The Rise and Fall of Boutique Causes
"You can get a pair of slippers or you can carpet the world."
I was taking a walk in 109˚ heat, listening to a podcast, and I heard that phrase. It kicked me right in the soft places. I hadn't heard it before but it crystallized so much of my perspective on my fellow citizens of the (dis)United Skeets of Amerigo going ballistic daily to bark and shame the rest of the place into submission to their specific moral standards.
A nice picture of the fix yourself or fix the world conundrum, the image likewise reminds me of the safety features on airplanes suggesting you put the mask on yourself before your kids. If you are completely screwed and broken as an individual, you aren't much good in your desire fix the screwed and broken system.
In Tripp Mickle's new book, After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul, he discovers a quirk behind the genius of designer Jony Ives. He speculates the man may have had tetrachromacy, a genetic condition by which one’s mutated retinas provide massively enhanced spectral sensitivity—such that while a normal person might see a product as being a uniform shade of white, a tetrachromat might instead see a hundred shades of eggshell, vanilla yogurt, and antique lace.
In one story, Ive complains to a co-worker about microscopic defects he observes in the stainless steel airport bar they’re drinking at, to which his colleague replies, “Your life must be fucking miserable.”
Gang, we have a whole buncha fucking miserable people out there. It seems that tetrachromacy might be a brand new pandemic—crowds of folks being miserable looking at the microscopic flaws in their immediate (or online) surroundings and driving themselves insane over them.
Much of the recent insistence on changes in society are what I call boutique causes. These are political or cultural fights that play well on the cesspool of Twitter but are more like carpeting your room than the world. These causes miss the bigger picture. They are microscopic flaws in the stainless steel airport bar. They are the causes that only the most affluent in society can afford to champion because, like buying a candle at a boutique candle shop instead of Target provides little difference in value, it sure makes the purchaser feel special.
The average life expectancy of a homeless person is just fifty years.
39.8% of homeless persons are African-Americans.
61% of homeless persons are men and boys.
20% of homeless persons are kids.
42% of street children identify as LGBT.
(https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/homelessness-statistics/)
The qualified causes for this state of being is poverty, escalating housing costs, and mental health issues.
If your stance on the homeless population in this country is that we should be calling them "persons who are homeless," "neighbors in need," or "persons experiencing homelessness," you're a useless boob (or "person resembling an idiot"). Also, no one has ever seen someone homeless due to their anxiety about their college loan. Mental health issues are serious and being sad about James Franco portraying Castro is not.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, about one million people in the U.S. identify as transgender. That’s about 0.6 percent of the adult population.
If your protest is that 0.6 percent of the country's population represents some sort of existential threat to your children, you're a bit of a dipshit (a demographic that includes 50 percent of the U.S. population).
A solid example of a boutique cause is encapsulated in the headline Cracker Barrel posted about its new meatless sausage, causing major beef with its ‘customer base’.
Turns out, like some groceries realizing that while they didn't have a lot of Orthodox Jewish clientele, it wouldn't hurt to have a kosher section, Cracker Barrel—home for the Southern elderly and lovers of gravy-smothered chicken fried steak and puzzles made from horseshoes—decided to add meatless sausage to their menu.
According to the article, "On Monday, Cracker Barrel proudly announced on Facebook that it now carries Impossible Sausage, a meatless breakfast patty made from plants, as an option on its Build Your Own Breakfast menu.
This seemingly innocuous announcement riled up many in its Facebook community, with some fans commenting how angry at the restaurant they were for offering a meatless option at all."
Yes. The "major beef" gag is solid in a David Himmel way but a more accurate headline might read Cracker Barrel posted about its new meatless sausage and seven trolls, three old guys with MAGA hats on, and a thirteen-year-old fat kid responded in outrage for thirty seconds.
Being angry about meatless sausage is a boutique cause. Hell, Black Lives Matters, while an incredibly serious cause for a whole bunch of angry black kids routinely harangued by police, was just an opportunity to get out of quarantine for millions of white kids looking to get followers on their Instagram and hook up with other white kids. Don't believe me? How is that the cause, huge in 2020, has had a drop of 65 percent of, you guessed it, white kids who no longer really give a shit. Boutique. That t-shirt has been wadded up in the bottom dresser drawer since the vaccines came out.
You can tell a boutique cause by the number of people actually affected by the stated issue, the sell-by date when something more interesting comes along, and the feasibility of the solutions trumpeted. A boutique cause is fashionable and like most fashion, is more trendy than real problems.
Rebuilding our country's ancient electrical grid is serious business. Outrage at a college school student dressing up in blackface is not really serious business. Gerrymandering is a genuine threat to democracy. Dave Chapelle making jokes about transgender people isn't a threat to anyone.
Sometimes the boutique gets in the way of authentic safety measures. Despite the fact that 97 percent of those afflicted with monkeypox are gay men from having sex, the vapid fear of stigmatizing gay sex (which was a real thing in the ‘80s but with millions of kids deciding they are nonbinary despite not knowing what binary is in the first place isn't quite the danger it once was) is preventing health agencies from simply saying "Don't go have a sex party in the gay bathhouse this summer, guys. I mean, seriously keep your patriarchal symbol in your skinny jeans for a couple of months until we get a handle on this thing." The offense of calling it accurately is probably less painful than bursting sores on your face.
Rule of thumb: if you read about it on social media and people are really pissed about it, it's likely a boutique cause. It's the realm of a small group of people trying to carpet your room or neighborhood with the lime-green shag they have in their area rather than getting a pair of slippers and digging in to real problems.
