I am over in Portland for the presbytery meeting of the CREC, at which we have been doing lots of cool presbyterial stuff. Anyhow, I posted what I did this morning on affected authenticity, and went off to presbytery. When I got back this evening there was a small mountain of comments, etc., which I enjoyed looking over. I was talking to Nancy about this point, and read her my initial post, which I had not had the opportunity to do this morning. She, having spent a goodish bit of time shopping today, told me about something concerning which I was hitherto unaware. Turns out she saw yesterday, with her own eyes, jeans that were for sale ($48) that were not only pre-ripped, but they also had paint splatters all over them. Then it turns out that she told my daughter about this over the phone who said, yeah, that kind of stuff is in the catalogs too. Huh. What I want to know who buys this stuff. I have it narrowed down to hypocrites or buffoons, that’s who, and perhaps both.
Nancy suggested that she start marketing a line of aprons that already had the pancake batter encrusted on them. I think she should go for spaghetti pre-stains. People who buy this kind of stuff are buying a pre-fab authenticity, plastic authenticity, lying authenticity, cool authenticity, too-much-discretionary-income authenticity, and are as hollow as a jug. But one other thing — the pre-fab factory-fresh grime is really obvious when you look straight at it. But it is not any more authentic to rip your own jeans, splatter your own paint, in order to go slouch around at your grandmother’s funeral. Then we are just talking about the difference between mass-marketed lies and home-made ones.