THE POWER OF NOT BEING HANDSOME
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THE POWER OF NOT BEING HANDSOME
The mannequin-like handsomeness of Mitt Romney -- indeed of his whole family -- has been much commented on this campaign season. It's sort of an X-factor in the run-up to next year's election: How much does the classic firm-jawed, "presidential look" matter, anyhow?
Reading Garry Wills's classic "Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-made Man" for the first time, I learned that the handsomeness of Romney's father, Governor George Romney of Michigan, was a factor in the 1968 Republican primary (in which the elder Romney was a contender). Or so it seemed to Wills . . . and, in Wills's version, to Richard Nixon:
It is unfair to judge Nixon as the least pretty of the candidates. But, as he talked . . . it seemed that the face does matter, because it affects the man behind it. Perhaps a Rockefeller, or Romney, or Reagan, or Percy, or Lindsay does not live entirely on the surface; still, each one could do so if he wanted -- it is a very pleasant surface. And if none of them lives entirely there, it pays each to do a good deal of commuting to that pleasant locale. It would not pay Nixon at all. He must be aware that people vote for him despite his appearance; he speaks, always, across a barrier.
Nixon, Wills proposes, ended up viewing his untraditional looks as a positive trait, something that filtered out frivolousness. "While he is being tested as a candidate," Wills writes of Nixon, "he feels he is a test of others' seriousness."
So if Romney, the younger, is the Romney of 2008, who is our Nixon, in this superficial (yet important!) sense?
-- CHRISTOPHER SHEA
INDIE CROSSING
I am old enough to remember the days -- 30 years ago -- when one had to dodge traffic in Boston's Downtown Crossing. My father's office was near the Common, and once in a while I'd spend the day there, and we'd have lunch in the area. This was in the mid-'70s, when the concept of the Ladder District would have struck Bostonians as pure science fiction.
A description of Downtown Crossing in a Globe story last week as "saddled with a reputation as an unkempt, unsafe shopping district lined with discount stores, fast-food restaurants, and vacant storefronts" makes it sound like a terrible place. But when I was in high school, I spent quite a bit of time in that part of the city, working as a courier and also shopping for sneakers. In the mid-'80s, if you followed hip-hop fashion and absolutely had to have particular editions of Adidas and
Downtown Crossing didn't have a lot of high-end retail in those days, but so what? It was a fine place for a teenager to buy records and books, nearly as good as Harvard Square. I've never set foot in Macy's or Filene's, so it still strikes me as odd that the shuttering of these institutions should be so alarming to Bostonians.
I know, I know. Well-heeled adults, and not urban teens, are the customers we are supposed to want for Downtown Crossing. But permit me to offer an alternate vision: Now that Harvard Square is all chain stores and high-end retail, why not let Downtown Crossing become the new Harvard Square? Provide rent breaks for independent retail stores. Make it easy for small restaurants, cafes, and pubs to open up. Try to attract some of Boston's thousands of undergrads and graduate students, not to mention its population of "cultural creatives," instead of worrying that Financial District workers won't lunch there.
Who's with me?
-- JOSHUA GLENN
THE LANGUAGE WE DESERVE
Wave goodbye to "just deserts": In today's entry on his Oxford University Press blog, Ben Zimmer reports that the upstart "just desserts" -- the version that confuses dessert, the after-dinner treat, with desert, something you deserve -- is beating the standard idiom by 58 percent to 42 percent.
Zimmer used the Oxford English Corpus -- a database of "more than 1.5 billion words pulled from newspapers, blogs, magazines, scientific papers, journals, books, websites, transcripts," and other sources, according to the OUP -- to check on the condition of some beleaguered familiar phrases.
There is some good news for traditionalists. The standard sleight of hand, fazed by, and home in on are trouncing the challengers (slight of hand, phased by, hone in on) by 2 to 1 or better.
But vocal chords is neck and neck with the standard vocal cords, and strait-laced scores a pitiful 34 percent against straight-laced. "Poetic innovation or descent into linguistic anarchy?" asks Zimmer. The strait-laced will have one answer, I suppose; the rest will have desserts.
-- JAN FREEMAN 