The Heimlich Maneuver in Neon Argyle

I hate wearing neckties. My loathing began in high school, when I attended a boarding school that required boys to wear jacket and tie. Unlike The Olive Garden, where my wife waited tables and was required to wear a tie just like les garcons, the girls at St. Andrew’s had sartorial carte blanche from the neck up; in addition to their naked napes they could, of course, grow their hair as long as they wished, while we boys had to keep our manes above the collar. Despite the apparent privilege of these feminine liberties, the injunction against growing facial hair, while technically only applicable to the boys, somehow still managed to feel like a twist on the old idea that “Gentlemen may remove their hats; all others must”: “Gentlemen may refrain from having beards and moustaches; all others must.” Despite the school’s efforts to undo patriarchy by way of having male and female co-presidents for each class, diligent guarding against facial hair reminded us that the world consisted of gentlemen and everyone else.

Gentlemen, of course, wear neckties. Or, apparently, turtlenecks, which were a permissible substitute. Given that the turtleneck’s bisection of the head and body mainly succeeds in bringing to life Descartes’ surreal image of brains floating in vats, the dons at St. Andrew’s likely trusted that the turtleneck would remain in its supporting role, one from which it was never a threat to steal any scenes. And since my singular accomplishment at St. Andrew’s took the form of being consistently and remarkably unthreatening, I was a natural for turtle necks. By senior year, I was wearing them every day, and pairing them with the black K-Swiss tennis shoes that were as forbidden as they were unnoticed, my act of rebellion so manifestly harmless that if any faculty members ever even noticed my sneakers it would never have occurred to them to either make me change or give me demerits (“marks” in the local lexicon); my sneakers were the exception that only proved how slavishly I had always followed the rules. In them, I padded down the corridors of Founder’s Hall those last few months without making a sound. To bastardize T.S. Eliot, and at the risk of sounding melodramatic, a necessary risk whenever discussing one’s adolescence: This is the way high school ends This is the way high school ends This is the way high school ends Not with a bang, nor a whimper, but with a forgetting

I don’t wear turtlenecks anymore, but I still don’t wear neckties. And, just as I hope to a) re-unsilence the S on the end of Illinois, b) get everyone to pronounce ketchup as catsup, and c) get everyone to pronounce the Atlanta Falcons such that the mascot rhymes with Balkans, I hope to d) foment a movement to replace neckties with funky socks. I go forth armed with the following talking points:
• Where neck ties are pure decoration, funky socks are equal parts form and function, the perfect marriage of aesthetics and utility, the reconciliation of doing and being.
• Where neckties say business must always come before pleasure, funky socks hint at the erotic, a flash of neon green argyles like a glimpse of a lady’s ankle in Victorian England.
• Where a decent silk necktie costs at least fifty bucks, two pairs of funky socks can be had for a mere five dollars at Nordstrom Rack. (Finding the funky sock stockpile at Nordstrom Rack was, for me, a lot like that moment in the Blind Melon music video when the bee girl finally discovers the field full of bee people.)
• Neck ties have become a fashion crutch for men, and too often become the equivalent of lipstick on a pig. Funky socks have their limits, and are not a fashion cure-all. But they are a place to start, which is exactly what men need, as opposed to the built in finish line of neckwear.
• If you must wear something around your neck, rock a manly scarf like Dr. Who.

• And if you insist upon silk, there’s a whole world of pocket squares.
• No one can choke you by your funky socks, a not insignificant benefit if, like me, you have ever worked on a locked psychiatric ward.

It is tempting to build on this last bullet by observing that when the white collar worker wears a tie to the office his boss has him by the neck. But this would be making the white collar worker into a victim, when, in fact, he is complicit. The correct image is that of the white collar worker standing in front of his mirror affixing his tie; he has himself by the neck, symbolically making the international gesture for choking. As he wraps the silk around his neck he accomplishes a micro-stroke, cutting off just enough of the oxygen to the brain to “have difficulty thinking, making judgments, reasoning, and understanding concepts,” (http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/stroke/DS00150/DSECTION=complications) all of which, of course, are more likely to impede than facilitate the salaryman’s credo of getting the job done. Choking is also the term used in sports for over-thinking at just the wrong moment, what Arthur Ashe described as “paralysis by analysis.” Note that the white collar worker wears his necktie every single day, preempting the possibility of thinking at just the wrong moment by never thinking at all. He is the permanent choke artist.

All hope is not lost for the gentleman in the tie. According to the Mayo Clinic, the stroke symptoms listed above “may improve with rehabilitation therapies.” The reference to therapy brings to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose later work was explicitly therapeutic. Anat Biletzki describes it thusly: “Philosophy, traditional, classic philosophy- is an ailment, and good philosophy-revolutionary philosophy as Wittgenstein would have us do it- is therapy for the ailment.” (http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/35797-philosophical-delusion-and-its-therapy-outline-of-a-philosophical-revolution-2/) Having already bastardized Eliot, I will do so again for Wittgenstein (by way of Biletzki): “Work, traditional, classic work- is an ailment, and good work-revolutionary work- is therapy for the ailment.” The therapy and the revolution begin in the same place: the worker’s mind. Since good things come in threes, let’s go one better and bastardize Marx: White collar workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your neckties!

Blue collar workers and women are encouraged to slip into funky socks and open their minds as well. But since white collar males still make up the bulk of the corporate Man On Our Backs, it is important to frame funky socks primarily as a replacement for neckties, as opposed to a fashion accessory for anyone. Simply put, white collar men have a harder time thinking than any other demographic, else the world wouldn’t be in the mess that it is, and therefore require full restoration of blood flow to the brain as soon as possible. Pairing funky socks with neckties would do as little to start revolutionary work as has Casual Friday. (The absence of ties on Friday is a guarantee of their return on Monday. And co-opting funky socks under the aegis of neckties would enable everyone to go around thinking that every day is Friday, when in fact it would make every day feel like Sunday, which is the day that sounds happy but, per Morrissey, is infinitely sad.)

When asked what was his aim in doing philosophy, Wittgenstein famously answered, “To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” Wittgenstein thought these flies were philosophers doing bad philosophy because they were thinking about the wrong things and asking the wrong kind of questions. As suggested above, I would universalize this observation. Gasping for air, we ask “How can we get this job done?” Instead, we need to breathe deeply, and then think about an entirely different question: “What exactly is it that we should be doing?” The easiest way out of the bottle is to widen the bottleneck. To do so we must release the chokehold on our own necks. And, like sneezing and peeing, it is impossible to be funky and choke at the same time. To bastardize one more line, this one from the Beastie Boys: Hey ladies and gentlemen, get funky