Transmogrified footwear and other ugly developments

Browse through any department store, cruise any mall and you cannot help but conclude that there is no uglier item for sale to the general public today than the modern athletic shoe. This may be merely an unfortunate fluke; some people have a perverse desire to make ugly things and perhaps athletic shoes are just one of those things.

Perhaps not. First, though, consider the old canvas sneaker. A paragon of simple elegance – light, bouncy, available in any color, as long as it was black or white – a veritable Bauhaus for the lower extremities, form married to function, cheap and versatile. Then came the fitness craze of some years ago (actually, the craze for buying fitness gear) and with it $100 shoes, different shoes required for different activities, all done up in absurd patterns of revolting colors.

It was as if the architects of the great Gothic cathedrals decided to do their flying buttresses in chartreuse and their ramparts in mauve. The most recent models, with iridescent fabric and faux high-tech translucent inserts, are at once astonishingly hideous and achingly comic. If there are Klingon clowns, this is what they wear.

Two recent events suggest these garish, misshapen items are no fluke. Athletic shoes are one of the leading products of sweatshops, that phenomenon wherein apparel manufacturers pay Third World wages and charge First World prices, those places in which medieval working conditions produce modern fashions. Shoe jobs that used to pay an average of nearly $10 an hour in the United States and Canada have been shipped to Haiti – average wage, 49 cents – and we’re still paying $100 for the shoes. Parading around in stupid- looking shoes may be the price we as a society pay for being so stupid.

The first event was, of course, the Free Trade Agreement for the Americas meeting in Quebec City. See heads of state slavishly doing the bidding of their corporate masters, watch the QC police turned into goons — it was like taking a time machine back to the union-busting days of a century ago. Read the tortured language of the parts of this enormous and incomprehensible document leaked to the public and be amazed how something so evil can be made to sound so vaguely benign. Listen to the insipid catch phrase – something about prosperity abounding from Point Barrow to Tierra del Fuego – and realize that what it means is working 14 hours a day, six days a week in Port-au-Prince.

The second event took place in Mississippi. Voters there, by a depressing two-to-one ratio, decided that keeping the stars and bars of the Confederacy on their state flag was more important than joining the 21st Century, or even the late 19th. The obvious wrong here is that 65 percent of Mississippians can look at something that represents 250 years of slavery followed by 100 years of state-sanctioned oppression and see some fuzzy image of bogus chivalry and gentility. Less obvious, but just as wrong, is that so many Southerners apparently still do not realize that the low wages and substandard working conditions that plague their region today are the direct result of living in a society that was founded on the concept that labor has no value.

On paper, the European powers that brought slavery to America abolished the abhorrent practice many years before the young United States did; in reality, they merely shoved it off to their far-flung colonies so they wouldn’t have to look at it. In much the same way, we have abolished sweatshop practices here as we encourage them to flourish offshore and across the border.

That in mind, it occurs to me that ugly athletic shoes may not be merely a fluke, but something downright karmic. Like Dorian Gray’s picture, the grotesque things we wear on our feet may be the mirrors of our shriveled consumer souls – and the more we delude ourselves that high prices automatically mean decent wages, the more grotesque they get. Call it the Transmogrified Footwear Theory.

What to do? Well, since events in Quebec City amply demonstrated that protesters with signs generally finish a distant second to barbed wire, tear gas and rubber bullets, and since FTAA boosters want us to believe that all Third World workers have to do to get better pay and humane working conditions is to suffer for a few decades and get beat up by government/corporate goons from time to time, I have a modest proposal to move things along. It’s a label, actually, just a simple addition to the tag already attached to clothes and shoes.

Don’t just tell me where something’s made or what it’s made of. Tell me how much the guy or gal who made it got paid. I might pay $100 for a pair of sneakers if the people who did the gluing and sewing got $10 and hour. If they got 49 cents, I want a discount.

By the way, I checked the relevant passages of the FTAA document posted online (www.iatp.org) and this seems possible. The corporations that want to turn the Western Hemisphere into one giant company store are allowing governments to continue such functions as providing police and fire protection, trash disposal and road construction and I could find no prohibition against enhanced labeling. It would, however, be wise for governments to move quickly on this because, as we saw in Quebec City, this could get ugly. Athletic shoe ugly.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.