Hirsute

My mustache, still. Shaved head, still. But, unlike some in my cohort, no beard. Which makes me wonder who has ’em, who does not. There’s bushy-bearded Ram Dass, until recently playing his part in the theater of dharma transmission. In the secular realm, post–Late Night David Letterman, tired of shaving, marked life change with mega-beard.

As for non-beards, think back to A Hard Day’s Night, Beatle Paul’s troublemaking grandfather (played by Wilfrid Brambell, only fifty at the time). “A nice old man,” and “very clean,” the other Beatles say.

Among my friends, there’s Robert, in his sixties working as a carpenter and still into pickup basketball when he grew a goatee. Teased by friends about newly visible white hair, he said it was liberating—helped keep him from imagining he was still a player in the game of sexual competition. Walking across campus, he’d become depressed: undergraduate women just couldn’t see him. Adding, as if it followed, “I have no more secrets.” Secrets only for the beardless sexual self?

Another friend, Jerome, was the first graybeard in our circle. Then in his forties, he’d begun studying with Hasidic Jews, soon not shaving either because Torah forbids it or because of beard proximity or beard contagion.

Re my own facial hair. Since trying out a version of myself as college bohemian, I’ve had a mustache more than fifty-five years. Faithful to this look, like my father with his mustache, except for a few months in my twenties wandering in North Africa. Came home gaunt and bearded. Was in no rush to revert to my previous status quo until a first date with a compelling young woman. Hacked the beard off late that night until again there was just my mustache. “This is who I really am,” I told her. Believed.

Though that first date seems a lifetime ago, it’s merely five decades. Now the mustache is no longer dark brown or black. A mix of gray and white, apparently still part of my sense of who I really am. This though shaving to clear the white stubble—spiny sea urchin gristle—is ever more a chore.

________

Thus far, then, no beard for me. Who else doesn’t grow one? And/or, why are most Washington politicians and players clean shaven? Nothing to hide? This though bewattled / dewlapped Mitch McConnell might consider facial hair. (Should lying-straight-faced public officials be exempt from body shaming? If so, shame on me.)

In the realm of the entrepreneurial, consider Mark Zuckerberg, boy-billionaire all grow’d up. Though this millennial butchers his own goats, for him no artisan-woodsman’s facial hair. At thirty-five, still a “beardless youth.” Idle question: what percentage of FB employees have beards?

Z’s signature T-shirt: no tricks up such short sleeves! Think of 1960s Playboy centerfolds—impossible for airbrushed girls-next-door to be hookers. Not that Z’s a hooker. A tech utopian, he’s “bringing the world closer together.” Question: such technology liberates whom from what?

And, Z’s job description? He’s “in sales,” or—nouns can be so blunt—a salesman. Selling predictive data points for targeted ads tailored to each user, based on information collected, recorded, captured from each user. Aggregated to manipulate the behavior of “friends” to... make money. “A surveillance system disguised as a high school reunion,” John Oliver argued. Designed to cultivate addiction, former FB president Sean Parker said.

So, Facebook or, as some have it, Fakebook: a predatory con. Meanwhile, who else is Z selling? Salesman-in-chief saying, maybe believing, his deceptions have the goal of making you happy? Or is it just about lust for power or the reluctance to admit colossal error.

“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility—that was a mistake and I’m sorry for it,” Z said. More PR. As George Soros put it, “Face-book and the others [Google, etc.] are on the side of their own profits.”

FB: cesspool of conspiracy theories; live-streamed murder; accessory to ethnic cleansing; algorithms calculated to feed and feed...