2024-03-04

• I seems clear to me that historians will end up attributing the Decline and Fall of the United States in large part to the introduction of elastic waistbands. Of course, I have achieved this clarity of foresight from personal experience. Recently I attended a wedding, and had to wear a suit. The current style of suits worn by men my age, and in my part of the world, involves a very slim silhouette. The goal is to highlight what is supposed to be a fit and trim physique. I had acquired a tailored suit about a year ago that was fit to my proportions, and that I thought cut a nice figure. But when I went to put it on last week, I was unpleasantly surprised to learn that my pants had become painfully tight. Evidently, I had begun the slide, well known to my fellow countrymen, away from trim athleticism and towards bloated corpulence. During the wedding, where I hoped people weren’t noticing my “way too tight” pants, I had some time to reflect on how this situation happened. I realized that I simply had not received the important signals about my ballooning waistline because I had started regularly wearing “athleisure” pants with an elastic waistband. Had I stuck with the traditional garb of pure denim jeans, worn by our nation’s greatest heroes, the increasing rotundity of my figure would have triggered alarm bells much sooner. Alas, it was not so. And then I realized that my story is just one of many in our declining nation. I was, in fact, just another casualty in the war of convenience against excellence. This war, like many before it in the annals of history, has eroded the foundation of our country. It will not stop until there is nothing but rubble. Fortunately, the traditional navel-gazing of history won’t have to look far to find the culprit. Let this be my contribution to the task of understanding the past.

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