Daily Inspiration Quote by John Updike

Updike’s line works because it’s a snobbery grenade disguised as a clever epigram. “Naked” and “barefoot” are both signals of refusal: refusal of propriety, of consumer polish, of the social contract stitched into fabric and footwear. But Updike sharply grades those refusals. Nudity “approaches being revolutionary” because it threatens the system at its most intimate level: the body as private property, the body as shame, the body as something disciplined by law, religion, and etiquette. Clothes are a wearable hierarchy; taking them off is a kind of sabotage, a disruption that can’t be fully assimilated without the culture changing its rules.

Bare feet, though, are “mere populism” because they’re legible as performance. You can kick off your shoes and still keep the rest of the apparatus intact: the wardrobe, the money, the status, the ability to put the shoes back on. It’s an aesthetic of accessibility, a gesture that borrows the look of the working class or the spiritual seeker without paying the real cost. Populism here isn’t democracy; it’s branding.

The subtext is Updike’s suspicion of easy authenticity. He’s poking at the mid-to-late-20th-century habit of confusing lifestyle rebellion with political rupture: the counterculture’s sandals, the celebrity’s “casual,” the curated scruffiness marketed as sincerity. The wit lands because it names a quiet truth about dissent: some acts unsettle power; others flatter an audience by pretending to.