The Etymology of Popular Iconic Items
I just stumbled upon something I had genuinely never considered concerning those silly stretchy wrist bands people wear to show solidarity for some cause or another. I actually have one flavor of these silly things, the Colbert WristStrong® bracelet, but it's a flavor I find to my liking.
I never considered why someone would stamp a slogan on, essentially, an over-sized rubber band. I'm old enough to remember Tony Orlando and Dawn's big hit Tie a Yellow Ribbon, so those silly ribbon car magnet things are easily explained, even separated by a few decades and several different military conflicts. But a rubber band? I figured it was just cheap to make.
Then I read Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightsided. Throughout the book, Ehrenreich traces the commonalities today's positive thinking movement has on our more dour Calvinist past. Check this out:
. . . (The) most striking continuity between the old religion and the new positive thinking lies in their common insistence on work -- the constant internal work of self-monitoring. The Calvinist monitored his or her thoughts and feelings for signs of laxness, sin, and self-indulgence, while the positive thinker is ever on the lookout for "negative thoughts" charged with anxiety or doubt. As sociologist Micki McGee writes of the positive-thinking self-help literature, using language that harks back to its religious antecedents, "continuous and never-ending work on the self is offered not only as a road to success but also to a kind of secular salvation." The self becomes an antagonist with which one wrestles endlessly, the Calvinist attacking it for sinful inclinations, the positive thinker for "negativity." This antagonism is made clear in the common advice that you can overcome negative thoughts by putting a rubberband on your wrist: "Every time you have a negative thought stretch it out and let it snap. Pow. That hurts. It may even leave a welt if your rubber band is too thick. Take it easy, you aren't trying to maim yourself, but you are trying to create a little bit of a pain avoidance reflex with the negative thoughts."
(Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Metropolitan Books, 2009, pp. 90-91, emphasis mine.)
Ehrenreich first encountered this national mania for positive thought during her treatment and recovery from breast cancer, so undoubtedly Lance Armstrong, the first branded wrist band promoter with his "Live Strong" bands, encountered this "common advice" during his own bout with testicular cancer. For those trapped in this positive thought gulag, this rubber band flagellation might possibly be common advise indeed.
To us regular folks, though, who think hurting ourselves to be as lunatic as it sounds, deliberately leaving welts on our wrists to "learn" a "lesson" . . . well, "uncommon" would be putting it mildly. I'm leaning closer to "batshit fucking insane."