There is a saying, if you are old enough to remember, which went something along the lines of “Don’t trust / vote for a man with a beard. They have something to hide”. Most would have heard this from a parent, grandparent, other relative or an educator. From memory I first heard my Nana utter it, which struck me as odd given all her sons were sporting beards at the time. Being too young to have any hair excepting that on top of my head, let alone vote, I didn’t pay her much heed but recently after pondering the statement I have a question to ask.
What the fuck have the clean chins done that was any good?
I can hear the cheer squads on all sides of Politics from
around the globe proselytising the virtue of their particular golden boy who
decided that they had enough time every day to shave their beard because it was
more important than running their country, but I don’t care.
The USA tends towards JFK or Reagan when it comes to Presidents’
in living memory, depending on which side of the aisle you sit on. Obama will
probably get a nod from the younger generations as a decent President, but that’s
all they’ve got going for themselves.
The bloke who started The American War in Viet Nam before
getting himself shot in Texas, another bloke who let Bush Sr. begin to conduct (possibly)
the most racist policy since slavery or segregation, the “War on Drugs”, which
by all accounts was and continues to be ineffective in all aspects aside from
incarcerating more and more people of colour in US prisons, aren’t really denizens
of The Office to laud. Which brings me to Obama.
Probably the best POTUS in my lifetime, President Obama had
some significant achievements, such as his “controversial” healthcare reforms,
but he also oversaw troop surges into Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither of these
wars were of his making, but his actions in office did little to correct the
destabilisation that was occurring in The Middle East.
Not that Trump has managed to do any better. Which should be
of no surprise to anyone given he’s hell bent on a second American Civil War. While
that’s going on China will invade so Donald can unite the people he has been
willing to sacrifice to a virus that he won’t take accountability for a shit
response to, in order to become President for life.
If this prick doesn’t declare war against China before Inauguration,
I’ll be surprised that he didn’t wait for the uprising of his own citizens who
remember their Second Amendment Rights but vote Democrat. When he refuses to
leave office after Biden’s win and everyone that he has, so far, referred to as
an Anarchist decide to forcibly remove him from The Whitehouse, there will be
chaos on the streets. Not that there isn’t already, but I’m sure you can grant
me some licence here, because it brings me back to beards.
Ask someone to name a President of the USA who was bearded
and they’re most likely to say Abraham Lincoln. I, personally, could not be
bothered to find out if any of the others wore a beard and The Old Man couldn’t
think of one off the top of his head, so that works for me because Lincoln is a
rarity in Politics, in so much as he is generally respected on both sides of The
Aisle.
Democrats like him because of The Emancipation Proclamation and
Republicans like him because he was a Republican, but that isn’t the point. The
point is that even after a hundred and fifty plus years since Lincoln’s
Presidency, he is still portrayed as an exemplary leader, despite not doing much
for The Race Divide in the long run, Honest Abe has managed to maintain an air
of dignity long after his death. If this is due to his service or that he wore
a beard will long be debated by Philosophers after we are gone. I wish them
well in this task, but it is not my burden to bear.
I am here to argue that clean shaven men have held the top
jobs in almost every industry for too long and they’ve made a bloody mess of
the lot. There are exceptions of course, Bob Hawke springs to mind, so does
Kevin Rudd (but he has gotten so much better after losing his office and his
razor) and we can’t ignore Dan Andrews, but it is becoming obvious, to me at
least, that beards need to be given a chance.
This is not a radical or new idea, but I am sure some of you
will draw parallels with The Taliban’s “beard large enough to fill a fist”
rule. That is a foolish assumption for you to make. My own beard can’t fill a
fist but some of our great leaders and politicians have beards that would fill
several fists, Gandalf and Pat Dodson are two notable examples. What I am
suggesting is that those men who are able to grow a beard are often wise and
have better things to dedicate their time to than shaving. Even Chris Bowen
makes more sense when he forgets to shave, while Ed Husic and Adam Bandt aren’t
useless either.
Now before anyone decides to come at me suggesting that I am
promoting only men that can grow beards should hold positions of power, you are
wrong. If I’d applied for my get out of jail free card and could’ve voted in Aotearoa,
I would’ve voted for Jacinda. I’m also pleased Annastacia won in Queensland,
even though I voted for Amy MacMahon from the Greens above former Labor Deputy
Premier Jackie Trad. As far as I know, none of these women can grow a beard and
if they can, they choose not to, but if they decide to, I will fully support
them in their decision. But this is not a discussion about whether or not women
should grow beards, it is about why we have left clean shaven men run the world
for too long.
