DEL.ICIO.USPublished on: 03/24/08
An age-old controversy — a sometimes bitter dispute in which I confess to having a strong emotional involvement — broke out on the floor of the Georgia Senate last week.
The subject was U.S. Patent No. 139,121 — blue jeans, and the appropriate wearing thereof.
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Growing up in my mother's house, children — decent children, anyway — were not to be seen wearing blue jeans to school, church or any other place where serious business was conducted.
In Mom's mind, jeans were not quite the mark of the devil, but certainly the mark of a juvenile delinquent. And while she was raising us on a sergeant's paycheck, meaning money for clothing was scarce, she was adamant that her children would always be "presentable."
But high school was a different world, where a different set of rules applied. By the early '70s, in the tepid backwash of the Age of Aquarius, jeans had become part of the teen uniform, in part because adults like my mother still saw them as a sign of delinquency.
That posed a dilemma.
Outright rebellion was inconceivable — Dad was a stern enforcer of motherly edicts. That left only one option, the tactic of all insurgents when confronting a superior military force.
Deception.
Sometimes I smuggled jeans into school in my gym bag; sometimes I wore jeans beneath my Mom-approved wool pants. But somehow, I managed to wear jeans.
In the wisdom of time, I now understand that what I saw as rebellion against one set of rules was actually conformity with another. But it turns out that's true of almost all forms of rebellion.
At first glance, state Sen. John Bulloch, a gray-haired Republican from the farm country of South Georgia, doesn't strike you as a rebel. But last week, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee showed up in the Senate chambers wearing a jacket, tie, white shirt and — gulp — blue jeans.
When Bulloch took the Senate well to present a bill for passage, one of his fellow Republicans, Dan Moody of Alpharetta, stood to question him.
Moody, an engineer by training and a former captain in the Army Reserves, is tall, and an elegant dresser. I suspect that his office desk is always clear and tidy, and that his underwear is folded neatly in its drawer back home. So last week, he proceeded to publicly dress down Bulloch for, well, dressing down, suggesting that his colleague was violating Senate rules for decorum and appropriate dress.
Moody was so offended, in fact, that he told Bulloch he was voting against his bill purely to protest his attire.
Bulloch, who grows pecans and row crops down in Thomas County, responded with a gentlemanly, even courtly, restraint that was remarkable under the circumstances.
"They're 100 percent cotton, they're clean, they're pressed, they have a seam in them, and I think they're just as appropriate as anything else I might wear," Bulloch told Moody.
I, too, was offended by Bulloch's attire, but not for the reasons cited by Moody.
Blue jeans have two qualities that distinguish them from any other form of attire: They are unmatched for comfort, and they require very little maintenance. You drop them on the floor at night; you pick them up and put them on again in the morning. For those reasons, they fit perfectly into my preferred sartorial style, which admittedly tends more toward the homeless than the metrosexual.
By pressing and creasing his jeans, Bulloch violated nature. Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis did not patent blue jeans back in 1873 so they could be crisp and pressed, like a pair of dry-cleaned fancy pants. That just is not done.
Putting an iron to a pair of blue jeans is like spreading brie on a piece of Wonderbread. It's like pouring a good honest can of Pabst Blue Ribbon into a champagne flute. So I agree wholeheartedly with Moody — what Bulloch did last week was an affront to decency and the American way.
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