Oh, the Humanity!

I learned, reading a blog on Newsweek's site, that the cultured, mannered and high-powered elite of the fashion world had to resort to unthinkably horrible and base strategies in order to have their pre-New York Fashion Week parties be up to snuff: They had to have them thrown by JC Penney. And worse still, their exalted senses, exquisitely refined tastes and stilleto-heel-sharp wit will be forced to attend a show that will feature fashions by that oh-so-flyover retailer.

All of this, of course, is because of global warming. No, I mean, it's all the fault of George Bush. No, wait, I mean it's because of the recession (Whew! Cutting it close on the old metaphorical at-bat!). Yes, you read that right. It's not enough that the economic downturn has cost many people huge chunks of their life savings or pension funds. It's not enough that hundreds of thousands of real people are actually out of work, unlike those silliest of the sillyrati, fashion magazine writers and "junior editors." Heck, it's not even enough that rappers and their enormous entourages have to cut back on the bling. No, now we have to hear of the suffering and potential damage to the fashion industry. You know, that group of people who create clothes that no one outside of the Mos Eisley cantina would ever wear in real life and drape them over the bodies of 19-year-old bundles of flesh-covered sticks who spend their spare time learning The Walk and The Look and reading Eighty Different Ways to Prepare Your Grape for Lunch.

Of course I'd feel for folks if the recession had actually thrown them out of work. Especially because whatever gets designed by them gets made by some poor seamstresses somewhere who've been perfecting their thin look by the old-fashioned method of not having enough money to buy groceries this week. But this item is not about them losing their jobs, it's about how they now don't like their jobs as well as they used to. So zero sympathy from me, as well as every other person who ever held a job that's not been kittens and sunshine every single second of the day.

Well, hold on there, Friar, you might say. If this is all so inconsequential, why are you wasting precious electrons and bandwidth and the time of the handful of people who have clicked here because the Ambien's running low by writing about it? Good question, and I wish I had a good answer. I guess it's because my other choice for subject matter is this: Our nation has set aside this weekend as part of a holiday that honors the men who have held our nation's highest office, some of whom literally shaped our nation or held it together. And an apparently record number of my fellow citizens are choosing to observe that by seeing a remake of a stupid slasher movie, by being entertained by the depicted deaths of young people (Cool! Jason holds her sleeping bag over the fire and roasts her to death!) and apparently by not being at all ashamed that they have done so. At least when the Romans watched people die in the arena they had to clean up actual blood and dispose of actual bodies. We don't even need to do that. We can be entertained by death and torture without having to cause any real harm to anyone! Yay!

I'm afraid the language I'd need to adequately address such a situation falls outside of the words I use in public, so I'll write about dumb fashion industry stuff.