Why Ban the Beard?

I walked into Midway ISD's job fair, having just moved to the Waco area, anxious to make good first impressions and find a position. As I stepped up to the registration desk, the receptionist bent over the computer asked for my name and looked up. She frowned. She stared a moment at me, making me feel quite uncomfortable, and then said, “You know you’d have to shave your beard if you came to work here, don’t you?”

I thought she was joking. I chuckled until she said, “No, really. It’s school board policy.”

“No, I didn’t know,” I responded.

She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, it is.”

I spent the morning making contacts and talking to principals, each of whom told me as we discussed my potential employment, “You know you’d have to shave your beard, don’t you?”

That evening my son asked me if I had gotten a job. I told him that things had gone pretty well and that, if I got the job I hoped for, I would be shaving my beard. He looked stunned. “Don’t shave your beard, Daddy,” he said. “We like your beard. Why do they want you to shave it anyway?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “Let’s go look it up.” We pulled up the internet, and began to look into the matter. What we found surprised us both.

The first thing we found was that many occupations have an excellent reason for banning facial hair. People in occupations where workers need to wear filtration masks, gas masks, or similar gear need to be clean shaven to allow those devices to make a good seal on their faces. It is an important safety issue, but teaching high school requires no such equipment. Nor is teaching the kind of job where my beard might get caught in machinery or otherwise cause me injury.

Why, then, ban facial hair? We dug deeper. Successful men with facial hair can be found today in every professional career. The pages of History books are overflowing with great men who just happened to have hairy faces. It was the norm in the late nineteenth century, but in the early twentieth century men with beards were considered too conservative and old-fashioned and the clean-shaven look came into style. That changed in the 1960’s with the counter-culture movement, but long gone are the days when beards, moustaches, and sideburns were associated with “dirty hippies.” I’m too young to even remember the 1960’s.

One interesting tidbit our internet search turned up was a web forum for ministers (of a popular American Christian denomination) who were discussing beards in the light of their own profession. The question came up, “Does a man have to be clean-shaven to qualify for salvation?” It nearly shook my faith in Christianity when several ministers said “Yes” or “I’m not sure.” Others responded that they expected bearded men to shave if they wanted to join their congregation. To be fair, most answered “No,” but that this was considered a topic for serious discussion made me wonder if these fellows might not have too much time on their hands.

It is important for certain professions that deal with the public to avoid an extreme and/or distracting appearance. We can all understand that. A law firm might require its members to avoid dying their hair blue and shaving it into a Mohawk. What jury would take them seriously? Wouldn’t it be difficult for students to concentrate on their algebra test if they kept staring at their teacher’s multiple facial piercings and tattoos? But can a neatly-groomed mustache or beard honestly be compared to such things? Has anyone ever heard: “He must be guilty; his lawyer has a beard” or “I can’t learn math from a teacher with a moustache.” (Okay, honesty forces me to admit that my own 9th grade math teacher’s moustache was a tremendous distraction, but she was an isolated case and the distracting nature of her prodigious lip fur does not weaken my argument.)

So, if there are no safety issues, no lingering negative associations in our society concerning professionals with facial hair, and most Christians can agree that a beard will not condemn its wearer to eternal hellfire and damnation, why the ban? The only reason my son and I were able to divine was personal preference. The people in charge of enacting the employee policies at this organization feel it is appropriate to compel their employees to look a certain way due solely to their own personal preferences.

“What about mommy?” My son asked. “Mommy prefers your beard. We all do. If there’s no real reason but what some people prefer, why can’t it be what we prefer? Don’t we count? We’re your family. It’s your face, not theirs. It’s not fair.”

After our research session I admitted to him that he was right that it was not fair that everyone who worked for this organization to live under this ban just because the policy makers themselves (or their spouses) preferred to be clean-shaven. The courts have said that this is not a civil/human rights issue, but even my young son could see the intrusive nature of this kind of policy.

Children often complain, “It’s not fair,” when told to finish their broccoli or clean their room. “Life’s not fair,” is the perennially popular parental rejoinder to this complaint. Every now and then, though, I guess it is good for them to see that ‘life’s not fair’ for adults, either.

Say It Ain't So, Randi!

