Bad manners. Miserable etiquette. Disrespect.
It was not enough that Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman continued to stand for election despite obvious and possibly irreparable cognitive impairment. Once in the Senate, Fetterman cannot muster sufficient respect for the institution, his colleagues, his state and his country to dress appropriately for official appearances.
He is, to be blunt, a slob.
There is no excuse for such conduct. Yes, I have some compassion for Fetterman, who is something of a mutant; fitting a suit to his Frankensteinian frame can’t be easy. I’m sure business dress is uncomfortable for him, but he is literally a representative of the United States government. Expecting a U.S. Senator to display sufficient dignity in the role he sought and accepted is not unreasonable.
So far, the only members of Congress to criticize Fetterman have been Republicans, which I take to be solid evidence that the GOP is the only party that believes minimal adherence to standards of decorum are important factors in engendering public trust. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer should tell Fetterman to dress appropriately or stay home.
(Why should I even have to write this?)
Ethics Alarms 
Must be a generational thing. Fetterman looks like, and dresses like, our son-in-law.
Can’t somebody say, “Dude!?”
I saw this, and I just shook my head.
This is an example of how societies die — when long tradition won by hard men in battle are frittered away by our “leaders.”
If this is the leadership I paid for with my service, I want a fucking refund.
Now that a protected identity (face it that’s what the Fetterman martyr has become) has begun dressing like a slob for official Congressional appearances, how long do you think it will take for some of the more “woke” Democrats to signal their virtue by dressing the same? Remember, the Democrats have basically proclaimed their hate of the status quo so what cold be a more visibly statement against the status quo than the way a member of Congress dresses.
No question about it. Cultural entropy. The slippery slope.
Fred Gwynne said it best.
My parents would’ve disowned me if they saw me on TV dressed like that as a Senator of the United States of America. Shit, my whole family would be disgraced in the community. A Senator? How the hell did they even let him in the building looking like that? A page dresses more presentable. They have stricter dress codes to get into bars than what that stunod is wearing. He makes me sick and I am embarrassed for PA. I heavily blame the RNC too for this debacle – Oz? How the hell….and the assholes that make excuses for Fetterman are sick bastards, starting with his wife. Sorry, his election hits a raw nerve with me.
Could be worse:
https://gifdb.com/images/high/uncle-fester-jackie-coogan-light-bulb-kjl6tvma3ef9imeo.webp
I used to have one of those gag light bulbs! Loved it…
Well, let’s not forget that Nancy Pelosi specifically lifted the ban on headgear in the house to accommodate far-left Ilhan Omar’s hijab. As long as you are useful to the party, they will find a way to accommodate you, and Fetterman, a puppet who simply votes as the puppeteer directs, is very useful indeed. According to his Wikipedia article, at least during the time he was lieutenant governor of pennsylvania, he owned one suit, which he only wore when presiding in the Pennsylvania senate, which has a dress code. Otherwise, dressing like a slob is his default setting. The Democratic Party doesn’t care. Actually, let me amend that, if there were some emergency issue in a red state and a Republican senator showed up wearing a fleece or raid style jacket, like he had just come from the emergency command center, that’s when they would start to care. If a senator who was a reservist threw on his flight jacket or camo coat for something like that, then they’d care. But, as long as you’re a reliable vote on the left, you can show up in a clown suit for all they care. Like high school, it’s simply a question of who is in the club and who is out.
He is a disgrace to his office and the institution. Failure of the other Senators to call him out is also disgraceful. While I am old school and feel he should have a suit and tie I could accept him dressing in business casual or ala Steve Jobs. Google either and Fetterman’s outfit doesn’t pop up.
The photo is ridiculous. It’s like a bad “Where’s Waldo?” Fetterman looks like a high school sophomore on a school trip to the Capitol who’s gotten lost. Or it’s a scene from some sort of D.C. version of “Ferris Beuhler’s Day Off.”
The story appears to have been given the full “Republicans pounce” treatment. All the articles that pop up begin with Lauren Boebert being quoted as condemning Fetterman! Brilliant!
Fetterman acts like an oblivious child. Maybe that’s to be expected from someone who’s not only brain-damaged, but was sponging off his parents, until he was in his 40’s, while he dabbled in politics. He never had to grow up.
I served on the jury for a civil trial a couple of weeks ago. Had I walked into the courtroom dressed like Senator Fetterman, the judge would – at the very least – have reprimanded me.
Even dark jeans, a nice dress shirt, and more formal footwear would get me to think he’s trying. What we see in the photo is just slovenly…
Fetterman is, among other things, a poster boy for the concept of “extended adolescence” that has been increasingly afflicting our culture for decades now. I actually prefer the term “extended childhood,” since the idea of a long transition from childhood to adulthood really seems to be mainly a latter-day Western construct. One graduates from child status to adulthood when one successfully takes on adult responsibilities, primarily autonomy of action, self-reliance, economic independence and self-direction of one’s future. This transition is often marked by getting married and having children (and, for men, making a priority of taking care of one’s wife and children) and embarking on a career or vocation. My generation in many cases delayed the assumption of these adult characteristics and roles by our children, and many of those children, now parents themselves, seem to be, intentionally or permissively, trying to extend the childhood of their own children even further.
As an eldest child and only son in my family, growing up on a farm, I was taking on many “adult” (by today’s standards) responsibilities by the time I was thirteen. While attending college (and working), I became a police officer shortly after my 20th birthday, and by age 21 I was married and a police academy graduate patrolling my beat alone and building a career while continuing to work my way through school. Most people I knew followed similar paths to adulthood, whatever their chosen avocation. (Anyone not doing so was certainly regarded as an outlier.) My leisure activities included outdoor pursuits (shooting, hunting, fishing, etc.) and working with my hands (gunsmithing, leatherworking, woodworking, etc.). The vast majority of male officers I worked with (and other guys I knew) enjoyed similar pursuits.
