This is an excellent article by Christopher Orlet on American Spectator: “Sag Harbor.” We writes about the downward progression (literally) of baggy pants as being a mainstay of the American Idiocracy. More specifically, he points to a grocery store owner who puts signage on the entrance to his store: “No shoes, No shirt, No service. And pull up your pants!” Orlet teases that “banning customers from one’s business because of the way they’re dressed — or undressed — can get you into hot water, especially if the banned person happens to hold membership in a protected class.” Furthermore, Orlet writes:

I WILL SAY ONE THING: the great science fiction writers had it all wrong. According to the sci-fi classics, by now we should all be wearing metallic form-fitting uniforms like the Robinson family from Lost in Space. I suppose if H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov had really been prescient, they would have portrayed their futuristic characters stumbling around with their pants around their ankles.

The trouble with sci-fi authors is most assumed Homo sapiens would continue to evolve intellectually when all the evidence points in the opposite direction. As far as I can tell, the only writer who has gotten it right is Mike Judge. Judge’s film Idiocracy depicts a future in which no one has an IQ above 70, although even these denizens of future Earth at least appear to wear belts.

My earliest memory of a favorite book was from when I was about 4 years old: The Saggy Baggy Elephant.

I adored the poor elephant, Sooki, who was taunted by the bully parrot for his saggy behind. I couldn’t stand the part of the book where Sooki took cover in a cave and cried. It made me cry. What I didn’t know at the time was that the book was a primer on diversity, though it also made some good anti-bullying points. Nowadays, the animals in the jungle taunting Sooki would not only be cruel and unkind (as the book made the point), but they’d be called out as racists and charged with hate crimes if Sooki was a member of a protected class.

The strange saggy pants compulsion is a strange sort of voluntary mental illness undertaken by bored and narcissistic punks whose IQs are the equivalent of their waist size. I cannot even contemplate the level of idiocy it must take to put those things on, hanging at the knees, and look in the mirror and say, “yeah, I look cool.”