More on Facial Hair

If you guys had passed that law about hair discrimination, it would have been difficult to enforce. If a potential employer doesn't hire you, it's pretty hard to prove why he didn't. I guess that's why they passed that affirmative action stuff for the colored people. If you had something similar for hair discrimination, it certainly wouldn't have endeared you to the establishment types who were responsible for most of the hiring. Come to think of it, though, many people disliked the hippies as much as they disliked the colored, so maybe you wouldn't have had anything to lose.

I didn't know that the Greeks invented shaving but, if they did, maybe it wasn't the girls that they were trying to impress. People make a lot of jokes about the Greeks, but I have heard from reliable sources that, in the days of Plato, they were indeed bisexual, and nobody thought anything about it. Come to think of it, I have head that about other ancient cultures as well. I think the Hebrews were the first people to condemn it.

My hypothetical wife said that she saw some beard trimmers in the Wal-Mart that were specifically designed to maintain the bum look. I suppose they are nothing but electric clippers with a spacer to keep the cutters a uniform distance from the skin, kind of like the spacers they attach to hair clippers to maintain a brush cut. If you buy a hair clipper kit, it comes with several spacers like that. I use the 3/8 inch spacer to cut my hair, and then I do the beard with no spacer at all. I don't develop the bum look until about a week later, and it only lasts a week or two after that. Like I said, my beard doesn't grow as fast as some people's, so I imagine that the average guy could use one of those bum trimmers about once a week to maintain his beard. This is less effort than shaving with an electric razor every day, and it certainly beats scraping your skin with a safety razor.

Maybe the reason guys first started trimming their hair and beards was because long hair would make it easier for an enemy to grab ahold of you in combat. I think that, even in the Stone Age, young men wore their hair shorter than women. We still associate a long beard with old age, and the old guys probably didn't have to fight any more than the women did, so they could let it all hang out. Fast forward to the Middle Ages and you have the knights wearing those helmets with full face visors. I imagine it would have been a hassle to stuff a long beard into one of those things and keep it from getting pinched when you took the helmet off. They told us in the army that the main reason we had to shave was because any kind of beard would interfere with the seal that is formed when you put on a gas mask. That might have been what started the tradition, but I'm sure that was also a way to keep everybody looking more or less uniform.

Moustaches were a whole nother story. There was no military regulation that said you couldn't grow a moustache, that was left to the discretion of your commanding officer. Moustaches were more common in some units than in others, I suppose depending on whether their C.O. liked them or not. Funny thing, though, almost every Black soldier wore a short thin moustache. It was so common that you didn't even notice it until you saw one of the few who didn't. You could tell that there was something different about that dude, but you had to think about it before you realized what it was. We had one White guy who noticed this and started his own little campaign against racial moustache discrimination. His sergeant told him that the only reason he couldn't grow a moustache was that it wasn't on his I.D. card picture, and you were not allowed to alter your appearance from the way it was on your I.D. card. A little while later, the guy reported that he had lost his I.D. card, so they sent him to get another one. On the day he went to get his picture taken, he drew a thin moustache on his upper lip with an eyebrow pencil, and it came out in the picture looking perfectly natural. After awhile the sergeant noticed that this guy was no longer shaving his upper lip, and he said something to him about it. When the guy proudly produced his new I.D. card, the sergeant confiscated it and made him get another one. This time the sergeant went along with the guy to get his picture taken and made sure that he didn't pull any shenanigans. So much for racial equality in the army!