Daniel Brookes
My eyes sellotaped ’slanty’, I get some funny looks as I scoot around town in my electric wheelchair. Though I must admit, the shouting only really starts when I get up to push the thing over cobbles. Sometimes it gets as bad as the time I saw City of God and spent the next six months dressed in authentic barrio rags. Random! Epic!
Of course I’m being ironic. That is basically my shit, yeah. But why can Japanese people have all the fun with those cool looking eyes and not me? Aren’t we all equal? Why should someone with no legs be allowed to zip around the town on wheels and I can’t? What are discrimination laws for?
This hack is fully aware that we live in a postmodern paradigm where the value and worth of anything is up for grabs. But there are some symbols that need to remain sacrosanct.
Walking down Oxford Road, attending lectures and out in the local nightlife, one cannot fail to notice an alarming penchant for unnecessary glasses: glasses with plain glass. Fashion glasses. And they’re not usually any old glasses; they’re deliberately those hyper-stylised ’80s NHS glasses that Morrissey wore when The Smiths were King Shit. The difference between El Moz wearing them and a girl from the Home Counties slumming it up north is obvious: the former was born poor with dodgy eyesight.
Wearing glasses when you don’t need them is as bad as going around in blackface. It takes the symbols of a historically rejected group and utilises them for purposes of ‘cool’. The thing with black people or disabled people, Johnny Hipster – they can’t choose not to be that when fashion rolls on six months from now.
The thing with the glasses is a double insult too. First the short-sighted get fetishised, as do the working class, who had no choice to wear big, ugly spectacles that often resulted in some vicious, witnessed first-hand schoolyard-type bullying. Why not have away with it all and start working down the pit? Get a greyhound and appear on The Jeremy Kyle Show? Then again, middle-class British culture is explicitly based around the misappropriation of the cool points scored by ‘others’, so why be surprised or angry about it? Is it like Clausewitz said, just a continuation of politics by other means? It’s a depressing thought.
The fashion industry has gone to great lengths to legitimise its industry as art, as important and influential as great music or film, so it’s about time it copped some responsibility. Either that or the future rulers of this country that populate our dear university could not be so frightened of developing their own culture using David Mitchell, field hockey and argyle socks as a starting point. How frightfully random.
February 10th, 2010 at 22:38
And so, Daniel, what are your thoughts on those with poor eyesight who toss their specs to one side, clearly tired of speccy four eyes jibes, reaching for the contact lenses? Yes, black people or disabled people ‘can’t choose not to be when fashion rolls on’, but myopic individuals clearly can. Do you regard them as outcasts, distancing themselves from their four-eyed brethren? Should they not be allowed to give the impression that they have 20-20 vision, in the same way you suggest those of us blessed with good eyesight should not be allowed to give the impression we have difficulty reading from the blackboard?
February 16th, 2010 at 15:26
I’m going to assume that’s not a rhetorical series of questions and the tone is genuinely inquisitive rather than that of a jerk.
People with contacts are cool with me. I don’t recall anyone at school getting beaten up for not wearing glasses, not having a wandering eye or being rich. Conversely, I remember quite a few beatings handed out to poor kids, glasses kids and deformed kids. This question is kind of like the earnest reading of discrimination laws I mock in the article.
If it was rhetoric and you were being a jerk, then fuck you.