Fashion Systematizes Life
It doesn’t matter which fashion one chooses, from carrying a Birkin to wearing a burka, all fashion is a product of systematizing a way of life. And the same can be said for fashions of the mind, particularly the political mind. We can apply this principle of systematizing (or systemizing) to a variety of human endeavors and philosophies, including the push by companies to be both politically correct and adoptive of social media driven movements. But there are dangers in adopting any system; it pigeonholes thinking; it stereotypes attitude; it quashes freedom and variation; and it promotes empty promises. It’s in the last, those empty promises, that we discover one motive for migration at the American southern border.
Carrying a Birkin Makes a Definitive Statement of Wealth
Many of the millions of migrants who have appeared at America’s southern border traveled under the promise of wealth very much in the manner of nineteenth-century domestic migrants driven by gold rushes. But without some newly discovered gold deposit, what could be the migrant magnet?
It’s still the promise of wealth, even inordinate wealth. Americans tempt foreigners with their seeming unending material wealth. And one place where that wealth is on flashy display is New York City, now the site of a migrant crisis.
In some sections of NYC, say on Fifth Avenue, maybe in Columbus Circle, outside Jeffrey’s, Louis Vuitton’s, or blueberi’s bougie women carrying their expensive purses present a flashy show of wealth that beckons the destitute and desperate of Central and South America as effectively as Homer’s Sirens and the 1849 Gold Rush. Their haute couture bespeaks a lifestyle system that’s well defined in the eyes of some migrants.
I can’t fault those women for the rush of migrants into their cities because some of the poor might have seen their ostentatious lifestyle as a representation of an American system; that’s a generalization gone too far. Those wealthy women are merely part of a social system marked by high fashion, and that means very expensive fashion.
But I will blame the sanctuary mayors and councils for their cities’ migrant problems and bags of empty promises. Had they systematized a set of clearly defined rules for any incoming migrants to follow, they might have warded off the current crush of humanity crowding their sidewalks and makeshift shelters. That the Left typically has no well developed plan doesn’t surprise me. Any complete system is difficult to develop, and most, if not all, systems contain flaws. That the Left’s minions in the councils and mayors’ offices could not anticipate their problems does not surprise me, also. Once the “rush” began, it became a self-sustaining system producing a seemingly never ending flow of people at the southern border, a flow that spilled into the “sanctuaries” that had no defined system to handle the crowds.
Economic Status in America as a Systemized Lifestyle
Judging a “book by its cover” is what we do when we assess the nature of strangers, and by that I mean here judging the wealth of someone by material possessions. A late friend of mine who was not just wealthy, but very wealthy was driving from one of his businesses to another when he stopped at a foreign car dealer. Dressed in khakis and a work shirt, he walked to a Bentley convertible in the showroom to see the car. A young salesman approached him and asked skeptically if he could help. My friend said in his down-home way, “That’s a pretty nice car.” Unaware of this stranger’s wealth and past dealings with the dealership, the salesman said, “Well that’s a very expensive car; I don’t know you could afford it” and some other statements implying that it was out of reach for this poorly dressed guy off the street. By chance the owner walked into the storeroom and greeted my friend warmly, calling him by name and asking him what he needed. My friend, who had previously bought Rolls Royce. Porsche, and Bentley models and who had a car collection worth millions, said, “Well, it seems this fellow doesn’t want to sell me this car.” Yes, that salesman, lost his job, not knowing that the fellow he had categorized as poor was a billionaire. He had judged him by his fashion. He assumed he could “systematize” a life by a superficial appearance. But then, don’t we all do that at times? Think of neighborhoods with expensive homes that have expensive cars in the driveways.
