiani brained the President of France at the Auteuil races for re-opening the Dreyfus case...

...It is safe to assume that our age's socialist ideologues masterminded the death of the hat because, sitting atop the head, it obviously represented hierarchy or subordination--a word so dear to Dr...

...There is The Decatur Shop, in North Adams, Michigan, where Mr...

...In 1976 physicians at the New York hospital found that 57 percent of cases of shigellosis, not related to foreign travel, were in homosexuals, who made up only 2.5 percent of the patients...

...A monarchist friend of mine had to stop wearing his Carlista red beret out of fear he would be mistaken for one of those vigilantes known as Guardian Angels...

...Homo democraticus americanus minimizes the time and emotional investment in work and maximizes vacation time and "discretionary income" so that life can revolve completely around some hobby or particular form of sensual indulgence, putting a "bohemian hedge," as Tom Wolfe calls it, between the source of his money and his "authentic self"--and wrapping that self in iconographic costume...

...Eliot...

...The young Barbey, however, was a dandy, an aesthetic reactionary, a sartorial " l i o n " who literally wore his contempt of the middle classes on his sleeve--with a ruffle and a tautly buttoned glove...

...Soon it will be said that satanism "is becoming street-level...

...Thomas Kennedy Wolfe, Jr., vulgarly known as Tom Wolfe, who spoke with an utterly disarming candor of his THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984 19 affectations in dress in his 1980 Rolling Stone interview...

...John Lukacs confessed to me that in youth he aspired to le dandysme...

...but, in a climate of cultural pluralism, each little cult presumably defines its own standard of "respectability...

...Yet the genius of the cheval-glass is still the essence of Wolfe...

...so have our means of instant communication...

...I ' m the only person who would confess all this to somebody," says Wolfe...

...Johnson and so demonic to sociologists...

...one of his admonitions was, "Always try to live like other people...

...Wolfe is already over fifty, and shows no signs of giving uPFhis trade as a clothes-wearing man...

...Wear some trick outfits...

...Some British lords are under the impression that they are grandees of some sort too, because they possess very old dispensations allowing their ancestors to remain covered before the sovereign...

...Selma Dritz of the San Francisco Department of Public Health wrote in the Western Journal of Medicine in 1982, "special precautions are required to protect the public from [carriers] who work as food handlers, bartenders, attendants in medical care facilities, and as teachers and aides in day-care centers for infants and young children...

...The young Kirk's checkered career as a self-styled "Bohemian Tory" no doubt found him in many a checkered coat...

...Of course, the clothes were made better in the old days and are well-nigh indestructible...

...Anyway, when the conservative looks in the mirIf heredity makes you the man your grandfather was, then it also makes you able to wear his clothes...

...Matei Calinescu is Professor of Comparative Literature and West European Studies at Indiana University and author o f Faces of Modernity (Indiana University Press...

...Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy," said Wilde...

...Modern Times confronts us with perhaps the main challenge of contemporary life: the sheer magnitude of historical events and their conse'Harper & Row, $27.95...

...Baudelaire summarized the creed of the dandy as "always to astonish and never to be astonished...

...my favorite is Erik yon Kuehnelt-Leddihn's tiny Maltese cross--and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta is a pretty good platoon...

...The Russell Kirk of nineteenthcentury French conservatism was Baudelaire's friend, the ultramontane ultra-royalist Barbey d'Aurevilly...

...Where Wolfe fails as one is in his journalistic method...

...In the newspapers, his pretentious pr#ciositt was sufficient to get a hardened journalist to call out, whenever he saw Wolfe, "Here comes the man with the double-breasted underwear...

...The legend has followed me unforgivingly --though forgiveness for such a departure from the slovenly and the drab is the last thing I would seek...

...But it was probably because they had ring-worm...

...It is invariably "worth it" to the true dandy...

...The morning coats worn in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot are passed from generation to generation and are probably better proof of ancestry than a title, especially in these days when the aristocracy is riddled with recently ennobled political bounders...

...As Dr...

...A letter describing this offer was mailed to all subscribers in July...

...In the same gay survey, 13.5 percent reported a previous infection with syphilis...

...They are dangerous to the appearance of even a quite young man...

...Anybody can be a fop when he is young, but the true dandy persists to the end...

...America is mentally under-taxed and morally underemployed...

