The menswear candidate

A friend of mine remarked the other

day, not a little incontestably, it 

was a dark day for menswear when the 

Presidency lost this man. Those who

lived through that scintillating ep-

och have forgotten the lateral lisp,

an aplomb in the figure at all times,

even the stern rebuke of Big Steel's

impertinent price increase, through

a veil of awesomely apposite deport-

ment, calling into question how much

his clothes really do make the man,

now that we see what little Brioni

have done to humanize the incumbent.

But I stray. Laying not very far o-

ver the horizon of the next Presid-

ency, we spy a candidate who offers,

not to say threatens, to refute the

proposition that one can be made to

seem to wear what others may place

upon one's back. Tar and feathers,

for instance; or merely, a drumbeat-

en wash of hoary phobic effigies.

Have we so soon forgotten Mr Biden's

praise of an African American run-

ning, for being surprisingly clean? 

The mayor of South Bend, a place

not so far west in The Philadelphia

Story as Duluth, offers cheerily to

be elected to this office by charm-

ing the pants off the capitalist in-

telligentsia, and lightening them

of merry wads of patronage. Every-

one is tacitly avoiding the thought 

of how he shall be dressed by the

other side, if he should gain the

nomination to run for that office.

An air of make-believe, not hugely

different from the spell which ab-

sorbed the literati in Camelot, is

suspended by satisfaction with how

he dresses himself. In Center Right

and in Center Left, the sound of

ice cubes clinking in a giddy flux

is wonderfully reminiscent of the

blitheness of the last candidacy,

oblivious to the coral in the way.

Ah, but how splendid now to don

the noble togs of chivalry, what-

ever the rules of the game.