I’ve been planning to write something about the recent death of TV news anchorman Peter Jennings, but I obviously haven’t gotten around to it yet. My plan was to follow my usual obituary schtick and be simultaneously nostalgic and curmudgeonly as I discussed how Jennings’ passing marks the end of an era, which was, of course, a better time than our current Dark Age of debased superficiality. But it looks like someone has already beaten me to that angle:

…it seems certain that, at least stylistically, Jennings will have no heir. News managers today aren’t looking to hire Cary Grant, the man of distinction; they’re looking for Matt LeBlanc, the dude next door. In fact, if young reporters in 2005 were to emulate the air of aristocracy that rocketed Peter Jennings to stardom two decades ago, they’d likely be shown the door. Q-score focus groups interpret urbanity as snobbery these days, which may be why Jennings himself lost ratings supremacy to Tom Brokaw when the glamorous 1980s gave way to the naturalistic ’90s. Once the millennium arrived, forget it: His brand of romantic persona had been supplanted by Britney Spears making pig noses and reality-TV contestants eating and vomiting up live worms. …Male news anchors no longer exude savoir-faire… because Hollywood actors no longer exude it. Yesteryear’s debonair hero has passed the torch to today’s cute goofball mensch: Jason Biggs, Seann William Scott, Ashton Kutcher.

That’s from a piece on Salon called “Peter Jennings and the Death of Panache”, by Richard Speer. It’s worth a read, if you don’t mind sitting through a commercial to get to it. (Sorry, Salon’s difficult that way.)

Speer’s central point — that American culture has largely abandoned elegance, decorum, style, and dignity — is something I’ve been pondering and fuming about for quite a while. As he points out in the Salon piece, today’s public figures are almost aggressively grubby, or silly, or, at the very least, self-consciously “just like us.” Bad manners and stupid behavior have somehow become things to aspire to, while “book learnin'” and refinement is distrusted at best, despised at worst. Oh, and god help you if you actually enjoy dressing up, because you’re obviously strange or snooty, and most likely you’re putting on airs and acting like you’re better than the rest of us. Unless you’re gay, of course, because gay people are expected to dress well… which is funny, because the handful of gay people I’ve known over the years didn’t have any more fashion sense than anybody else.

From my perspective, no one has much fashion sense anymore, or much sense about anything else either. Our whole society has taken a hard turn towards crudity in the past fifteen years. I don’t mean crudity in the sense of profanity or vulgarity (although there is plenty more of that than there used to be), but rather in the sense of a lack of sophistication. Nobody really seems to have it all together anymore, and moreover, no one seems to want to. As a society, America has become anti-suave. You can see it in who we put on our magazine covers. Who wants marquee idols like Cary Grant, impossible ideals that we average mouthbreathers can’t begin to live up to? No, it’s much better to reassure ourselves that it’s perfectly normal to look like hell in public because even Brad Pitt, as beautiful a specimen as he is, dresses like a total schlub most of the time when he’s not on a movie set.

It’s not that I pine for the days when women wore dresses and little white gloves and a man couldn’t leave the house without his hat. I myself wouldn’t be comfortable if I had to be buttoned into a three-piece all the time, and I admit to being as baffled as anyone when it comes to etiquette and fashion. But after a long slide toward the casual end of the spectrum, I think we’ve finally arrived at the extreme, and I really don’t know how it happened. When did we all become such freakin’ slobs?

Take flip-flops, for instance. Back in my day (yes, I know I sound like the crabby old retiree I’m no doubt destined to become), you wore those things around the pool or in the public showers at the gym. Now you’re seeing them at the White House, for god’s sake! (For the record, I wasn’t offended by the Great Flip-Flop Scandal of ’05 the way a lot of people were; I didn’t see it as a disrespectful affront to Office of the President or anything like that. I mostly just think flip-flops are dumb-looking and shouldn’t be worn anywhere except at the pool and in public showers. I thought those young ladies looked ignorant, not disrespectful, and I find ignorance a lot more offensive most of the time. Hell, flip-flops even have a dumb-sounding name, now that the term “thong” has come to be associated with an entirely different piece of attire.)

Another one that drives me crazy is this trend of wearing baseball hats — excuse me, trucker hats, another pointless change of appellation for something that’s always had a perfectly serviceable name — with the bills turned sideways. Granted, that one’s mostly perpetrated by young males, who have always been guilty of questionable sartorial choices, but someone really needs to tell these kids that they don’t look edgy; they look like Forrest Gump. They look like they don’t have the brainpower to figure out how to put their hats on straight. Yes, I know that the whole point of young people’s fashion trends is to annoy older folks like me; mission accomplished, at ease. The problem is that these trends no longer stay confined to the ages of 18-24 like they used to. They tend to bubble up into populations that, thanks to the Baby Boomer example, think they can stay forever young if they just wear what the kids are wearing. Bzzzzzt! Sorry, don’t work that way. The day I see a man my age wearing a hat turned sideways is the day I give up hope for the human race.

In case you’re wondering what put the yellowjacket in my underwear this morning, I think my bad attitude is motivated by the same thing that moves all grumpy old men: the nagging belief that the world has moved on and hasn’t bothered to take them with it. I no longer know what I ought to be wearing and that makes me feel vaguely irritable. Even worse, I’m downright repelled by much of what I see out there in the stores and on the streets. I haven’t seen a pair of athletic shoes that I’ve actually liked in years, not since they started sticking all kinds of weird little greebly doo-dads all over them. I don’t want shoes with pumps in them and I don’t want big, puffy shoes that look like Mickey Mouse feet. I want plain-old, unobtrusive, non-flashy, non-Michael-Jordan-branded, 1985-style sneakers. Good luck trying to find any, though.

Mostly I just want to feel like I’m not clueless and that everybody else isn’t clueless either, and that even if individuals are clueless, our society isn’t glorifying them for it. I guess that’s really the problem I’ve got with the current state of society. The mishmash of dumb clothing styles, the reality shows, the sloppy celebrities and non-personalities that the media thinks we’re supposed to care about — it’s all based on and fueled by cluelessness. It’s like something broke down along the way and we stopped learning how to do things like dress well and behave properly and speak clearly, and then to make matters worse, we became militantly opposed to learning those things, and now we’ve convinced ourselves that everything is better this way. We’re living through the final triumph of tackiness, people. Peter Jennings, being someone who apparently valued sophistication, intellect, and dignity, got out just in time…