Swimming To Catatonia

I just realized once again how mainstream American culture is ruining my life.

I don't know how I did it - of course I did, I'm absent-minded by nature, no question about it - but I left my swimsuit hanging in the locker room of my local indoor community pool the other day, and I didn't even realize it until later that night.  When I went back to look for it the following morning, it was already too late; it was gone.  Even the lost-and-found bin didn't have it.  This swimsuit was a vintage-1980s Catalina suit, cut short in the style of the times. In other words, it's irreplaceable, as I found out when I searched through the Web sites of various discount marts looking for something exactly like my lost swimsuit.  I couldn't even find anything remotely like it.  The current men's swimsuit style is long-legged cuts, what cultural critic James Kunstler calls "clown trunks."

As fate would have it, Kunstler himself wrote about his own frustrating experience on his blog about trying to buy a short-cut swimsuit for himself, back in July.  As he explained, he went to a chain sporting goods store and looked for such a suit, but he could only find clown trunks.  When he asked an "associate" if they had any short-cut suits, the employee told him, "What you see is all we got."

Kunstler complained to the manager and lectured him about what real swimsuit ought to - and used to - look like.  "In the old days," he told the manager, "bathing suits were designed to minimize the amount of cloth one dragged around in the water. These clown trunks you sell not only make a person look ridiculous, but they must be an awful drag in the water."

"That's what they send us,"  the manager said.  "It's all we got." 

Needless to say, Kunstler left the store  without buying anything.  Me?  I'm down to one newer swimsuit I bought a couple of years ago - not cut as short as the swimsuit I lost, but adequate - and another 1980s-vintage swimsuit that's packed away somewhere with several other garments in our overstuffed basement.  I have a better chance of returning to the lost-and-found bin at the community pool and finding the one I just lost on another try than finding the vintage swimsuit I still have.

This is just another example of how a hip-hop/heavy metal/Homer Simpson mentality defines the American man these days.  The fashion has gotten more cartoonish and more infantile to enable American men to show how bad-ass they are.  I want a classic, short-cut swimsuit to replace the one I lost, but if I get a new swimsuit, I'll have to be okay with dressing like Kanye West lounging around the pool in Vegas. 

This dilemma is also a reminder of the tyranny of the free market, which exists to serve mass taste, no matter how wrong-headed it is.  Long-cut swimsuits are in, so not too many athletic-wear brands offer "classic" short-cut swimsuits.  To find them takes cunning and persistence . . . and they probably cost too much.  The free market has long screwed me before.  It's the same free market in which Quaker Oats discontinued corn bran cereal and Kellogg's stopped selling muesli because anyone who liked them (including I) was in too insignificant a minority to care about.  It's the same free market that led Volkswagen to decide not to sell any car smaller than the Golf here because it figured that too few Americans would buy one.  And, it's also the same free market that put hip-hop all over terrestrial radio and took rock stations off the air . . . as well as leaving hip-hop culture's mark on our swimwear.

This country is degenerating into a stupor where no one is phased by the clownish behavior of the masses; we simply drift toward cultural inertia, and we explain it away as "changing times and changing tastes."  Those of us who would like to get away from all that instead have to deal with the dictates of mass taste, with no recourse but to deal with it and live with it.

I sure do hope I find that other vintage swimsuit.  

Read James Kunstler's rant here.