One need only look at mythology and history to realise that
blokes with beards are clearly better leaders than those who decide to waste
ten minutes scraping whiskers off their faces every day. This is where I must
apologise to any Indigenous readers – I’m about to go all Eurocentric on this
one because white kids in Australia have never been taught the true history of
these lands (I’m trying to learn. Please trust me that I’m trying), but more importantly,
of the little knowledge I have been able to acquire, I am in no way qualified
to speak about it in an educated manner, so I won’t.
What I will do is remind you that most European, Mediterranean
and Middle Eastern cultures held the beard in high regard for thousands of
years. As far back as the interesting gods like Odin and Zeus, right up to the
figureheads of the three main modern religions of those regions were bearded. Abraham,
Moses and Jesus who are usually depicted as white (they weren’t) with beards.
Mohammed certainly had a beard, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so keen on telling
blokes to grow them. But it doesn’t stop
there, damn near everyone in The Iliad with testicles had a beard as did a raft
of Shakespeare’s main players.
Beards were once viewed as a mark of maturity and wisdom.
The fuller, the better and when it started going grey, you were proper
respected. Especially if you could still formulate a cogent argument regarding
whatever topic was under discussion.
Which brings me back to why clean-shaven men should remove
themselves from public life. They’ve had their chance and they’ve failed. Some
of them will attempt to gain favour by growing a moustache over November, but I
have some bad news for them – a moustache is not a beard.
Most of our Politicians, at a Commonwealth level at least,
look as if they struggle to grow stubble, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to
distinguish between those who can’t grow a beard and those who choose not to.
From there it will only be a matter of time for those of worth to come to the
fore while those who are found lacking and continue to take a blade to their
face on a daily basis are hounded from office.
To fully appreciate the power of the beard in Politics we
must cast our minds back to the twentieth century, when three bearded men, for
a brief period of time were probably the most recognisable and arguably the
most important Politicians in the world. I am speaking of course, of Fidel
Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, all of whom were relentlessly
harassed by beardless men. You can argue the political differences all you like,
but deep down you have to admit it was actually about the beards.
While Kennedy failed in his invasion of Cuba and was dead
before his failed invasion of Viet Nam was over, Fidel’s beard was specifically
targeted, but he is the only one of the four to have lived long enough to see
the twenty-first century. The infamous CIA plot to administer a substance that
would defoliate his face was obviously the idea of clean-shaven men. Anyone
with a beard will tell you that if you can somehow manage to get any substance
consumed by your enemy, you might as well just poison them to death.
Ho Chi Minh succumbed to diabetes and Che was Killed In
Action but their images have been immortalised to the point that companies in developed
countries pay sweat shop wages in developing countries to have the faces of
these men adorn their products and charge exorbitant prices for the product so
privileged people can pretend they are rebelling. Hypocrisy is never more
evident than seeing a private school kid wearing a Che T-shirt.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I went to a private
school. I have also never worn anything with any of the aforementioned bearded
warriors depicted on it. I drew an Anarchist armband on the shirt that you get
other kids to sign on the last day, but I never descended to the level of
denying my privilege by paying eighty bucks for a shirt made by a kid in Bangladesh
who is paid three bucks a week to make hundreds of them.
However, this does bring me back on point about the significance
of beards in Politics because at that school was a bloke who is of Chinese
heritage, a very good friend, he’s an Engineer of some sort now and I’d vote
for him if he ran for elected office. The problem is that he couldn’t grow a
beard. Not even the bum-fluff that some of us attempted to sport in our final
years and he was jealous that he didn’t have to shave. Ever.
Those of us that were forced to, advised him that he was
much better off not having to scrape a razor over his face every morning but he
refused to believe us. This is why I must make the point that a beard is not
and should not be a prerequisite for elected office. If anyone is unable to
grow a beard it should not preclude them from public office, but if a man can
grow a beard yet insists on wasting taxpayers money on the time and materiel to
remove it every day before attending to their duties, they are clearly unfit
for office.
Look around the world. Outside of the Middle East, Central
Asia and the Sub-Continent you aren’t going to find a bearded Head of State,
except Trudeau sometimes, maybe somewhere in the Pacific, but they’re rare as
hen’s teeth in the grand scheme of things.
