Keeping America Safe From Exposed Underwear

by Tommi Avicolli-Mecca, 2007-09-19

God bless American legislators. They’re always looking out for our welfare. They don’t bother with guaranteeing universal healthcare or increasing funding for affordable housing. Forget ending the war in Iraq or holding a lying president accountable for his actions.

These days, America’s lawmakers are busy protecting the American public from the sight of a butt crack or, even worse yet, someone’s underwear.

Especially in the South. Dixie rises again, this time, to reclaim American decency. Atlanta politicians have recently joined the growing list of Southern municipalities that want to punish young people who commit the heinous crime of exposing their underwear in public via saggy pants that just won’t stay on their hips. Obviously these kids have never heard of belts.

The lack of belts is apparently what got this whole ordeal started in the first place. According to the Associated Press, the baggy pants fashion trend can be traced to American prisons where inmates were forced to walk around in oversized pants without belts that could be used as weapons, or to commit suicide. Gangster rap artists adopted the look in their music videos, thus introducing it to America’s all too impressionable youth. There’s not much you can’t sell to a young person. Just ask Hollywood film producers. Or junk food manufacturers.

In Delcambre, Louisiana a person who shows a flash of the boxers faces a possible fine of up to $500 or even six months in jail. Nothing like giving young people a nice criminal record to follow them around for the rest of their lives. The Louisiana state legislature even tried, via a “baggy pants bill” to make it a no-no, not only to wear butt-baring pants, but also those low-rise, belly-baring ones, the kind that has become a trademark for pop singer Britney Spears. Perhaps Louisiana should just outlaw Britney.

Not to be outdone, the North has taken it all one step further: Trenton, New Jersey may soon not only fine someone for public indecency for wearing oversized pants that make a mockery of the word underwear, but also force them to face 20 questions from a do-gooder city worker who will want to know if they’re employed and where they’re going with their lives. George Orwell would have been proud.

Let’s all applaud lawmakers for sticking their noses where they obviously belong: In the butts of America’s youth.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical, southern Italian, working-class, atheist queer performer and writer with a website: www.avicollimecca.com