...He does not part with old friends for light causes, and his old clothes are old friends indeed...

...One of these ideologies states that it doesn't matter what you wear, so long as it was good once...

...Matei Calinescu OUR CENTURY OF GANGSTERS As Paul Johnson reminds us, the worst of them pillaged in the name of ideology...

...The reference is clearly patronizing...

...The book lends itself to philosophical discussion for a simple reason: In our century, the very choice of writing narrative history has become inherently philosophical...

...In college he wore black gangster shirts and a hat and always carried an umbrella...

...Don Lipsett sells his invention, the Adam Smith tie-and its sequel, the Edmund Burke tie, conceived possibly for those conservatives with some residual hostility to plutocracy...

...The affected dress of the dandy was a defense: Its integrity of taste, its internal logic, was calculated to outrage the bourgeois standard of "respectable" conformism...

...I recall reading the Forbes profile of one old geezer who pontificated, as old geezers are wont to do in their Forbes profiles, upon his formula for a "successful" life...

...Between 60 percent and 70 percent of these persons were homosexuals...

...You can indeed spot a conservative that is not the case at all...

...Do you care to be a respectable sadomasochist, or a respectable satanist...

...In one large survey of U.S...

...The unsophisticated thought I was wearing spats, since they had never seen either Oxfords or spats...

...The reactionary impulse brought him to don his Old School Tie for the first time in his life...

...On the same occasion, I was wearing black and white Oxfords...

...When I go to the Philadelphia Society, I wear my Heraldry Society tie, which is sprinkled with crowned lions' heads...

...the slightest variation in the width of a cuff or the number of vest pockets could get him confused with somebody he thoroughly despises...

...With its sad collapse, the role of counterrevolutionary helmet passed on to the humble billycock or bowler...

...Our awareness, Arthur Koestler once reflected, is incapable of grasping large processes: "Distance in space and time," he wrote in The Yogi and the Commissar (1945), "degrades intensity o f awareness...

...and he adhered to it strictly through all upheavals in fashion and politics until his death in 1889...

...Dandyism is the unforgivable offense against democracy's cult of informality...

...Above all, he considers the idea that he should wear blazer buttons with the initials of some Parisian couturier whose models look like transvestites--unspeakable...

...The conservative does not buy new clothes simply because the fashion has changed or because his wife and children plead with him to try and look like other husbands and daddies...

...In fact, as Johnson stresses again and again, the world has expanded in all dimensions, and so have its problems and tragedies...

...The colors were bright crimson, salmon pink, and royal blue...

...No, with all due respect to the jolly old boy, I fear he was not a conservative but only an oldfashioned stick-in-the-mud...

...Common homosexual varieties of this disease (oral and rectal) are also more difficult to detect and t r e a t . Antibiotic-resistant gonococci are now making an appearance...

...In any event, if a man has "vanity, and fails to divert it into his wardrobe or his prose style, it may corrupt his moral sense, or prevent him from ever forming one...

...It is self-evident that gay sexual practices are an assault upon the ecology of the human body, that the gay communities of America's cities are polluted with disease...

...The main culture that the sixties counterculture was countering no longer exists...

...America is today only an T. John Jamieson is a counterrevolutionary living in Evanston, Illinois...

...With respect to AIDS, there exists a potential for disaster...

...Amebiasfs and/or giardiasis are estimated to affect between 10,000 and 50,000 men in New York City...

...P a u l Johnson's Modern Times' is an extraordinary book: a comprehensive narrative history of the contemporary world, and at the same time a sustained and passionate meditation on the meaning of history in general, and of modernity in particular...

...Our one chance for success in life lies in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time," some new Walter Pater of the American decadence might rise to tell us...

...One doesn't take off one's hat in a saloon, or, if one is a grandee, in the presence of the King of Spain...

...The days of the individualists who felt a compelling psychological urge to scandalize the indifferent liberal culture with sartorial sarcasm are probably over...

...it is especially easy if he's trying to indicate what his little platoon in society is, for then you know that he has one...

...Always it is accompanied by the tightly furled bumbershoot, which is a cryptowalking stick...

...To that of an old man they are utterly disastrous...

...Of the movie Partners, Richard Schickel wrote: "Like all the other pictures, in what looks like a t r e n d . . , it shows homosexuality neutrally, as just another fact one is likely to encounter...