You can write this off as a “grumpy old man” rant if you wish, but during the four decades of my career, I saw a steady regression in the “adultness” of the young people being hired by law enforcement agencies, beginning in the mid-1980s. Many of them continued to live with parents even after starting work, and they had a significantly different work ethic than my age cohort of officers. A lot of them (certainly not all) seemed to regard their jobs as mere inconvenient necessities to fund their leisure activities. Often, they were less compliant with grooming standards and uniform regulations. They saw every instruction or direction by a superior as an occasion for debate. For their supervisors (me included), they were definitely “high maintenance.”
By the time I retired, I was seeing a lot younger officers who spent the majority of their off-duty time playing video games and other (to me) childish diversions. Only a small minority of them had any interest in firearms (outside the agency requirements for qualification with duty weapons) or any other outdoor activities other than maybe running. As a police academy instructor, I actually encountered several cadets who said they would prefer to work without a firearm! (I told them that in a perfect world that might be possible, but a perfect world wouldn’t need cops at all.) Quite a few of the cadets had never been in a hands-on fight until defensive tactics training.
Today I see many, perhaps even most, cops under forty sporting beards (males) and prominent tattoos (males and females). Next it will probably be the oxymoronic “man buns” and “skinny jean-style” uniforms for the men, and who knows what for the women. Out of uniform, it would be hard to distinguish these younger officers from the average street thugs and “thug-ettes” they arrest every day. Just like others their age, they are on their phones virtually constantly -even while working. I am told, although that I am dubious of the claim, that agencies have to make these concessions to traditional standards of grooming and decorum in order to attract a sufficient number of applicants to fill vacancies. They may all be fine people, but I am not filled with admiration and confidence at their appearance. As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.
Surely, there are notable exceptions to these generalizations, but their rarity is what makes them notable.
With these widespread changes in attitude and appearance, I feel that the professional police image that builds public confidence, and the “command presence” that fosters voluntary compliance (the lowest level on the force continuum), have suffered tremendously. But at least, maybe they have achieved really high self-esteem. Fetterman would certainly approve. The “everyone gets a trophy” generation has arrived!
And you kids get off my lawn!
Amen.
Jim Hodgson wrote, ” I actually prefer the term “extended childhood,” since the idea of a long transition from childhood to adulthood really seems to be mainly a latter-day Western construct.”
You and I seem to be thinking similarly.
A few year ago I wrote a blog titled Emotional Childishness Is A Societal Cancer. From my observation perch of society it seems like there are a lot of people that reached the maturity of a 7th or 8th grader and simply stopped psychologically maturing beyond that point. I’ve wondered why.
School districts have generally separated 7th and 8th and sometimes 9th graders into separate school buildings and part of logic beyond that is that their brains are physically transitioning and it screws up their reasoning. Many years tutoring students helped me understand what was happening. Talk to 7th or 8th graders and then talk to the social justice woke and see if you can detect much difference between their psychological maturity and levels of respect. See the 10 Signs of Emotional Childishness in the blog post I linked to above. Society’s 7th and 8th graders are very self-absorbed, have very limited respect for authority and feel entitled, you can find many of these these ignorant fools walking down the middle of streets thinking that the roads are theirs and they can do what ever the hell they want, that’s thinking just like modern day woke social justice warriors. They seem to think that their “right” to be stupid and walk in the middle of the street is going to protect them from a three to four thousand pound vehicle bearing down on them at 45 miles per hour, so they just walk out there like a damn fool (it’s their right) and when the car has to come to a screeching halt to prevent killing the damn fool, the driver is perceived as being in the wrong.
Personally I think isolating these students from their upper High School aged classmates is a bad social idea. These students are being coddled and it has likely enabled and maybe even promoted extending these childish behaviors. I’m completely serious! Think about it, we didn’t have an onslaught of nonsensical childish behaviors in society when we had one room school houses. These isolated students are given participation trophies, told that their irrational behaviors are “normal”, put in an environment where these irrational behaviors are not socially chastised as they should be. Then when these emotionally stunted students get to High School the behavior coddling continues, upper classmates are punished for exerting the needed social pressures to correct the irrational behaviors and help advance maturity. Those High Schoolers that have matured beyond the nonsense irrational exhibited by 7th and 8th grades simply won’t tolerate the utter nonsense from lower classmates and social and peer pressures within the school bubble can actually aid in correcting the irrational nonsense, but in the 21st century even those social and peer pressures are being squashed so no one get’s their feelings hurt. What’s happening is absurd!
You can see the same irrational mentality of 7th and 8th graders exhibited all the time by “adults” in today’s world if you pay attention. Their irrational reasoning is exhibited in almost everything they do, the way thy running in the streets, riding their bikes in the streets, walking down busy sidewalks, their non-work ethics, they’re always the victim, they’re always entitled, it’s always their rights over others, and they’re always oblivious to the logical world around them. When their behaviors cause them to “crash” into you for one reason or another, whether it’s socially, rhetorically or physically, it’s always your fault. These people are our future leaders.
Welcome to the first quarter of the 21st century.
Steve,
This is nothing new, but the Greek roots of the word “sophomore” mean “wise fool”. There is a reason I believe younger people should spend more time around older people. It’s so they stop acting like fools and begin the maturation process.
Your post and Jim’s taken together are a great one-two. Thanks!
It appears that expecting Senators to observe formalities while conducting US Senate business on the Senate floor is the position of a fuddyduddy. The AP thinks Fetterman’s attire is just fine: https://apnews.com/article/fetterman-depression-senate-return-hoodies-shorts-771886ba8f3caee9be9674d186cd656b
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