Critical Exponent

Forget the metrosexuals; the smoothies are the latest gay-inspired straight-boy trend in town.

While the metrosexual spends a lot at Barney’s, shops for heirloom tomatoes at Dean & Deluca, keeps his CD collection carefully alphabetized, and nurtures a wide range of house plants without help from his gay friends, the smoothie is a horse of a different color. He isn’t necessarily an effete city dweller; more often than not he lives in Iowa or Florida or Oregon or California. His interest in fashion isn’t about keeping up appearances — he’s not some slick lawyer with a penchant for Armani or some young actor trying to look appropriately hip. The smoothie’s interest in his “look” is more deeply felt and sincere than that, not to mention slightly misguided and disturbingly meticulous: Baseball caps are molded, painstakingly, into the perfect C-shape; stubble is trimmed into the perfect Don Johnson-style 5 o’clock shadow; “distressed” jeans, with their calculated faded patches and hemmed rips, are cleaned and pressed and tugged just below the waist; eyebrows are waxed, as is back, chest and (gasp) the family jewels to boot. The smoothie spends a lot not just on clothes and haircuts, but on highlights, spray-tans, manicures and pedicures, bodybuilding formulas, gym memberships, dry cleaning bills, man jewelry and hip-hop classes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the smoothie is like a cross between a frat boy and Britney Spears.
…

Remember how, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the camera was attracted to almost any tall, big-breasted blond, and we often had to sit through their rambling thoughts as well? Thanks to the work of pioneers like Fabio, today the camera loves the smoothie even more….

So, how did the gay male ideal get adopted by so many straight guys, or more important, how did the smoothie upstage the metrosexual? Well, first of all, the smoothie is actually an exaggeration of the gay male ideal: He’s more buff, more hairless, more tan, and yet there are little bits of macho “whatever” clothing thrown in as a hedge, a little signal that he’s not, in fact, gay.

One season does not a trend make, but a part of me wonders whether this is a consequence of global warming… One scientific model suggests that it is.

It’s sad that the secular-minded among us feel so harassed that a summer camp for kids like this is needed.

In this upcoming article for The New York Times Magazine, Noah Feldman traces the dichotomy in the modern church-state debate between what he calls “values evangelicals” and “legal secularists.” Some of his points are interesting, but I think he misrepresents what legal secularism is (at least as I understand it). I think legal secularism holds views closer to his proposed solution than he admits.

Here are some choice quotes:

Writing just before the American Revolution, the British historian Edward Gibbon opined that the people believed, the philosophers doubted and the magistrates exploited. Gibbon’s nominal subject was ancient Rome, but his readers understood that he was talking about their world too.
…

Values evangelicals say that the solution lies in finding and embracing traditional values we can all share and without which we will never hold together. Legal secularists counter that we can maintain our national unity only if we treat religion as a personal, private matter, separate from concerns of citizenship.
…

Despite the gravity of the problem, I believe there is an answer. Put simply, it is this: offer greater latitude for religious speech and symbols in public debate, but also impose a stricter ban on state financing of religious institutions and activities.
…

In the courts, the arrangement that I’m proposing would entail abandoning the Lemon requirement that state action must have a secular purpose and secular effects, as well as O’Connor’s idea that the state must not ”endorse” religion. For these two tests, the courts should substitute the two guiding rules that historically lay at the core of our church-state experiment before legal secularism or values evangelicalism came on the scene: the state may neither coerce anyone in matters of religion nor expend its resources so as to support religious institutions and practices, whether generic or particular. These constitutional principles, reduced to their core, can be captured in a simple slogan: no coercion and no money.

Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford.

Canada’s House of Commons voted Tuesday night to extend gay marriage nationwide. There is opposition, and we’ll hear about it should the conservatives rise to power… but yay, Canada!

Read about it here.
Once again, thanks to AmericaBlog for the pointer.

The BBC reports that in a Discovery Channel/AOL poll, Reagan was voted the ‘greatest American’.