Obviously "presentation" is high on the considerations in the theatre, and a high value among the middle class. And my mother. ("Surely you're not going to wear THAT!") But I've been pretty haphazard about it. I try to wear enough clothes to stay warm and not be arrested. The ministry was focused on authenticity, but for occasions of presentation, one wore an academic gown that covered everything. Expectations in that context are usually high.
People discuss all this at great length, the need to honor the group by fitting in, the need to belong, the basis of admiration, the clues to virtue, and so on. I haven't heard many talk about the phenomenon of being forced to present oneself some certain way: as white, for instance; as entitled to either lack of stigma or to stigma. I mean, Trump could not have presenting himself as a billionaire playboy if we hadn't really liked him in that role. Then his "harmless clown" act was also enabled by the public feeling safer if he saw him that way. Same with Giuliani.
There are so many cases of people being admired and almost required to be a certain way when the evidence for them being quite different was always in plain sight. Authors like Louisa May Alcott and Lucy May Montgomery were assumed to be like their characters, cherished and happy women who only struggled enough to make an interesting story. Ernest Haycox was no cowboy: he wrote in an office on a schedule. Zane Grey's tales of romantic derring-do were often written by his wife or one of the cute girls he took along on his nearly continuous fishing trips. Good old Charlie Russell came to Montana after the buffalo were gone and he had a rich grandmother. He and his wife suffered VD bad enough to prevent children. Some say his wife's obsession with high society and high prices came from having to work, ahem, "professionally" as a penniless young girl.
The Great Myth of the American West is criss-crossed with all of this because it was a time of chaos, atrocity, invention, and a high fatality rate. But it only lasted until the railroads made much of it obsolete -- so maybe a century. The Great Myth of American Democracy is lasting a little longer and it will take more than a couple of railroads to end it. The Internet might do the job. IS doing the job.
Trump's mythological incarnations came from two forces: the Mafia which is obvious and becoming more so, and the early Dutch plutocrats of New York, the Edith Wharton crowd. Both are beloved of movie makers. Real politicians and their henchmen are heard quoting lines from the Godfather and the media loves it. Then there's war -- beloved war, and its sister Dystopia. Nothing about war is ever true. So much is an accumulation of small miseries and devastating grief, but that gets dropped out of the myth.
Trump's disintegrating TV-imbued mind is like a map of the worst side of America, all the things we try to ignore as we read tabloids in the checkout line so we don't have to buy them and can deny that we read them. After WWII my father used to sneak the Police Gazette in the bathroom where he could lock the door and hide it behind the dirty clothes hamper. I heard far worse things about torture last night on the news, yet we fuss about triggering super-sensitive people.
Today's children see, grasp, and accept what many adults deny. I'm not talking about depictions--- I'm talking about experience. Yet they are expected to present themselves at school, looking and acting like everyone else even as their clothes hide scars. This is almost necessary, because the pretence of a "normal" helps the illusion that there is such a thing. And yet this government has proven that there is no normal, that the kind of behavior that has been condemned and only practiced secretly has now become common. So what? Everybody does that. You're just old-fashioned.
But we love the spies, the deceivers, the exaggerators. A man in my neighborhood was accepted as a sniper in the "sand wars" until a senior citizen who watched the same sort of movies noted that this sniper's adventures, which he freely shared, were always very much like whatever war movie was on TV the night before. A Greek woman here has always enjoyed the assumption that she is Blackfeet because her husband was. Certain apparently thriving local enrolled people try not to let anyone know that they are a front for whites who are forbidden by law to accept certain advantages.
And then there are the fantasies about ME! When I withdrew to my hermit's stronghold of books, that only encouraged the idea that I was up to something secret. One of the appeals of imagining and never challenging the exotic roles of people comes from living lives so confined that the only possible alternatives are the ones on television. (Around here there are not even movie houses close enough to attend regularly.) Neither movies nor TV vids show lives about people who sit there either reading or writing. What are they DOING?? It can't be healthy.
Getting behind the presentations of folks is a big preoccupation in this country. I remember reading the autobiography of Mary O'Hara which was the origin of the "My Friend Flicka" series but much harsher. I remember the "real story" of Kahlil Gibran and how he was reduced to platitudes, supported by a devoted woman. Probably the most fertile ground for such exposés has been "true stories" about low status, stigmatized, or minority populations where there is little chance to get to know blacks or "Indians" or sexworkers, whatever shunned categories happen to be.
But that doesn't mean there isn't an appetite for knowing dangerous lives from one's safe reading or viewing chair. It's easy to forget that there must have been a photographer at watch, an author with a point of view who wants you to see in a certain way.
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