The Coffee Table

If you think she likes your bristles walk barefoot through some thistles – Burma Shave

I hate shaving. I consider it among the least accomplishments of civilization, for men on the face, for women elsewhere on their anatomy.

In high school, a few spidery hairs curled off my chin and above my lips. By age 20, when I solicited gainful employment, I sported a 23-hair mustache and a beatnik goatee. I shaved the sparse growth mid-jaw but kept these and grew the sideburns made popular by late-period Elvis.

During parent-teacher conferences in Hammond, Louisiana, 1995, one mom told me that when I walked my dogs around the neighborhood, her husband said, “Here comes the professor.” At that time mustache and goatee looked academic instead of standard issue for celebrities.

The day before my 42nd birthday, we landed in Fort Wingate, New Mexico, where I contracted to teach English for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. My hair and whiskers were still blond enough that by the end of my first day, a hand-made sign appeared outside my classroom: “Custer go home.” One does not prefer to work with a Native American population under the name Custer. I immediately let my hair and whiskers grow, leading my students to nickname me “Jesus” and “Moses.” My driver’s license photo portrayed a Southern Rock musician.

My wife and youngest daughter claim “Dad has no chin,” because they have only seen mine in its hirsute condition. It’s all white now, and I thought to let it prosper for the Kris Kringle look last December, but with the pandemic, it doesn’t matter. When I am trim, I resemble a photo of one of my dad’s ancestors, from the late 1800s —same hairline, beard, eyes, nostrils, wrinkles. Strong genes.

In 2010, my longtime favorite baseball team, the San Francisco Giants, won the World Series, marked by the wacky personality of pitcher Brian Wilson who flaunted a big bushy beard, perhaps dyed black, and tattoos. Wilson was a phenomenal relief pitcher, leading fans to chant “Fear the Beard!” when he entered a game. Since then, numerous sports heroes have sported gigantic beards, dreadlocks for Black athletes, and roadmapped tattoos.

When I am out and about, I see interracial couples, gay couples, people with hair dyed green or pink or rainbowed. It is cool that in the 21st Century folks can dress weird, grow long hair or shave their heads, get tattooed with pictures, poems or prophecies, and wear silverware in their eyebrows, septums and belly buttons. Not all of that is for me, but I am glad that anything goes. This all happened in my lifetime.

In 1968, Abbie Hoffman (clean-shaven but Afro-coiffed) was arrested for wearing a shirt sewn from an American flag. A few years later, the Supreme Court overthrew certain statutes that prohibited desecration of the flag, but a flag code still exists that says the flag should not be reproduced as clothing or discardables like paper napkins, or have images superimposed upon it, and other etiquette.

Which brings us January 6, 2021. Photos of the mob which attacked the US Capitol show plenty of flag imagery on T-shirts and jackets, and a flag featuring a gun-toting Donald Trump waving high above the crowd.

I gather that the guy calling himself Q Shaman is sort of a modern-day right wing version of Abbie Hoffman, a fellow with an overlarge sense of the absurd, willing to show up in public to advance his cause. But what is his cause?

Abbie Hoffman’s protests were to promote the antiwar movement, protest racial inequality, highlight governmental hypocrisy, and campaign for freedom of speech and assembly. Watch The Trial of the Chicago 7 on Netflix for realistic background on that era. His arrest and appeals eventually led to people wearing the flag publicly on the beach or at political rallies, and to desecrate it with superimposed images.

I read a commentary after the Capitol invasion that said “mostly white men with weird beards” staged the riot. It almost made me want to shave. The beard—symbol of Jesus, Walt Whitman, Tolstoy, Civil War generals, The Allman Brothers, and my ancestors, an image of wisdom, creativity, non-conformity, desecrated and shamed.