The Rule of Law and the Rule of Men

Actually, you don't need a law protecting your right to long hair because there is no law that says you can't have it. The various incidents of hair discrimination are perpetrated by organizations and individuals, not by the law. If your hair doesn't conform to their standards, the only thing they can so about it is exclude you from the organization or from their individual list of friends.

It's a little different with the military, but not that much. I never heard of anybody In the military going to jail for his hair, but that's probably because nobody ever pushed it that far. They just told us to get haircuts and we did it. I don't know what would happen if a guy just refused to do it, and I have never heard of that happening. When I joined the army I promised to "obey the lawful orders of the President of the United States and the officers appointed over me". If a guy wanted to mount a legal challenge against the hair policy he would need to establish that it wasn't a lawful order. Now that I think of it, I don't know whether or not there are any hair standards written into the official military regulations. Maybe it was just a tradition or something. Something like that occasionally comes up in the military, everybody thinks that it's a rule and then we find that it was just something that somebody made up.

I remember one guy who was caught gambling in the barracks and got off because he found out that there was no military regulation prohibiting it. See, you have the army regulations (ARs), and then you have your standard operation procedures (SOPs), which are policies established by your commanding officer. Almost every outfit in the army had an SOP prohibiting gambling in the barracks, so most people assumed that it was an AR because it was so universal. Come to find out, it wasn't an AR and our outfit didn't have an SOP that covered it. They did establish one after this incident brought it to their attention, but they didn't have one before that.

I don't know if the hair and beard standards were in the ARs or not, but I'm pretty sure that the moustache policy was not, because it differed from one outfit to another. I know that you weren't supposed to alter your appearance from the way it looked on your ID card picture. I think that even the Black guys had to shave their moustaches off in basic training but, when they were assigned to their permanent units, they all seemed to have it on their ID cards, so nobody told them they couldn't have it. The guy I told you about noticed this and figured that, if he could get it on his ID card, he would be allowed to keep it too. I don't think he really cared that much about the moustache, it was just a contest of wills between him and his sergeant, and the sergeant won. It would have been  interesting to see how it came out if he had made a legal issue of it, but he never did.

Twice a year, we went to Wildflecken in West Germany for three weeks to do some training that couldn't be accomplished in Berlin. During those times, we were allowed to grow moustaches, but we were told to shave them off when we got back to Berlin. We were periodically issued new ID cards, I think it was once a year. This guy's time must have come up right after we had gotten back from Wildflecken, and he managed to get his new ID card before he shaved off his moustache. His sergeant was not amused, and told him to shave it off and go get another ID card. So the guy shaved it off, but drew it back on just before his new ID picture was taken. The sergeant wasn't amused this time either, and I've already told you the rest of the story.

I don't know if cave men cut their hair or not, but in the pictures I remember seeing of them, they all had long hair, but the women had noticeably longer hair than the men. Of course these weren't photographs, they were artists representations. The more I think of it, maybe this was the the artists' way of showing you which ones were the men and which ones were the women. Of course, there is another way they could have established this, but it was probably not deemed appropriate for elementary school textbooks in those days.

Speaking of moustaches, my grandfather is the only guy I remember having an Adolf Hitler moustache, except Hitler himself of course. My grandfather was born in Austria, and so was Hitler, so maybe it was an Austrian thing. Now Sadaam Hussein has been compared to Hitler, and he also had a moustache, but not the same style as Hitler's. When Sadaam was in power,  all the Iraqi soldiers seemed to have a moustache just like his. I suppose it was their way of showing how much they admired their leader. When Hitler was in power, however, all the German soldiers didn't grow Hitler moustaches, in fact I don't think any of them did. Why do you suppose that is?