Twilight of Doom

The War on the Unique and the Unexpected — and on Tall Top Hats

i recently wrote round the refusal of the coalesced states government to allow sebastian horsley into our nation’s sanctified realm, where our every thought and action are so astonishingly vestal that jesus would weep with envy. the allied states launches criminal wars of aggression, it commits genocide, it tortures as a thing of national game plan, but the united states remains the greatest expect of the world, the mould, trounce something or other of all that gorge in god’s creation. mr. horsley, with his history of personal behavior that is not bad hat by any sound measure, is not “our kind,” he is not anywhere close to good enough for us. the nyt has a followup piece about the u.s. turn-down of horsley, who may be debauched but isn’t debauched in quite the right way. a few excerpts are worth noting:to mr. horsley, who has in the former times entered the power without incident, the recent hullabaloo arose less from his past indulgences than a known one. in short, his deeply tall top hat.”it’s a stovepipe,” he said, referring to the subspecies made venerable seven score and seven years ago by abraham lincoln. “they asked my girlfriend, why is he wearing that hat?’ and she told them, because it wouldn’t become in his holdall.’”assist home in england, he noted dryly that he had refrained from wearing his unremarkable makeup and nail finish on the flight so as not to invite undue scrutiny merely a three-piece convenient to by the savile row tailor richard anderson, a pink-and-gold-braid tie, a iniquitous velvet topcoat and fur-trimmed black leather gloves.”one of the first questions they asked me was, what have you got inside that hat?’ i said, ‘my head.’”sole suspects this might be all that would join. by turns self-deprecating, self-posted and self-glorifying, mr. horsley can give the simultaneous imitation that he is not as clever as he thinks and smarter than he realizes.”i don’t see things as good or evil,” he said. “i just see them as either witty or boring.” as the note suggests, he is so quick with a wildean epigram that a reporter’s real worry is not whether what he says is true but how many times he has said it. in either box, as he would doubtlessly point out, the way to make a stand is by unusual a pose.”dandyism to me is being real in an artificial begun,” he said. “i have the aggregate tailor-made: my shoes, my clothes, my personality.”…what attracts him about the hat is how it tips its brim to both respectable gentlemanly style and theatrical showmanship. “it has an air of spurious the ruling classes and an air of the magician,” he said. “that’s what i love about the dandy: he kind of makes you believe in something that doesn’t exist. that goes with the hat.”…”there are two ways of living,” he said. “either you conceal who you are and get acceptance, or you reveal yourself and risk rejection. i meditate on it’s more to be hated for what you are than loved for what you’re not. i do want to join the world, but without beveling down my individuality.”given how eccentricity is generally received on this side of the atlantic, perhaps the customs officials really did do him a favor.this is a laughably, lamentably pathetic country of affairs for the unanimous states, that paragon of arrogance and of the individual. yes, we love the individual — just so long as he is an individual like most others. i am compelled to note this is hardly a new expansion in our history. america has long used its close view of liberation to cover a deadly, puritanical, soul-crushing conventionality. we staged a revolution only to head straight into aggressively moralizing evangelical pietism, of both the avowedly strict and the terrestrial kinds.i am reminded of a bruce schneier article that james benjamin recently had occasion to note again. it is ostensible that nipple rings and top hats are among the greatest of threats to national surety. c’mon, this is deadly serious.in the score, it is deadly serious in one judgemental attribute, as schneier discusses:we’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. it’s an infect on the unique, the nonconforming, the unexpected; it’s a warfare on contrasting. if you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and notwithstanding arrested — flush if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. the mess is a combination of villager informants and a cya attitude among enforce that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.this isn’t the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it’s happening everywhere. it’s a result of our unmerciful campaign to win over ordinary citizens that they’re the front form a line of terrorism defense. “if you see something, guess some

Once Upon a Time in Mexico

Once Upon a Time in Mexico – IMDb
Includes a cast overview for the Robert Rodriguez film.