Dress for success
On "Mad Men", Craig Ferguson's life advice, and the purpose of a government PSA
Comedian Craig Ferguson offers a useful three-point test: “Does this need to be said? By me? Right now?”. It’s a good heuristic to follow, and not just for individuals. The government, too, can stand to run the same test. It might have stopped the Department of Transportation from launching a taxpayer-funded campaign admonishing air travelers that “The Golden Age of Travel Starts with You.”
■ A 90-second Public Service Announcement advertising the campaign relies on gauzy film of 60s-era boarding queues and contrasting cell-phone videos of cabin fights to hint that a “golden age” has been lost and needs to be reclaimed -- including by imploring passengers to “dress with respect”. In theory, there’s nothing especially wrong with encouraging good, pro-social behavior in public.
■ But there is something massively flawed about appealing to the past as a Platonic ideal to which we should return. First, socioeconomic class imposed a lot of constraints on air travel in the pre-deregulation era. Rich people traveled by air and many others did not.
■ Second, air travel is objectively safer today by such a wide margin that it’s hard to put into perspective. Try this: a study conducted at MIT found that there was one fatality on board commercial aircraft for every 350,000 passenger boardings in the era from 1968 to 1977. In the period from 2018 to 2022, that number was one in 13.7 million -- a mind-boggling 39-fold improvement.
■ Other things are much better, too: Most people wear deodorant (a bigger change from the 1960s than you might think), performance fabrics are widely available and affordable (a quality of life improvement in confined spaces, to be sure), and in-flight smoking is prohibited everywhere (which didn’t happen until 1990!).
■ Good sense requires rejecting the hazy illusion of better times in the past, even if that means one has to fly next to some bozo in a “Who Farted?” shirt. Yes, appropriate attire is a mark of courtesy. But is it the Federal government’s job to nag us about dressing up, just so we can chase a mirage of past glories? The people who start fistfights in coach aren’t going to be coaxed into better behavior by being admonished to dress like Don Draper.
