- New watch? - 1 Update
| hchickpea@hotmail.com: Sep 04 12:19PM -0500 >but the articles kept telling us the "discerning" man needed an expensive >watch. That is yet another example of the media and advertisers either not understanding the meaning of words or twisting them to their own purposes. I'm probably one of the most "discerning" individuals you would ever meet. I "discerned" as a child that I didn't need to wear a watch. Moreover, there is a subtle psychological entrainment that submitting to wearing a watch encourages. The importance of measured time is a side effect of the culture of "class" and the subservience of the worker class. The chime of church bells or calls to prayer at matins and other natural times of the day were subverted into the chimes and clocks located in positions of power, such as courthouses and town halls, built at some expense to tell workers when to start and stop work, so as to give their "betters" a full day of labor. The transfer of power from that to a pocket watch inferred that the owner of the pocket watch was a representative of the power of the upper class. Hence, the train conductor image, or the foppery that included special watch pockets and fobs as further indication of power and wealth. When the mass produced and more crude wristwatch was introduced, the band around the wrist -in effect a handcuff - indicated subserviance and the open willingness of the wearer to comply with time - but with the slightly daring attitude - "Don't try to manipulate the time on your pocket watch to cheat me." To me, the people who wear the ostentatious Rolexes or other watches are declaring their allegience to nouveu riche fetishes and a culture that has no clue that it is making a statement of voluntary enslavement. When I was a teen, I wore a pocket watch, along with my keys to the state hospital locked wards. The only time I have ever worn a wristwatch was when a child's cheap mickey mouse watch was given in swag at a movie convention, and I found the juxtaposition of cheap, small, "mickey mouse", and the idea of subservience to that just too amusing to pass up for a couple of weeks. Nobody understood, but I'm used to that. |
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