Faites Attention Pour Le Sans Culotte Wannabe

Here is a sans coulotte; lacks only the red hat. If you copy it to your picture program, you can blow it up. I can't figure how to make these images I get from the Web bigger for my blog.

Ms, Cobbe: I await the lawyer pay information for 2007: how much taxpayers paid Mr. Gonzalez's firm and how much they paid firms whom Gonzalez recommended.

I believe the board has revised its travel-funds privileges since the outrage about how much Susan Valdes spent: $50,000 in a single year. May I have a copy of that as well? Thank you. lee drury de cesare

-----Original Message-----
From: Anonymous [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 6:27 AM

To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Phyllis Scaglione Hamm Passes.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Phyllis Scaglione Hamm Passes":

Do you recall if Phyllis judged all those downtrodden farm workers by the clothes they wore?

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Posted by Anonymous to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 3:26 AM

Lee responds:

Clothes signaled to her when Phyllis dealt with people with little money for vanity or fancy clothes during the times she worked for the poor and the homeless.

Through the ages the poor have worn rags or cast-off clothes of the well-heeled of society. "Sans-coulotte" was the term that referred to the ill-clad, ill-fed, and ill-equipped volunteers of the Revolutionary army during the early years of the French Revolutionary Wars, but, above all, to the working-class radicals of the Revolution. From this comes the now slightly archaic term "sansculottism" or "sans-culottism," meaning extreme democratic principles.

I bet a poll of Phyllis's mourners would show they all want the universal health care that other industrialized countries have but which the United States drags its feet about because the well-dressed donors to politicians from the insurance and drug industry don't want poor people's messing with their obscene profits.

Poor sans culottes get their politics from the intellectual left. But mixed into this situation in the South is some considerable amount of racism, unfortunately. The sans culottes provide today as they did in the French Revolution the poorly clad and fed bodies who protest against the Let-Them-Eat-Cake royals.

The French sans-culottes were for the most part members of the poorer classes or leaders of the populace, but during the Reign of Terror, public functionaries and persons of good education styled themselves citoyens sans-culottes.

Poseurs wanted to blend in the crowd of triumphant sans culotte revolutionaries for glamour and for safety. The distinctive costume of typical sans-culottes featured the pantaloon (long trousers) - in place of the culottes (knee-britches) worn by the upper classes, hence the name "without breeches"), the carmagnole (short-skirted coat), the red cap of liberty, sabots (clogs, wooden footwear mainly worn in the countryside). Today the sabots are the cheap shoes manufactured in Third-World countries with leather uppers and rubber souls.

Lack of influence on royalty or pols is the story of the poor politically: they don't have the emblems of power: the words, the clothes, or the cars to impress their needs on political higher-ups. Elected officials pay them no attention because they lack these symbols of power: a major one being good clothing.

This lack of good clothes doesn't mean that the poor wouldn't like to have nice clothes of their choosing and that they know that the power people will scorn them because they are ill clad. A lot of the poor today dress out of the Salvation Army second-hand stores and thrift shops.

The clothes of most of the people at Phyllis's funeral were sans-culotte attire. Their clothes told me that the people she had worked to help all her life did not forget her in death.

Poor people have another mark of lack of money: their negative dental condition. They can get into the health-care- for-the-poor systems like Medicaid if they are alerted to them; I believe that is one of things that Phyllis did: show unsophisticated poor people how to migrate the health-care system. But poor people don't have money for the dentist. And dental care is not a benefit in government Medicaid I believe: hence the bad condition of the poor's teeth.

Since I am a registered nurse, I subconsciously check out people's appearance both for signals of their health status and, because clothes have their own language, their economic condition. I get lots of clues just by looking at people as I did when I nursed in the emergency rooms of hospitals and they walked in with gunshot or knife wounds on Saturday nights chiefly from the poorer sections of town.

I messed up and overdressed for Phyllis's funeral service. I wore a navy-blue pants suit. If I had been thinking , I would have worn dungarees with the pants-suit top.

Now it's your turn. Tell us what the couture habits of smartasses are. You doubtless inhabit that class in the clothing hit parade. Most people are puzzled by the one or even two nose rings that smartasses affect. What does that jungle jewelry connote in smartass psychology: solidarity with the pygmies?

A police profile would report that smartasses come from addresses that signal middle-to-upper-class families; these sans coullote pretenders want to affect the glamour of authenticity that they see in the sans-coulottes class that works in the fields around Hillsborough county's periphery--if they can get work. Proletariat bosses are reluctant to hire ill-dressed people. They are bad for the outfit's image.

I bet also that a regulation smart-ass such as you has been to the dentist in the last six months with your parents footing the bill.

Love and kisses, lee, who was born to a bona fide Georgia sans-coulotte family during the Depression. The conditions when I was born give me a good grasp of what poor means in all its ugly aspects--including the emblematic status of clothes.