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Down in quality control

Potemkin

Links are at the end.

Mark Knopfler wrote today’s headline.¹

Landlords in Berkeley, CA, held a formal event at a local bar to celebrate the end of the eviction moratorium there, with predictable results—landlords and protesters got into a scrum. City Council members denounced the violence and the landlords.

“We must note that hosting a party at a pub to celebrate the end of the eviction moratorium may be seen as callous and insensitive to the thousands of Alameda County residents facing housing precarity or homelessness, regardless of individual hardships faced by small property owners during a temporary emergency period.”

Berkeley, man. You’re going to hold a hurrah for evictions party in Berkeley?²

I don’t follow the American foot variety of sportsball anymore, but the Broncos losing by 50 points to the Dolphins in a game played on land is special.³

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who published Hunter Biden dick pics into the congressional record, is outraged that Chuck “Energy Bucks” Schumer relaxed the Senate dress code on behalf of John Fetterman. “Disgraceful,” she says.

Someone writing in the New York Times agrees, sort of, but on a more reflective note. Rhonda Garelick, a journalism professor at SMU and a Times style writer, argues that the Fetterman rule disadvantages women, who are much more vulnerable to style and physical critiques than are men.

Women are still the adorned, visible, bodily sex whose physicality gets staged by clothes. Accordingly, women’s fashion — including even business attire — requires a near-infinity of daily micro-decisions from head to toe: dress or pants? Low or high neckline? Flats or heels? (If heels, how high?) What kind of jewelry? How much makeup? What is my hair “saying”? Harder still, these decisions all carry a perpetual risk of tipping us somehow into “inappropriateness” — of exposing too much or too little, of trying too hard or not enough, of missing that sweet spot between alluring and dowdy, while, of course, presenting the usual challenges concerning age and body type.

Women showing up to work in the Senate wearing shorts and a hoodie would draw way more outrage than Fetterman, or the occasional other Senator in sweats, does, without a doubt. Kirsten Sinema’s occasional forays into imaginative business casual, for instance, are invariably noticed; imagine if she showed up in triathlon warm-up gear, or any woman showed up in comfort wear.

So there’s a significant measure of inequality between men and women on that score and, Garelick notes, another dollop in maintaining the dress code for Senate aides and other personnel. One imagines that witnesses in Senate hearings would be accused of disrespecting the body if they showed up in casual wear as well.

And that, disrespecting the Senate, is at the heart of most of the critiques. My view is that disrespecting the Senate should be one’s default position, and the only dress code should be the mandate to wear the logos of the member’s corporate sponsors.⁴

Speaking of etiquette, phones are no longer telephones and we should call them something else, although the Washington Post doesn’t say so.

We spoke to an etiquette expert and people of all ages about their own phone pet peeves to come up with the following guidance to help everyone navigate phone calls in 2023.

The actual very last thing you want to do is use your phone to call someone, and for god’s sake don’t leave a voice mail if you do transgress in the first instance.⁵

Also speaking of etiquette, are demands that Senator Bob Menendez resign before he has a chance to use his potential resignation as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the feds a violation of comity? Evidently it’s rude to even mention the possibility that that’s what he’s doing. This other Post story doesn’t mention it, probably under pressure from the etiquette desk at the paper.⁶

NASA sent a spacecraft on a two-billion round trip to gather samples from an asteroid, and it worked. This may seem like an oblique and perhaps trite conclusion to draw, but if we can do that, we can fix whatever technological issue you want to insert here. In any event, watching the NASA nerds dancing in the desert when the capsule with the samples landed was great.⁷

Dire Straits, “Love Over Gold;” Dream Wife, “Social Lubrication.⁸”

And that, Comrades, is all I got. Share if you like it, consider subscribing if you’ve not—it’s free unless you want to pay.

Be well, take care, dress down.

1. Dire Straits live, Industrial Disease

2. Berkeleyside on the evictions party

3. A bit of football glee from the homers

4. NYT on the Senate dress code (no paywall)

5. The WaPo on phone etiquette

6. WaPo on Menendez’s press conference

7. Space.com on the return of Osiris from the depths

8. Dream Wife, Who Do You Wanna Be? live