“By Andrei Codrescu
In line with my New Year’s resolution to write only things that have some practical and positive value, I’m advocating that men start shaving again. The current style, which reflects the state of the Republic, is mostly unshaven, or half-shaven. Stubbly actors have given men everywhere an excuse to sport stubble, but not all men are actors. The young males who romp through the pixels on TV do not resemble you or me. They are a breed apart, bred by advertising to sell things. Every time I see my fellows outdoors I want to scream: To the Barber!
That’s ironic, of course, because in my youth I did not shave at all: I sprouted silky birds and mustaches like a field of rich loam. My hair and my youth were a challenge to the smooth-shaven who ran the world. When I joined them, it was not because I felt less rebellious, but because I had less hair and what hair I had had turned to barbed wire. The new youth on TV are not rebellious at all, not even half-rebellious as their stubble might suggest. Their purpose in existing is to make money by sporting a look that should never ever be taken for a statement. They are a waste of hair.
Clearly, today’s youth have no idea why they were put on earth: they are ironic, wasteful and hypnotized by actors. That’s a given, but older men who should know better are also covered in gray stubble like fields of burned sugar cane. Who are they in their own minds? Special forces who’ve just emerged from foxholes after facing a mole-like enemy? Poets who’ve worked so hard at their sonnets they stayed up weeks in their attics carving every line out of three grams of brain spunk? What is also certain is that older folks, just like the younger, are void of ideas, and that they are hypnotized by the same culture. Perhaps the stubble reflects a desire to grow out of the mirror-clean interiors of their smooth-shaven minds.
Actors are not entirely responsible for the look, though. Clearly, being half-shaven reflects the half-assed Congress, the inarticulate president, the uncertainty of the times. In the black-and-white days of the Cold War the choices were clear: you were either a cop or a beatnik, a banker or a prophet, a salesman or a target, a hippie or a trucker. Later, those designations lost their definitions. For a while it looked like nobody was in control: truckers grew hair, bankers grew mustaches, there were pompadours on the beach. The mix-up was good for the economy and for democracy. Then the Cold Warriors took back the country and let loose the pixels of confusion.
We are now a wholly hypnotized, half-militarized, half-shaven country. Men, to the Barber, I say! I can’t even imagine what’s going on with women: their worlds of pilation and depilation are numerous and hallucinatory.
www.codrescu.com, www.corpse.org
