Joe Biden's Hair Plugs and Our Choice This November

We tuned in to last week's debate between Vice Presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, primarily to see if we could find any truth in the mainstream-media-fueled meme that Governor Palin is somehow any less qualified to be President of the United States than "community organizer," serial autobiographer, and career presidential candidate Barack Obama. Perhaps the reason we couldn't find the truth that we were looking for is that we found ourselves so terribly distracted by Senator Biden's hair; specifically, his front-to-back comb-over that might be the most unflattering 'do that we've seen on an American politician since James Traficant piled a dead possum on his scalp.

Concerned with Senator Biden's health and the health of Our Nation, we looked further into this issue, and in doing so gained some insight into how we might choose among the candidates for President this November. As a preliminary matter, we learned that Biden actually made a painful choice to make his hair look the way it does. Painful, in that he apparently underwent a surgical procedure to have hair follicles grafted from the back of his head (or somewhere else), to the front. The procedure likely involved the insertion of "hair plugs," each containing 15 to 30 hairs, "lined up to create a solid wall of hair."

Why would Biden, a handsome enough fellow, undergo this painful procedure? In answering this question we might argue over whether Biden actually looks better with his combed over doll-hair than he would otherwise (though he quite objectively does not), but we simply must assume that he did it because he wanted to. Put another way, Biden went under the knife to have hair plugs inserted into his skull because he preferred his artificial comb-over over his natural baldness. He did not want to be bald.

Senator Biden is certainly not alone in his aversion to male-pattern baldness. Countless men seek "treatment" for this "condition" every year. So it's worth asking why so many men, including Biden, are so hesitant to let nature take its course in this way. A convincing explanation is offered by May Kasahara, a character in Haruki Murakami's classic novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Ms. Kasahara offers that, "the reason people are afraid of going bald is because it makes them think of the end of life. . . . [W]hen your hair starts to thin, it must feel as if your life is being worn away . . . as if you've taken a giant step in the direction of death, the last Big Consumption." This, to us, goes a long way toward explaining why Biden (and those who seek similar "treatment") might think that his combed-over plugs look better than a more natural look.

But baldness just can't be that bad. Or even bad at all. We all die. And we all grow older with each passing moment. Every successful religion on Earth counsels some degree of detachment to life here on Earth -- a certain fearlessness in the face of death. So doesn't this get us to the heart of the concept of "growing old gracefully"?

Indeed. There is an evolutionary argument that acceptance of one's baldness goes to the very essence of human "maturity." The theory, which is the most reasonable that we (and Wikipedia) have been able to uncover on the subject of baldness and evolution, suggests that "baldness evolved in males through sexual selection as an enhanced signal of aging and social maturity, whereby aggression and risk-taking decrease and nurturing behaviours increase. This may have conveyed a male with enhanced social status but reduced physical threat, which could enhance ability to secure reproductive partners and raise offspring to adulthood." This theory is supported by the fact that "some primate species clearly use an enlarged forehead, created both anatomically and through strategies such as frontal balding, to convey increased status and maturity;" and a study in which "males and females viewed 6 male models with different levels of facial hair . . and cranial hair. . . . Beards and a full head of hair were seen as being more aggressive and less socially mature, and baldness was associated with more social maturity." It should also be remembered that, as a general matter, humans have exponentially less hair than the apes from whom we evolved.

Male pattern baldness is a powerful message from nature about the temporality of our lives on Earth. And we see that there are two divergent ways in which a man might respond: Either by rejecting and/or repressing nature's message by attempting to hide one's baldness as Biden has gone to great lengths to do -- thus incidentally rejecting some good and potentially useful things, such as being perceived as being less aggressive, more socially mature, and a more suitable reproductive partner; Or by accepting one's baldness with grace, thus indicating acknowledgement of the natural limits of life on Earth as a human being.

This is all especially relevant this election season because these divergent responses to male pattern baldness are so strikingly similar to the divergence between today's Democratic and Republican parties. At least this is so to those who understand this divergence as a direct result of the Democratic Party's apparent reluctance to accept nature's limits as demonstrated by its repeated insistence on making the perfect the enemy of the good -- just as Biden has made his hair plugs the enemy of a perfectly good scalp.

Due to this apparent failure to recognize that we live in a world of scarce resources, we are continually subject to policy objections by the Democratic machine that are based primarily on the fact that the world is not perfect. What else could explain their simplistic tropes? "How can we pay for a war abroad when there are poor people here in our country?" "Why go after Saddam when there are bad guys in other places too?" "How can we let these 'Benedict Arnold CEOs' take our jobs overseas?"* On this view, any human suffering can be explained as a failure of government to intervene in the right way. On this view, we must obtain the approval of the whole wide world before we go to war to protect ourselves, because we must maintain a perfect image abroad. No matter that those from whom we were to seek approval had incentives to see us harmed. And nevermind the good chance that we've accomplished something very good and useful by going forward without this approval that we were never going to get anyway.

Biden's hair plugs are an apt symbol of a Democratic Party that has spent most of the last four decades trying to convince America that things should be perfect, at the expense of making things better. They are a perfect symbol for the Democratic Party that is the party of the Hollywood elite. The party that is forever trying to restore the picture-perfect image of Kennedy's Camelot. This party would never accept George W. Bush because he didn't "look (or rather, talk) the part," just as it will not speak out against the socially regressive claims that a healthy 72-year old John McCain is "too old" to be our President.

A failure to account for the natural limits of life on Earth -- and the consequent rejection of good and useful things that is so often incident to this failure -- is one thing when it comes to Joe Biden's decision to drill holes into his own scalp. But, as Joe Biden's hair-plugs remind us, the world is not a picture-perfect place, nor could it ever be.

One should take a good long look at those plugs before pulling the lever this November for a party that has so forcefully tried to convince us otherwise.

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*Footnote: Whatever else one party has over the other, aren't the Dems so much more likely to f*ck up in the Middle East? Whatever the problems in the U.S. economy now, even the New York Times recognizes that we're a part of the global economy too. And integration of the Middle East into the free global economy might do more for that economy, and our economy here, than any domestic policy possibly could -- and would make us forget about our current domestic 'crisis' in a hurry. We are the world. And a rising tide lifts all boats. At bottom, that is what the War in Iraq should be all about, and perhaps what it's always been about. 9/11 was proof that we, the world's strongest nation, should have focused on this integration sooner than we did. That the Democratic Party's tooth-and-nail opposition to everything about this War along every step of the way might demonstrates a willful parochially self-interested ignorance of this reality is something that we're painfully reminded of every time we see Senator Biden's hairline.