I can assure you that by my possessions and fashion, you could judge my economic status more accurately than that salesman judged my friend. In 1965, I bought a new VW Bug for $1,600: Rear-mounted 40 hp engine, stick shift, crank-open sunroof and side windows, rubber floor covering, and no radio or air conditioning, well, it did have a heater that after the second year worked whether I wanted it to or not. In first gear I could accelerate to 15 mph. In fourth gear I could zip over 70 mph on long downhill highway stretches if the wind was at my back. I bought it on payments. Had I kept the car that was too small for my growing family, it could be worth between $2,500 and $18,000 today, depending on its condition—which would probably be in my case both rusted and broken down since my policy is to wash a car once a year whether it needs it or not. That means my first car started at a price below that of a 1965 Hermès handbag and that it wouldn’t come close to the price of a modern Birkin by Hermès, the price of which could exceed $28,000 this year. As an aside I’ll note that my Bug was bigger than a handbag—not by much—and that it looked like one on wheels.
A Life in Hand-stitched Fine Leather
A New York Post (8/22/23) article on “bougie” purses and New York’s fashion-obsessed who spend thousands of bucks on purses triggered my memory of that story of my rich friend and my little VW. According to the Post, Victoria Lagg, the centerpiece of the article, owns 60 bags by Hermès and other haute couture houses. * She spends as much as $10,000 per month on handbags. Try to imagine—unless you are inordinately wealthy, in which case you’re probably an odd follower of this website. Victoria’s clothes make a similar statement that defines her as wealthy. The system of her life and the lives of other bougies can, it seems, be readily assessed by a glance and summed up in aphoristic explanations.
I can’t imagine spending, even with inflation, that amount of money on fashion of any kind. But I do not begrudge Victoria her wealth. I’m happy for her, and I wish others had similar resources though, of course, few do. For the others, the less fortunate, knock-offs, or dupes, as the haute couture crowd calls them, are available, and according to the Post, you can find such “dupies” in West Virginia and similar states. New York is the number one bougie state for expensive purses, probably most of them in NYC; California comes in second, probably most of those located in Hollywood; I imagine that Florida’s Palm Beach is a close third because I remember walking down Worth Avenue years ago wearing my old jeans, running shoes, and a T-shirt and passing by a young woman wearing a casual outfit probably worth more than my new VW. Definitely, she was a bougie if I judge correctly. (Am I guilty of being the reverse of that young salesman who judged my rich friend? Am I no different from the migrants who see a system they want to join?)
Systematizing Life
In a way, I can’t fault Bernie Sanders and his followers for struggling with a definition of “Democratic Socialism.” The term, in light of socialists’ history of quashing the freedoms of the Demos and annihilating whole populations, seems to be an oxymoron. Any complete definition should include shining darkness on those 160 million dead who were murdered at hands of socialist/Marxist governments. So, Bernie and friends use the term in an open-ended way, giving us hints without precisely laying out a Democratic Socialist System. In that open-endedness, Bernie allows for variant interpretations, much like, yet not like, Friedrich Nietzsche.
During his productive years Friedrich Nietzsche avoided systematizing his philosophy. He was, he hoped, impossible to pin or categorize because he believed that no knowledge system could be complete. His writings are, in fact, difficult to categorize though many have tried to force his thinking into a box of some sort. The closest Nietzsche ever came to systematizing his thought was his Thus Spake Zarathustra. And the reason for his anti-systematizing stand lay in his somewhat troubled life and his recognition of the chaos that envelopes everyone at some time. Systems are antithetical to organic thinking, he believed, organic in the sense of growing fruit.
Friedrich would probably see the affectation of bougie life as an analog of aphoristic, and therefore, easily understandable, thought: “Let us not hide and spoil the actual way in which our thoughts have occurred to us. The profoundest and least exhausted books will most likely always have something of the aphoristic and success character of Pascal’s Pensées. The driving forces and valuations are far beneath the surface; what emerges is an effect” (22). **
The Left Uses Aphoristic Explanations to Systematize a “Warming Climate”
If one considers the arguments of the Left’s climate alarmists who have cherrypicked a few weather data to run the world’s biggest ever scam, he sees a mental fashion that is every bit as pretentious as a handbag full of empty promises. The standby expression of the Left that “the science is settled,” shows the superficiality of their ideas because they have no true systematized science; yet, they believe they have systematized one of the most complex of natural and open-ended phenomena.
