There is a moment when individualism becomes a uniform in spite of itself. (Malcolm Cowley)
Brooksville, Fla. (AP) – A Florida city is cleaning up with a new dress code that requires city workers to wear underwear and use deodorant. The city council … recently approved a dress code that instructs employees to observe “strict personal hygiene.” It also prohibits exposed underwear, clothing with foul language, “sexually provocative” clothes and piercings anywhere except the ears. Repeat offenders can be fired. The city council approved the dress code 4-1 as part of a wider effort to update existing policies and ordinances. The one vote in opposition came from Mayor Joe Bernadini. He said the underwear edict “takes away freedom of choice.”
Mayor Joe “Bare Bottom” Bernadini, Brooksville Florida’s High Priest of Hygiene, is mad as hell, and he’s not gonna take it anymore. After the city council out-voted Bare Bottom 4-1 in favor of requiring city employees cleaning up their acts, His Hygiene-ness held a press conference to air his … uh … views. What follows is a transcript of the event:
This is a sad day for the city of Brooksville. It’s a sad day for the United States of America and a refutation of our proud history. On December 15, 1791, the Bill of Rights was ratified and became part of the U.S. Constitution. The second of the Bill of Right’s ten amendments states, this: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep bare arms shall not be infringed.” A member of the militia surely must be considered a commando. And the right to bare arms surely must be interpreted as the right of members of the militia to go commando. Yet the esteemed city council of this fair city has seen fit to abridge those rights for city employees.
Before casting his vote, councilman Albert Murfwhiffle stated his opinion that the rights of Brooksville’s citizens to know their mayor is wearing skivvies supersedes the right of the mayor to express his sartorial preferences, regardless of the fact that said preferences might show no outward manifestation other than the spontaneously inadvertent bulge and/or the occasionally indecorous stain. Such happenstance occurrences hardly constitute grounds for dictating the wearing of unmentionables for the city’s highest elected official. And any preoccupation with my underwear on the part of our citizenry certainly can’t be construed as my problem. I don’t think about their underwear, at all.
Councilwoman Ernestine Frisch, the only female on the council, noted that she could – albeit infrequently, she hastened to add, since she wasn’t, you know, like staring or anything – detect the outline of various piercings through my suit pants. While I disdain the deference to conformity that compelled her to vote with the majority, I must say that I do find it something of a consolation that Ms. Frisch should be checking me out. I understand she was quite the looker in her day.
Councilman Melvin Freen seemingly had no opinion and offered no comment about underwear or piercings; although, he did seem a tad preoccupied about my abstinence from deodorant. His pre-ballot statement, which rambled a tad incoherently, contained some oddly impassioned remarks about manliness, pheromones, and Brut … or maybe it was brute. No one seemed sure. Immediately after the vote, he apologized to me for the outcome and asked for some of the clippings, should I ever decide to trim my nose hair.
Alternate councilman, Basil Heimlich, who participated in the proceedings to preclude the possibility of a tie, cast his vote by absentee ballot, citing the impossibility of his getting through the Town Hall’s metal detector as a result of the various studs, rings, plugs, bars, and other paraphernalia that adorn bodily regions for which he provided no anatomical specificity. As a result of the uptight shortsightedness of the council’s decision, it would now seem as if Mr. Heimlich’s only options are to resign his seat as an alternate city employee – or invest in a metal detector so he and his surgeon can find and remove all that hardware.
Before I take your questions, I have one of my own: After the haberdasher, the shower, and the hardware store for a pair of needle-nose pliers, where are we headed? Are we headed for a country in which traditional conceptions of dress – and manifestations of common, public decency – will trump free expression and celebration of our bodies? Will we choose to live in a land in which offensive bodily effluvium can be the subject of preventive legislation? Will we accept the consensual notion that decorative disfiguration our faces and bodies might be disruptive to the conducting of the public business with which we are entrusted, elected representatives? What are we running around here, a democracy, for cryin’ out loud?
Today, we’ve put the first foot on a slippery slope. Mandatory haircuts and other grooming edicts can’t be far behind. It’s a short step from here to self-respect, to the kinds of conformity and commonality that will bind us as a community and a society. If we persist in this direction – if we refuse to act in a way that serves self-interest and individual narcissism – it won’t be long until we’re all committed to acting as responsible adults.
May God help us.
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