I’m playing catch up on the new season of "Curb Your Enthusiasm."
So sorr this is late, but… did you see Larry David’s Q & A with The Huffington Post?
Here’s the passage that has me, uh, scratching my head (my italics):
In the episode "The Seder" [season five], Larry was concerned that a follically-challenged sex offender was "very bad for the bald community." Who, in your opinion, is good for the bald community?
I’m not the president of Hair Club for Men. I’m not president of the bald celebrity league. I don’t even know who the bald celebrities are. It used to be Telly Savalas and Gavin MacLeod. Who else is there? Mikhail Gorbachev is bald… Joey Pants… there’s not that many of them. I mean, we always welcome new members with open arms. Most actors don’t let themselves get bald. They get transplants or weaves or something. When’s the last time you saw a bald president? There’ll be a woman and a Jewish president and maybe even a Muslim president before a bald president. That’s my prediction: There’ll be a Muslim president before a bald president.
Hey, were Larry David and Michele Bachmann in the same history class together?
John Adams. John Quincy Adams. Martin Van Buren. Dwight D. Eisenhower. (Were there others?)
That said, it’s fair to say that Americans seem to like a nice head of hair in their presidents.
Here’s Steve Rushin of Time on the topic back in 2007: [[READMORE]]
When President John F. Kennedy went hatless during his Inauguration speech in 1961, he committed in essence a double homicide: of the hat industry and of the prospect that any bald man would ever have to the nation’s highest office.
Since Eisenhower left the White House, voters have carved out a Mount Brushmore of Presidents–Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton–with magnificent hair. What we need is a tonsorial memorial to those giants–Ike, Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi, David Ben-Gurion–of the World War II era, that one brief and very shining moment in history when baldness was tantamount to greatness.
Today the only thing voters like less than a candidate who gets a $400 haircut is a candidate who doesn’t require one at all. Whether or not they realize it, voters think of great leaders as people with haircuts, and really great leaders as people with haircuts named for them. George Clooney once wore a Caesar. It is unlikely that he will ever ask his stylist for a Stevenson.
