Kali Tal

Stupid American Fashions

I was driving down Speedway in Tucson (once voted the Ugliest Street in America), when a fellow in a Saab 900 turbo convertible blasted past me in the right-hand lane, and then was halted in his zigging and zagging through traffice by a snowbird grandmother driving a venerable Dodge Dart driving in tandem with a beat white pickup truck that belonged to some backyard landscaping business. The man in the Saab--barely a man, really, since his frat boy looks and demeanor were what caught my attention in the first place--was wearing a sun visor. The sun visor looked strange on his head, but it took me a moment to figure out why. At first it reminded me of the way white kids imitate the B-Boy backwards baseball cap, but topologically it was still deeply disconcerting. The dissonance, I finally determined, was created because the sun visor was indeed worn backwards, but with the bill facing up (like a scoop) in the back. The absurdity of this (at least backwards baseball caps still cover one's head!) would have made me laugh, except that the kid was white and driving an expensive car and, I'm sure, utterly unselfconscious about any of it. So instead it just made me sad and tired

Posted by kalital at September 15, 2003 3:57 PM