Oh wait. Never mind.

But seriously:

Last night’s episode of So You Think You Can Dance (7.26) began with choreographer Mia Michaels apologizing for a jacket she had worn on the previous night’s episode. Apparently, it was a military jacket (USMC?), but with the insignias sewed on upside down.

Mia claims that she had been given the jacket by a designer-friend, and had no idea that it signified anything at all. I don’t think there’s any reason not to believe her, but I do want to come back to this, especially because Apostropha has an awesome post on a similar situation Cameron Diaz recently faced in Peru.

But back to SYTYCD. One reason Mia’s jacket garnered so much attention is because it appeared in the same episode as Wade Robson’s solo choreography, which in the package preceding its first rendition (by Jamie), he explicitly refers to as anti-war. Or more specifically, he refers to it as “about peace,” which he stutters into “anti-war.”

And the stutter seemed appropriate, because he must know that while he might have gotten away with “peace,” a term that has been emptied of any relation to feeling and action, “anti-war” does still actually say something. Friend and SYTYCD colleague Dan Karaty, however, has already spoken out against Wade, using the sort of vague, awkwardly “diplomatic” cliches that have become epidemic in popular discourse. After pointing out that his own brother is a Marine, Karaty tells USmagazine.com that:

“Everybody has the right to have an opinion,” he says. “Part of the reason our troops are [fighting] is that so we can all have our own opinion. We are given the freedom to do whatever we want conceptually and choreographically, which is a great thing. The producers of the show trust us,” he says, adding that he is unaware of a production policy of clearing routines and themes prior to air. “But,” he insists, “I don’t think So You Think You Can Dance is the right form to express political opinions.”

Karaty can’t quite stay afloat in this sea of borrowed discourse, a discourse that has become one of my pet peeves. I generally accept the claim that American soldiers imagine themselves as fighting for American rights. But I find it disconcerting how this claim has become a way of blocking people from exercising that very right, which of course nullifies the claim itself” “we’re fighting for your right to speak. So shut up.”

This is particularly sad coming from an artist, and Karaty’s self-contradiction reveals at least one of two things: he is pulled between being an artist and supporting the war, or he is pulled between being an artist and being a successful commodity. And, in today’s political climate, the latter term in each possibility is essentially equivalent to the other, in the sense that it doesn’t matter what Karaty actually thinks about the war. What matters is that he thinks it’s his duty to say nothing, to be a good cultural soldier– to never say anything that might jeopardize sponsorship (“The producers of the show trust us”).

Like many of his “hip-hop” routines, Karaty’s thoughts on the matter leave me feeling like I’ve been watching a little one trying to swim in the big kids’ pool– with a kickboard.

Thank god there were some adults on the stage last night! I was happy that Nigel stood up for Robson’s routine, actually appealing to reason by questioning what it means for a society to be up in arms about the words featured in the piece (each dancer wore a shirt with a “peace-related” term written on it: communication, understanding, etc.) The routine, Nigel pointed out, wasn’t anti-American or anti-troop, it was against troops being in Iraq.

And I must say; Nigel’s moment was a quick moment, but it was an important moment that was unfortunately rare for television. And I don’t quite mean this in an against the war way, but more because it was nice to hear anyone say anything– and mean it.

Ironically, the verse of the John Mayer song (“Waiting on the World to Change”) that Robson chose?

it’s hard to beat the system
when we’re standing at a distance
so we keep waiting
waiting on the world to change

now if we had the power
to bring our neighbors home from war
they would have never missed a Christmas
no more ribbons on their door
and when you trust your television
what you get is what you got
cause when they own the information, oh
they can bend it all they want

Well, we better not wait too long, ’cause it’ll all be over before we know it.

Oh, and I got this link via Blogging SYTYCD; it’s a note on the piece (on the “peace”?) on Wade Robson’s website.

Let’s have a look at Miss Mexico, v. 2!

As you can see, the new dress follows the original form, being cut from the same traditional manta and so on. Gone, however, is the band of bullets, replaced with a black lace shawl. Also gone are the scenes of civil war destruction, now replaced with “landscapes of corn and cactus fields and decorative elements from Indian cultures,” according to the Houston Chronicle.

I must admit that I am a little bit suspicious of this corn. I know: who could be suspicious of such a cute and important grain? (I strongly recommend the animated “what is corn and what’s its story” tour at The Great Corn Adventure!) But I guess that I am suspicious because I find it hard to avoid interpreting the dress change as meaningful– if only because the original was so oversteeped in its attempts at meaningfulness. It seems to me that whoever ultimately made this decision was looking for a way to keep the original message by offering up an “alternative” that is only different on its surface.

One connection between the original dress and this new one is in the way the new dress shifts its scene from a time of conflict to one of prelapsarian innocence. Rather than displaying a moment when the Catholics lost political power, it shows a scene from before when such power became necessary– before there was a nation-state. And by offering a vision of meso-america before political subjecthood, before the establishment of the Mexican state that the previous dress implicitly critiqued, the dress ultimately skirts (ha!) the issue of its divisive politcs.

The irony, of course, is that immense violence transformed meso-america into the very Mexico represented by the dress. In this sense, the dress indeed fulfills its mission to show the “nation’s culture and history,” but the details, this time, are only revealed in its seams and folds.

It would be like Miss USA wearing a dress showing images of the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. [...] A beauty contest is very far from being the right place to vent political and religious ideologies.

Oh my! Let’s have a look at this dress…

According to msnbc, this well-accessoried ensemble features a “billowing, hoop skirt adorned with sketches of Catholic rebels hanging from posts. Rosaries and scapulars hung from the bullet-studded, bandolier belt; a large crucifix necklace, black halter top and wide-brimmed sombrero completed the outfit.”

(I really like it when ladies remember their hats. Bullets, however, are often that one thing too much that bogs down the look.)

The msnbc and BBC articles each do a good job pointing out some of what is at stake in this choice for representing Mexico to the world. There is also an article in La Jornada* that is particularly good at reading the dress as a signifier of contemporary Mexico’s political moment, which Melissa has also pointed out to us to in her response to JL’s post on the new abortion laws in Mexico City.

Further, as all of the articles point out, there is something troubling about this fetishization of the violent Cristero War, which hinged on Catholic rebellion against the secularization of the Mexican state. And for some, the images, which include Roman Catholic rebels hanging from posts and a man facing a firing squad (maybe Blessed Miguel Pro, SJ.?) also have an uncomfortable resonance with the pervasive public violence brought on by the escalating drug war in Mexico.

Hey Princess Propaganda and Princess Production, what do you think of this sticky uber-princess situation?

[*By the way, the Jornada article is in Spanish though, since it is a newspaper, you might only need to dredge up your sixth-grade Spanish! I suggest taking a look. If you get stuck, feed the article's URL into Babel Fish.]