The systemizing they proclaim lies on a base of failed computer models and failed and exaggerated predictions. Their system touts “settled science” that suggests: “We have only twelve years left!” “We have only eight years left”—those numbers keep changing and will continue to change with the weather.
Climate alarmism and the bougie life are, in the word of Nietzsche, effects. The former is replete with aphoristic statements like “The corals are dying,” “People are dying,” “The planet is dying,” and “The hottest day on record.” Alarmists encapsulate meaning through statements so conveniently understood that one can carry them around in a mental handbag.
Vandalized VW
I parked my VW on Fifth Avenue on a winter night in 1968 when I went into the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. When I returned to my car, I found that someone had jimmied open the triangular wing window, reached in, unlatched the door, and stole a paper bag of stuff I had in the back seat. Surprise for the thief: That bag contained my sweaty gym clothes from earlier in the day. Somehow the thief believed that my little cheap purse on wheels carried something valuable inside.
But not all was lost. When summer returned hot weather, that broken wing window kept the air flowing inside where my broken heater never stopped working. My lost gym clothes had been converted into air conditioning. An open window became my substitute for an energy efficient air conditioner, much the way people in New York and California who have bought into the alternative green energy systems have found that opening their windows is their realistic clean energy option when the electric grid is overburdened.
The Left’s Promise of Free Stuff for All: Do I Have to Say More than Bougie “Martha’s Vineyard”?
I have a feeling that the millions of migrants who crossed the border during the Biden Administration under the lure of a bag of stuff left in full view have discovered that the bag they’ve come to take doesn’t contain the wealth they thought they were getting. That appears to be the case in bougie NYC that is struggling to provide shelter of any kind to house the thousands inundating the city. As Mayor Adams has said, his handbag of handouts is running empty. He wants you and me to give our taxes to support his sanctuary city’s mess; he wants your money in his handbag. Ah! The Left. They love the haute couture ideas they carry around and profess with ease; it makes them look much better than those lowly and stingy dupies from places like West Virginia. But they now cry for dupies to supply them with stuff for their ransacked bags.
It’s one thing to walk around carrying an expensive handbag; it’s quite a different thing to have something of value inside it. In the case of Leftist NYC, it seems that the politicians mistook dupies for bougies, fake for fine handcrafted leather, cheap for expensive. Too bad my VW is probably in some scrap metal pile; otherwise, I could offer it as a place for NYC’s burgeoning crowd of illegal aliens seeking the bourgeoise—or classy bougie—life of affluent America.
Would Systematizing Ideas Have Prevented the Migrant Mess?
The open-endednes of the Left’s policy on migration has created a mess. Biden and company have flashed a fancy purse before the poor and desperate of other countries, enticing them to rush the border. And those migrants, having opened the purses of sanctuary city mayors, now find themselves as poor and as destitute as they were in their native lands, save a few diminishing handouts. Now, they live in makeshift housing, crowd sidewalks, and wait for handouts from those carrying the purses. Like the thief who raided my little VW, the migrants went through the wing window to grab an enticing bag they now discover was not worth the suffering, the abuses, rapes, and murders of untold numbers who made the journey under the promise of a bougie life. They've been duped by the promise of a system that doesn't really exist, even in Bernie's democratic socialist America.