Xi, Putin, Trump, Bolsanaro, Johnson, Morrison, Jokowi and
the list goes on, all beardless men who hold the rest of us in contempt and have
all presided over serious human rights violations, inaction on climate change
and, excluding Xi, an absolutely piss poor response to COVID-19. How they were
elected differs from country to country but what unites them is the lack of
facial hair and they’re all a bunch of narcissistic pricks. If you want to see
good beardless leadership, I recommend Germany, Finland and New Zealand.
Now I’m not saying that those countries are perfect, nor
would I imply that all countries currently governed by bearded men are exemplars
of good governance, but they do have something in common. They get shit done.
Tiny Island Nation doesn’t want COVID? Lock the whole country down. Don’t like
a journalist who will be visiting your embassy in another country? Murder him,
dismember the corpse and dispose of it. Simple. While these examples are at different
ends on the spectrum of getting shit done, they do demonstrate the capacity of
women and bearded men to accomplish what they set out to do.
Compare that effectiveness with Morrison pissing off to
Hawaii while the East Coast of Australia was on fire and Trump playing golf as
the death toll from the virus surpassed the number of American fatalities in
Kennedy’s War. Morrison came back and committed common assault on bushfire
victims whereas Trump caught COVID and hosted a bunch of super-spreader events.
On the other hand Jacinda Ardern united her country after a terrorist attack,
worse than anything New Zealand had ever seen, dealt with a volcano blowing up
and had a child before instituting what is arguably the best response to
COVID-19 in the world.
I won’t detail Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, nor do I condone it.
I mention it only as a recent example of how a bearded head of state can move
swiftly and decisively to deal with something they perceive as a problem. This trait
is something that is lacking in the clean-shaven men who run the Anglosphere,
East Asia and Europe. I’m not talking about the killing people bit, because
they are all guilty or complicit of that, I’m talking about the ability to make
a decision, knowing full well that there was going to be a kick-back, but doing
it anyway.
Imagine if Turnbull had just told Abbot, Kelly, Christensen,
Canavan and Joyce to piss off and vote against his climate policies that Labor,
The Greens and most of the crossbench agreed with. Even left-wing voters had a little tingle in
their pants when Malcolm knifed Tony, hoping that it might be time for a return
to sensible climate policy but Turnbull lacked the beard or the vagina that
would have given him a backbone to stand up to The Ignorati in his own party.
It was a failed opportunity and something that contributed to The Morrison
Fires over the last summer.
A bearded man would have sent Abbot to a triathlon somewhere
far away, Kelly down a coal shaft so he could figure out what mining is all
about, Christensen to Mackay instead of Manila, Canavan to a housekeeping course
so he can learn how to wash his own clothes and realise “gifting” a clothesline
to your wife on mother’s day is a proper shit misogynist move, whereas Joyce who
is far too busy struggling to feed 2(+?) families, as well as his sheep, while
jacked up on goofballs and talking to sky fairies, is beyond my ken as to why
he wasn’t redeployed elsewhere to sort his shit out.
This is only a handful of clean-shaven Australian Politicians’
but I think they are an appropriate group to demonstrate the collective failure
of bare chinned men in public life, of course I could rail hard on Trump and
his massive man sook but that would detract from the central point because he is
to be replaced by another beardless man. At least Biden is smart enough to have
picked a woman as his deputy and Labor has now announced that the
aforementioned Ed Husic, of bearded fame, has been returned to the Labor front
bench. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but these moves are both in the
right direction.
For those who argue that shaving is an indicator of
discipline I will simply remind you that the three most recent Australian Parliamentary
infidelity scandals have all involved clean shaven married male Ministers
cheating on their wives. If this is a measure of discipline it would imply that
Trump and Boris are the most disciplined world leaders in the history of
history. Even JFK wasn’t as disciplined as that pair (The Ghost of Marilyn told
me), neither was Hawke (his ghost told me) but despite their philandering both
men are lauded as exemplars of decency in their respective countries and both
were beardless. This is not to say a bearded man can’t be unfaithful, but we
haven’t elected enough to have a measurable sample group.
That The Age of The Shaved Chin must come to an end is something we cannot afford to argue about any longer. The damage and
destruction that has been wrought by these lathered razor worshippers has gone
on for far too long. Now is the time to act. I am setting myself a standard for
all future voting in so much as if the candidate from my preferred party is not
a woman, or a man who can grow a beard and wears it with pride, I will be
putting my second preferred party first. I’m not saying I won’t vote for an
independent but in recent elections both beards and talent have been missing
from that option. What I’m saying is don’t vote for a clean-shaven man, they
lie and they don’t care and they don’t try to hide it.
