Appearance matters.
Sad but true... we're just that shallow.
SNAP JUDGMENTS
Human beings are quick to judge one another by how we appear. I know, I know… “beauty is only skin deep,” and each of us is ever so much more than how we look. However, in the world of politics, appearances are crucial. (I speak as an experienced color and image consultant.)
We’re in a protracted and costly election season right now. Until a couple of weeks ago we had two elderly white men who presented as polar opposites, appearance-wise (policy-wise too, but I’m going shallow here).
The MAGA candidate looms large--a dark glowering orange hulk, who does whatever it takes to be the center of attention. By comparison, the Democratic party’s candidate was ghostly pale, quiet, and stayed out of the limelight. (Perhaps he should have asked the opposition for advice on eyeliner and bronzer, but he was busy “presidenting” behind the scenes on matters of grave national and global consequence, i.e. doing his job.)
Meanwhile, millions of us were in despair over the possibility the Malevolent MAGAman would get re-elected. The pallid Democrat did not appear to have the energy to win a campaign. Gloom hung over his supporters.
Speaking for myself and most of my friends, we’ve been filled with dread since election night 2016—and not because “vermin” were invading our southern borders and “violent criminals” had taken over our cities. No, we dreaded that a greedy, vengeful ignoramus who cared nothing for the well-being of anyone besides himself had access to the nuclear codes, and wants to have them once again.
Back in March 2020 I renamed my weekly newsletter Alive! with Joy to offer myself and my readers something cheery during COVID. But this past year, the looming danger of another Trump term made cheery harder to find.'
THEN, OVERNIGHT EVERYTHING CHANGED.
Biden agreed to bow out and Vice President Kamala Harris and “coach” Tim Walz stepped up. The clouds parted and we found ourselves blinking in the warm bright sun! We took a collective deep breath and for the first time in eight dark years, we began to hope.
ENERGETIC YOUNGSTERS vs GEEZER GRANDPA
Harris is 59, and Walz is 60—and both exude joyful energy. They even laugh! Suddenly Malevolent MAGAman looks like the whiny wacko old fart he really is. At 78, he’s old enough to be the father of his running mate and both Democratic candidates.
This is just the beginning of what will be a challenging race. Will we choose anger, fear, revenge, and Trump’s authoritarian wet dreams? Or will we choose hope, possibility, inclusion, freedom and true patriotism?
Has your mood changed? Will you choose the dark vision or the one of hope?
PUT YOURSELF IN THE WAY OF BEAUTY
A friend was visiting from Chicago and we hiked up to the Japanese Garden early because it was going to be another scorcher. We ducked into an exhibit of Japanese crafts. One wall was decorated with these colorful fans.
A collection of temeri—balls wrapped in fine silk thread, forming unbelievably intricate designs. Zoom in if you can…
LINKS THAT CAUGHT MY ATTENTION
Pantone chooses the color of the year and millions of us have to spend a year wearing it, painting it, buying toasters in the color… also interesting graph of where it’s used.
Charlie Sykes—on Trump’s speeches, quoting the peerless H.L. Mencken
Listening to the speeches of Warren Harding, H.L. Mencken once wrote, reminded him “of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”
Why, Mencken asked, was Harding so awful? Why did his rhetoric chronically sound “so flabby, so banal, so confused and childish, so stupidly at war with sense?” For Mencken, the answer was very simple.
When Dr. Harding prepares a speech he does not think of it in terms of an educated reader locked up in jail, but in terms of a great horde of stoneheads gathered around a stand. That is to say, the thing is always a stump speech; it is conceived as a stump speech and written as a stump speech. More, it is a stump speech addressed to the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small-town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.
OUCH.
You can catch up on the last 25 issues of Alive! with Joy until I disconnect with Mailchimp. Over the years I've posted lots more on my various websites:
ColorstylePDX.com/blog 65 posts about color analysis and seasonal style.
joyoverstreet.com My author website. Learn about my book, the Cherry Pie Paradox: The Surprising Path to Diet Freedom and Lasting Weight Loss, plus other magazine writing, links to guest appearances on a bunch of podcasts and video interviews.