Gold Medalist Shawn Johnson’s peace earrings are, I think, a sure sign of the
changing times. There would have been all kinds of noise about this in
2004.
I really want to believe this is a sign of significance, of advancement, of sea-change. I do. Because despite the fact that my inner child looks mostly like a walk-of-shaming, gravelly-voiced drunken Jezebel blogger, there is a part of her that still looks all sweet and wholesome like this little Iowan smiley midget here. (Seriously though, how can you not be in love with Shawn Johnson? She is A-motherfucking-DORABLE and she’s teeny tiny and like, the best gymnast in the world and even though everyone is trying to make her say mean things about the Chinese gymnasts she will NOT because she is from the Midwest which I imagine to be the land of eternal niceties and raising people right and euchre and ANYWAY, I hope that even if American forgets about her entirely in three weeks (Shannon Miller anyone!??) and she realizes she has accomplished more at sixteen than anyone else she’ll ever meet and nobody will ever be really relatable to that, that she still finds something to do with her life that’s more fulfilling and awesome than coaching gymnastics. Which I’m sure is fun, but I mean like, I hope she goes to college and discovers lesbianism and/or the joys of the nonprofit sector. I don’t really want her to be a lesbian, that was just for example’s sake. She’s clearly hella straight. It would be fun if she did College Playboy though.)
Anyway, the point of this reblog was that I hope that her peace earrings and her peace sign flashes really indicate some kind of sea-change on the part of the American public; that it’s a signal that even in the Breadbasket and the Bible Belt the “regular” people are sick enough of the hypocrisy of conservatism, the abuses of justice, et. al, that they’re tolerating this overt televised statement-making. But I dunno. I guess I’m not convinced it’s that frought with meaning. I mean, remember when “hippie culture” came back in 1994 in the form of peace signs all over those horrendous ill-fitting “baby tees”? I don’t think that many kids were really contemplating the legacy of the struggle of counterculture or anything. I mean, sure there were the girls in ripped jeans smoking pot and writing in their journals incessantly who professed to be anti-establishment, but most teenagers who were at the mawl buying those earrings at Claire’s (sorry Shawn, maybe yours are real silver or something) were just buying cheap trendy crap. The peace sign just carried a kind of superficial, anachronistic, cutesy appeal. Like, “I’m too young to be washed out and scarred for life by the consequences of hard drug use and group sex, so I represent the innocent new face of peace and love, man!” Maybe I’m overanalyzing this and maybe because I’ve lived in the Haight Ashbury most of my adult life I have a knee-jerk “you don’t know what you’re talking about” reaction to anyone attempting to fly the hippie flag, but I’m inclined to see this whole peace sign thing as superficial. Or if a statement, a partly unwitting one.
