Pants: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

A reader writes:

It occurs to me that the pants game provides the perfect retort to the Shi’ite Catholics.

“Judge me by my pants, do you? Pants matter not!”

And yet, funnily enough, they appear to matter a great deal, judging by the 300+ comments that I got and the 200+ that Simcha got before she closed down her comments.

I *suspect* that obsessiveness over pants is a classic case of transference: people focus on this utterly trivial thing because they either are too lazy or too confused or too harried to focus their energy on stuff that matters. It’s like the guy who comes home from a day of being yelled at at the office and kicks the cat. Or the bank president whose institution is 100 million bucks in the red, obsessing over a candy machine that took his quarter. 100 million dollars is a statistic, but 25 cents, he can understand. The Pants Inquisitor who declares women to be immoral and invokes saints and the Blessed Virgin Mary as meddlesome scolds to keep women in line with his trivial need to control seems to me to be a classic cat-kicker, trying to keep those he perceives as his inferiors in line in order to maintain a sense of domination over his world. The trick, particularly for people who are very rightly offended by this confusion of The Need to Dominate with The Will of God, is to simply not give power to such people by taking them seriously. (I speak to myself here as much as anybody.) Pants jokes seem to me an excellent way to do this. Humor deprives the devil of his power–when you direct it at the devil. He cannot, says St. Thomas More, endure to be mocked. Nor can we humans in our silliest moments of pride.