There is a fairly comical scene in P.G. Wodehouse’s “Carry On, Jeeves” (which, by way of mention, is shamefully missing from the University library’s millions of volumes), in which the ever-incorrigible Bertie Wooster encourages his rather dissolute friend Sippy to steal a policeman’s helmet. The theft is comical not because Sippy has a desire to become a police officer and in so doing wishes to take the guise of one. Indeed, he leads far too comfortable a life for something as arduous as that. Rather, on Bertie’s advice, Sippy fancies the novelty of the policeman’s helmet. It’s droll and preposterous, a token taken out of place and used rather absurdly. To make a long story short, the theft also lands the two in jail, though that hasn’t much to do with why the story came to mind.
- Angela Cesere
- Rafi Martina
Really, the story of Sippy’s misguided penchant for a malapropos object came to mind on a recent jaunt to Urban Outfitters. The trip was on the urging of a friend of mine, who told me it was selling something so unbelievably doltish and misplaced that I’d have to witness it to believe it. Yes, next to a tacky T-shirt with the Manishevitz logo fixed above Gefilte Fish, sat a stack of variously colored keffiyehs, the traditional Arab headdress recently associated with former Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat and lately a symbol of solidarity with the intifada.
No doubt the product was designed to complement the wardrobes of those already in possession of Che Guevara T-shirts and West German army surplus winter coats – those cohorts (bourgeois and undoubtedly self-loathing of the fact) who, like Sippy, fetishize objects grossly out of place in their comfortable lives.
The mock-militarism and the outlandish embrace of revolution (always in the abstract, mind you) invariably reveal an unmistakable immaturity: revolution in the form of a callow and clich