...In their day, the scruffy radicals of Bloomsbury used to pepper their socially indignant letters to The Times with little digs about the "Old School Tie...

...L i k e the ambassador of a deposed monarchy, the true conservative will never openly admit that his civilization, the disestablished establishment, has been reduced to the status of a subculture among the rest...

...Sir Frederick Wilhelmsen lecturing at Hillsdale in the cape of the Order of the Proscribed Legitimacy--with a "leisure suit" underneath...

...Among gays attending saunas in Amsterdam there was evidence of old or recent syphilis in 34 percent...

...P l a t o observed that a democracy is a place where everyone conducts his life exactly as he pleases...

...The world, we are told ad nauseam, is a smaller place: Fast travel has made great distances evaporate...

...My oldest Chesterfield (inherited, in truth, through the line of a good friend) dates back to the Hoover era...

...Still, one is reminded of the observation of the nineteenth-cen~ry historian J.A...

...quences, intended or not...

...To become a reactionary in a revolutionary age, you need only stand still...

...On the other hand, Russell Kirk has been known to wear things that he found in a trunk at Piety Hill...

...A brummagem pretender to the Polish Throne, Count Potocki de Montalk, publisher of the Right Review, wore a miniature crown under his beret, and would snatch the hat o f f at dramatic moments to establish his true identity, doubtless creating the same sensational effect that Clark Kent did whenever he opened his shirt...

...No doubt most fashion designers, like most sociologists, who have as much sympathy for human nature as Robespierre, think that you should not have an individual character...

...The method of Wolfe is to communicate his astonishment to us...

...Now that it is easy to be a conservative, it will become boring...

...I had to have it relined, but that is like dropping a new engine into the old Rolls...

...Conservatives also wear a lot of interesting lapel insignia...

...To obtain a copy, send a check for $36.95 ($21 for the subscription, $13.95 for the book, and $2 for postage and handling) to The American Spectator.--Ed...

...No one is going to forget the kilt of James J. Kilpatrick, and I have heard of Dr...

...Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know," said Wilde again...

...Franz Pick, who pays his tailor in Krugerrands...

...The rest is habit: I believe that I have been wearing three-button coats and waistcoats since 1 attained the doctrinal age of free will (seven), and I do not intend to change now...

...A dog run over by a car upsets my emotional balance 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1984...

...It seems that today's pipe-smoking pretend preppy puppies will only grow up into tomorrow's respectably businesssuited policy analysts, without even the wit of a Dr...

...the pharmaceutical industry is only about one drug ahead of these strains, and there is no guarantee it will remain so...

...by what he wears...

...black is the color of mourning for the ancien rdgime, grey is the color of aristocratic indifference...

...He wore old clothes too, but with a different method to his madness...

...The yearly attack rate was about 22 percent...

...His career ends only with bankruptcy, madness, exile, or mysterious disappearance, but never with old age...

...The walking stick is the reactionary's sceptre of office, a mace with which to call democracy back to order: from the Herculean ivory club of Honor~ de Balzac (sole support of his dubious particle), to the swordstick of Chesterton and the malacca of the monocle'd T.S...

...Without these dead giveaways, it may be less simple to spot a conservative, but it can be done...

...Froude: "One lesson, and one lesson only, history may be said to repeat with distinctness [and that is] that the world is built somehow on moral foundations...

...gays, 40 percent reported known infection with gonorrhea...

...1 predict that satanism is about to make a big comeback: Consider the antinomian zeal with which "avowed" sodomites are rushing to get themselves ordained to the priesthood...

...A public health debacle is here in the making...

...As of this writing, the closest thing to a dandy among the conservatives is Dr...

...He is perhaps supported in this illusion by the fact that the marketplace has not recognized him as it recognizes the other subcultures, by granting him his own exclusive underground boutique...

...The incidence of shigellosis and hepatitis A in men 20 to 29 years of age is now six to ten times that of men or women in any other age group...

...someone took the trouble to weave some red silk into the design, so that the lions, "langued gules" (in heraldic parlance), distinctly appear to be sticking their tongues out...

...No less banal are the grim views of modernity as an age of alienation, anomie, and decay, in which technological advances do nothing more than speed up the moment of global perdition, the final shrinking o f our world into nothingness...