*https://nypost.com/2023/08/21/new-york-is-most-bougie-state-in-thanks-to-birkinmoms/ See also an article about some relatively wealthy people who think they’re poor: https://nypost.com/2023/08/14/some-of-the-richest-people-in-america-feel-very-poor-survey/
**Morgan, George A. 1941. What Nietzsche Means. New York. Harper Torchbooks (Harper & Row, Publishers).
It doesn’t matter which fashion one chooses, from carrying a Birkin to wearing a burka, all fashion is a product of systematizing a way of life. And the same can be said for fashions of the mind, particularly the political mind. We can apply this principle of systematizing (or systemizing) to a variety of human endeavors and philosophies, including the push by companies to be both politically correct and adoptive of social media driven movements. But there are dangers in adopting any system; it pigeonholes thinking; it stereotypes attitude; it quashes freedom and variation; and it promotes empty promises. It’s in the last, those empty promises, that we discover one motive for migration at the American southern border.
Carrying a Birkin Makes a Definitive Statement of Wealth
Many of the millions of migrants who have appeared at America’s southern border traveled under the promise of wealth very much in the manner of nineteenth-century domestic migrants driven by gold rushes. But without some newly discovered gold deposit, what could be the migrant magnet?
It’s still the promise of wealth, even inordinate wealth. Americans tempt foreigners with their seeming unending material wealth. And one place where that wealth is on flashy display is New York City, now the site of a migrant crisis.
In some sections of NYC, say on Fifth Avenue, maybe in Columbus Circle, outside Jeffrey’s, Louis Vuitton’s, or blueberi’s bougie women carrying their expensive purses present a flashy show of wealth that beckons the destitute and desperate of Central and South America as effectively as Homer’s Sirens and the 1849 Gold Rush. Their haute couture bespeaks a lifestyle system that’s well defined in the eyes of some migrants.
I can’t fault those women for the rush of migrants into their cities because some of the poor might have seen their ostentatious lifestyle as a representation of an American system; that’s a generalization gone too far. Those wealthy women are merely part of a social system marked by high fashion, and that means very expensive fashion.
But I will blame the sanctuary mayors and councils for their cities’ migrant problems and bags of empty promises. Had they systematized a set of clearly defined rules for any incoming migrants to follow, they might have warded off the current crush of humanity crowding their sidewalks and makeshift shelters. That the Left typically has no well developed plan doesn’t surprise me. Any complete system is difficult to develop, and most, if not all, systems contain flaws. That the Left’s minions in the councils and mayors’ offices could not anticipate their problems does not surprise me, also. Once the “rush” began, it became a self-sustaining system producing a seemingly never ending flow of people at the southern border, a flow that spilled into the “sanctuaries” that had no defined system to handle the crowds.
Economic Status in America as a Systemized Lifestyle
Judging a “book by its cover” is what we do when we assess the nature of strangers, and by that I mean here judging the wealth of someone by material possessions. A late friend of mine who was not just wealthy, but very wealthy was driving from one of his businesses to another when he stopped at a foreign car dealer. Dressed in khakis and a work shirt, he walked to a Bentley convertible in the showroom to see the car. A young salesman approached him and asked skeptically if he could help. My friend said in his down-home way, “That’s a pretty nice car.” Unaware of this stranger’s wealth and past dealings with the dealership, the salesman said, “Well that’s a very expensive car; I don’t know you could afford it” and some other statements implying that it was out of reach for this poorly dressed guy off the street. By chance the owner walked into the storeroom and greeted my friend warmly, calling him by name and asking him what he needed. My friend, who had previously bought Rolls Royce. Porsche, and Bentley models and who had a car collection worth millions, said, “Well, it seems this fellow doesn’t want to sell me this car.” Yes, that salesman, lost his job, not knowing that the fellow he had categorized as poor was a billionaire. He had judged him by his fashion. He assumed he could “systematize” a life by a superficial appearance. But then, don’t we all do that at times? Think of neighborhoods with expensive homes that have expensive cars in the driveways.
