“If I am occasionally a little overdressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”
Oscar Wilde
John Fetterman, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, has taken Wilde’s bon mot and flipped it on its head; not even by accident has the hulking Reading-native ever been overdressed, and by no metric has his intellectual capacity ever been judged to exceed the average.
And that was before his stroke.
Prior to the traumatic event that reduced the former mayor of Braddock to a state of garbled unintelligibility, and cast him into depression’s dark and violent sea, no one considered Fetterman to be an especially profound thinker. The exalted Harvard graduate degree notwithstanding, Fetterman was thought to be a man governed not so much by the sharpness of his wit, but by the sincerity and range of his emotion. His tearful remarks on the issue of immigration, for example, appealed rather to the heart than to the head of his constituents and his party. The unhewn vulgarity of his language, to take another, was tailored not to the thinking, but to the feeling common man whom he wished to address and sway.
Perhaps, in a different era, that might’ve been a detriment to someone who’d set out to court the public’s esteem and win the nation’s approval.
Today, it is not.
Ours, sadly, is neither an age nor a government noteworthy for its abundance of great minds. The soil from which such powerful intellects once sprang is less fertile. It’s less forthcoming. It isn’t as fruitful of genius. In fact, as I see it, it’s nearly barren. Through the years, almost imperceptibly, its richness has been depleted, almost to the point of its having become a gaping desert. Strong minds and strong characters are no longer sprouting up and occupying the high offices for which, above all, moral and intellectual strength are needed.
While I’m doubtless more interested in the contents of one’s mind and the quality of one’s character, it would be remiss not to take an exacting account of one’s person.
That’s right, one’s person: his bearing, his air, his deportment, his style. These things, frankly, cannot be overlooked. We must attend to them. With an eye unclouded by bias, we must come together and grade the way in which a man presents himself. How does he dress? In what light does he shine? With what charm has he been endowed? Of what grace is he devoid? With what vibe does he touch us?
To measure these things is not to be superficial.
It is not to be snooty.
No.
It is to be discerning. It is to be thorough. It is to assay a man in his entirety, from the inside out, and from the outside in.
His carriage–is it easy and elegant, or stiff and lumbering? Does he exude, in his mannerisms and interactions, warmth, confidence, and poise? Is he possessed of a natural bonhomie? Or is the room strained, and the company cooled, by his bone-chilling froideur? In what way does he carry himself? Is he destitute of all social graces, or do they pour out of him generously, as though a dam unbarred? What is his deportment? Is he well or ill bred? Is he mindful of his appearance? His mien–is it stamped with nobility and refinement? Or is it streaked with base lineaments and paltry cares? With what brilliance does his eye flicker? What sort of a countenance does he wear? In what way, and to what height does he hold his chin?
And, importantly, how does he dress?
Yes, yes!–how does he dress?
In the case of Fetterman, the answer is slovenly, and purposefully so.
Strangely, to many of his devout supporters not only in Pennsylvania, but across this fair land, Fetterman’s unkempt look is his appeal. That’s the whole charm of it!–he appeals by being deliberately unappealing. Think of that! A self-styled “everyman”, Fetterman is famous for donning an oversized Carhartt hooded-sweatshirt, a pair of long, baggy basketball shorts, and thick-soled Hoka running shoes (the thinness of his shanks, and the corpulence of his torso, make the likelihood of his having recently run in said shoes vanishingly low).
And now, contrary to many years of good custom, Fetterman will be allowed to wear his trademark junkyard outfit while in the Senate. That august body of “temperate and respectable” citizens, whose dignity and independence were relied upon to serve as a ballast to the ever-changing tides of democratic whims, will be made, all of a sudden, far less temperate and respectable. Slob chic has arrived and, with it, the total loss of the Senate’s dignity.
A few weeks ago, Chuck Schumer, the Senator from New York and Majority Leader, took it upon himself to amend the Senate’s dress code. He instituted the change in order to appease Fetterman, whose mental health was ostensibly threatened by the burden of being made to look half decent. ‘Tis a plight incomprehensible to me. If ever there was an example of eliminating all standards to make one substandard man feel better, this is it.
Now, if you want to be in the Senate, you needn’t think nor dress well; sheer existence will be quite enough. Along with having attained to the age of thirty years and been nine years a citizen, a pulse is the only other prerequisite.
In closing, I recall Wilde: I fear we’re being governed by grossly underdressed and immensely under-educated men. And Fetterman is the leader of this unsightly pack.