Black Tie for Authority

At the end of the day Friday, after the field trip to DC during which students enjoyed the ducks feeding just feet from the sidewalks around the Jefferson Memorial, scrutinized the Capitol rotunda for naked fresco people, and fingered the sample musket in the war department of the American History museum, I heard the good news: my school board had ruled that male teachers no longer need to wear ties “on most days.”

Now, it had occurred to me earlier that day, standing there in my jeans (it was payday) in the capitol building among the statues of great leaders, huge marble works, pillars, and imposingly closed office doors, that the tremendous power impressively exerted in such edificial presence is diminishing. (I was wearing jeans, after all.)

Certainly having leaders preside from within fine buildings intends to make their authority overwhelmingly tangible, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned previously and well into this first decade of the new millennium it’s that real power is much more evasive and unidentifiable.

Take al-Qaeda, for instance, ever shifting and sifting, ever eluding and even flourishing through whatever thumping the most powerful military in the world can render.

Take the dissolution of journalism from truth-in-hand printing to the fluidity of blogging and virtual readership.

Take my view of church, for crying out loud. I like a large, impressive building with whispered acoustics, believe me, but that’s not what really effects the work of what I suspect is but subtle, nitty-gritty, perhaps even spirit-infested revolution that repudiates establishment thought and adherence to nationalistic, fanatical dogmatism.

The cathedrals of yesteryear were and are quite nice, really, and do have a lot to offer believers and enjoyers of art, yet they seem to me to loft too far above the down-to-earth relevance I imagine is evident in, say, house church congregations’ gatherings.

And so this untying of that which has maladorned my fine throat is entirely called for, and I celebrated the change in policy yesterday by wearing the pictured “Black Tie of Mourning.” The professionalism and indeed the authority of my teaching and classroom relationships must now flourish where it will, without a pretentious and uncomfortable facade (at least “on most days”).

As for the rest of the days, well, long live la facade!

(Not that my ties were ever pretentious. Since taking this job I have made few efforts to minimize my frequent if slight mismatchings that no colleagues have ever known were my attempts to adhere to the letter but usurp the spirit of the dress code.)