I can assure you that by my possessions and fashion, you could judge my economic status more accurately than that salesman judged my friend. In 1965, I bought a new VW Bug for $1,600: Rear-mounted 40 hp engine, stick shift, crank-open sunroof and side windows, rubber floor covering, and no radio or air conditioning, well, it did have a heater that after the second year worked whether I wanted it to or not. In first gear I could accelerate to 15 mph. In fourth gear I could zip over 70 mph on long downhill highway stretches if the wind was at my back. I bought it on payments. Had I kept the car that was too small for my growing family, it could be worth between $2,500 and $18,000 today, depending on its condition—which would probably be in my case both rusted and broken down since my policy is to wash a car once a year whether it needs it or not. That means my first car started at a price below that of a 1965 Hermès handbag and that it wouldn’t come close to the price of a modern Birkin by Hermès, the price of which could exceed $28,000 this year. As an aside I’ll note that my Bug was bigger than a handbag—not by much—and that it looked like one on wheels.
A Life in Hand-stitched Fine Leather
A New York Post (8/22/23) article on “bougie” purses and New York’s fashion-obsessed who spend thousands of bucks on purses triggered my memory of that story of my rich friend and my little VW. According to the Post, Victoria Lagg, the centerpiece of the article, owns 60 bags by Hermès and other haute couture houses. * She spends as much as $10,000 per month on handbags. Try to imagine—unless you are inordinately wealthy, in which case you’re probably an odd follower of this website. Victoria’s clothes make a similar statement that defines her as wealthy. The system of her life and the lives of other bougies can, it seems, be readily assessed by a glance and summed up in aphoristic explanations.
I can’t imagine spending, even with inflation, that amount of money on fashion of any kind. But I do not begrudge Victoria her wealth. I’m happy for her, and I wish others had similar resources though, of course, few do. For the others, the less fortunate, knock-offs, or dupes, as the haute couture crowd calls them, are available, and according to the Post, you can find such “dupies” in West Virginia and similar states. New York is the number one bougie state for expensive purses, probably most of them in NYC; California comes in second, probably most of those located in Hollywood; I imagine that Florida’s Palm Beach is a close third because I remember walking down Worth Avenue years ago wearing my old jeans, running shoes, and a T-shirt and passing by a young woman wearing a casual outfit probably worth more than my new VW. Definitely, she was a bougie if I judge correctly. (Am I guilty of being the reverse of that young salesman who judged my rich friend? Am I no different from the migrants who see a system they want to join?)
Systematizing Life
In a way, I can’t fault Bernie Sanders and his followers for struggling with a definition of “Democratic Socialism.” The term, in light of socialists’ history of quashing the freedoms of the Demos and annihilating whole populations, seems to be an oxymoron. Any complete definition should include shining darkness on those 160 million dead who were murdered at hands of socialist/Marxist governments. So, Bernie and friends use the term in an open-ended way, giving us hints without precisely laying out a Democratic Socialist System. In that open-endedness, Bernie allows for variant interpretations, much like, yet not like, Friedrich Nietzsche.
During his productive years Friedrich Nietzsche avoided systematizing his philosophy. He was, he hoped, impossible to pin or categorize because he believed that no knowledge system could be complete. His writings are, in fact, difficult to categorize though many have tried to force his thinking into a box of some sort. The closest Nietzsche ever came to systematizing his thought was his Thus Spake Zarathustra. And the reason for his anti-systematizing stand lay in his somewhat troubled life and his recognition of the chaos that envelopes everyone at some time. Systems are antithetical to organic thinking, he believed, organic in the sense of growing fruit.
Friedrich would probably see the affectation of bougie life as an analog of aphoristic, and therefore, easily understandable, thought: “Let us not hide and spoil the actual way in which our thoughts have occurred to us. The profoundest and least exhausted books will most likely always have something of the aphoristic and success character of Pascal’s Pensées. The driving forces and valuations are far beneath the surface; what emerges is an effect” (22). **
The Left Uses Aphoristic Explanations to Systematize a “Warming Climate”
If one considers the arguments of the Left’s climate alarmists who have cherrypicked a few weather data to run the world’s biggest ever scam, he sees a mental fashion that is every bit as pretentious as a handbag full of empty promises. The standby expression of the Left that “the science is settled,” shows the superficiality of their ideas because they have no true systematized science; yet, they believe they have systematized one of the most complex of natural and open-ended phenomena.
The systemizing they proclaim lies on a base of failed computer models and failed and exaggerated predictions. Their system touts “settled science” that suggests: “We have only twelve years left!” “We have only eight years left”—those numbers keep changing and will continue to change with the weather.
Climate alarmism and the bougie life are, in the word of Nietzsche, effects. The former is replete with aphoristic statements like “The corals are dying,” “People are dying,” “The planet is dying,” and “The hottest day on record.” Alarmists encapsulate meaning through statements so conveniently understood that one can carry them around in a mental handbag.
Vandalized VW
I parked my VW on Fifth Avenue on a winter night in 1968 when I went into the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning. When I returned to my car, I found that someone had jimmied open the triangular wing window, reached in, unlatched the door, and stole a paper bag of stuff I had in the back seat. Surprise for the thief: That bag contained my sweaty gym clothes from earlier in the day. Somehow the thief believed that my little cheap purse on wheels carried something valuable inside.
But not all was lost. When summer returned hot weather, that broken wing window kept the air flowing inside where my broken heater never stopped working. My lost gym clothes had been converted into air conditioning. An open window became my substitute for an energy efficient air conditioner, much the way people in New York and California who have bought into the alternative green energy systems have found that opening their windows is their realistic clean energy option when the electric grid is overburdened.
The Left’s Promise of Free Stuff for All: Do I Have to Say More than Bougie “Martha’s Vineyard”?
I have a feeling that the millions of migrants who crossed the border during the Biden Administration under the lure of a bag of stuff left in full view have discovered that the bag they’ve come to take doesn’t contain the wealth they thought they were getting. That appears to be the case in bougie NYC that is struggling to provide shelter of any kind to house the thousands inundating the city. As Mayor Adams has said, his handbag of handouts is running empty. He wants you and me to give our taxes to support his sanctuary city’s mess; he wants your money in his handbag. Ah! The Left. They love the haute couture ideas they carry around and profess with ease; it makes them look much better than those lowly and stingy dupies from places like West Virginia. But they now cry for dupies to supply them with stuff for their ransacked bags.
It’s one thing to walk around carrying an expensive handbag; it’s quite a different thing to have something of value inside it. In the case of Leftist NYC, it seems that the politicians mistook dupies for bougies, fake for fine handcrafted leather, cheap for expensive. Too bad my VW is probably in some scrap metal pile; otherwise, I could offer it as a place for NYC’s burgeoning crowd of illegal aliens seeking the bourgeoise—or classy bougie—life of affluent America.
Would Systematizing Ideas Have Prevented the Migrant Mess?
The open-endednes of the Left’s policy on migration has created a mess. Biden and company have flashed a fancy purse before the poor and desperate of other countries, enticing them to rush the border. And those migrants, having opened the purses of sanctuary city mayors, now find themselves as poor and as destitute as they were in their native lands, save a few diminishing handouts. Now, they live in makeshift housing, crowd sidewalks, and wait for handouts from those carrying the purses. Like the thief who raided my little VW, the migrants went through the wing window to grab an enticing bag they now discover was not worth the suffering, the abuses, rapes, and murders of untold numbers who made the journey under the promise of a bougie life. They've been duped by the promise of a system that doesn't really exist, even in Bernie's democratic socialist America.
*https://nypost.com/2023/08/21/new-york-is-most-bougie-state-in-thanks-to-birkinmoms/ See also an article about some relatively wealthy people who think they’re poor: https://nypost.com/2023/08/14/some-of-the-richest-people-in-america-feel-very-poor-survey/
**Morgan, George A. 1941. What Nietzsche Means. New York. Harper Torchbooks (Harper & Row, Publishers).
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