James Randi, for those of you not familiar with his work, is the closest thing we have to a modern Harry Houdini. Like Houdini, "The Amazing Randi," has spent his career both astounding audiences worldwide with unrivalled feats of stage magic and debunking charlatans who seek to dupe and defraud the unwary by claiming to harness supernatural forces. Houdini became involved in exposing fraudulent mediums after the death of his mother, but Randi's debunking of supernatural fakery comes from an unshakable belief in the naturalistic world.

To further his ends, Randi established the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), which he used to put forth the ultimate "put up or shut up" challenge to the world's mediums, dowsers, psychics, spiritualists, faith healers, astrologers, and everyone else trying to make money from the gullible by pimping the supernatural: The JREF Million Dollar Challenge. The challenge guarantees in writing a prize of one million dollars who can conclusively prove the existence of any supernatural power or force. All applicants have to do is to submit their claim in writing and have their powers tested by JREF's experts. All tests are set up using scientific controls which do not allow cheating or the possiblity that success was caused by chance alone.

What could be simpler? What easier way could there be to get your hands on a million bucks?

Yet, in the ten years it has been around, JREF's million dollar prize has yet to pay off for any of its would-be claimants. None of the aspiring psychic millionaires has been able to pass a test that does not allow cheating or luck to be a controlling factor. After ten years the score is Randi: $1 million, Psychic Woo Woo's: 0.

Last week the bad news came. In JREF's Swift newsletter (http://www.randi.org/joom/content/view/144/1/), Randi announced that the end of the Million Dollar challenge would come on March 6th, 2010. It seems the sheer numbers of mystically-charged loonies crawling out of the woodwork to attempt the challenge has been overwhelming and the foundation's time and resources have been stretched to the limit, keeping the foundation from fulfilling its primary purpose: education. No one has even come close to proving the existence of the supernatural and, worse yet, the big-name psychics (the ones with TV shows, radio programs, and best-selling books) are so afraid to be proven frauds that they would not touch the challenge with a ten-foot pole.

Fans and admirers of Randi and his foundation certainly understand and respect the reasons the challenge must end, but we will miss it nonetheless. The challenge always hung over the heads of charlatans and their believers, a sword of Damocles ready to burst their bubble of nonsense should they dare attempt to face it. Their fear to 'go for the million' was all the proof we ever needed that there was nothing but air to the mystic claims of the Sylvia Brownes and James Van Praaghs of the world.

Worst of all, however, is the unfortunate truth that if the challenge can end, so, too, can Randi. The Amazing Randi, tireless crusader against those who would have us ruled by the irrational, is no longer a young man. His recent open-heart surgury leads us to the inexorable conclusion that he is mortal and must pass the way of all mortal men, despite the fact that his wit and wisdom are needed as much now as ever.

Perhaps when it happens Sylvia Browne can talk to him so that he can share his wisdom from beyond the grave ("I'm hearing a name. It starts with 'M'...or maybe 'R'...although it could be an 'A.' No? Well, think about it. It'll come to you. I think he had a full head of...no...I mean he was losing his hair? Yes, that's what I'm seeing...). No, probably not.

Bloggy. Bloggier. Bloggiest.

Google the phrase 'I hate the word blog' and you will see that quite a few of us do. It is not a very graceful or mellifluous word, but it is both honest and useful and it is this honesty and utility that have given it its place in modern usage.

Its honest derivation from the term 'web log' has, thankfully, deprived us of some pretentious term likely to be dreamed up by sociologists attempting to load it with significance. Granted, the term 'web' is no longer used like it once was and 'log' reminds one more of Abraham Lincoln's birthplace or William Shatner's voiceover of an ancient special effects sequence, but 'blog' soldiers on. It is unfortunate that the somewhat more literary connotations of a word like 'travelogue' could not have been incorporated, but things are as they are and any pretensions to literature will need to arise from blogs' contents and not the genesis of the term itself.

The utility of 'blog' is an even greater factor in its popularity than its honest origins. It has a forthright monosyllabism that lends itself to ease of use. Once one has gotten past the newness of the term, the conjunction and combination of its component sounds makes it seem surprising that no one before our own generation has put them together for the naming of something else. Why did our ancestors have nothing named 'blog?'

Its utility continues far beyond its brevity. 'Blog' easily jumps across the noun line into verb territory: "I blog," an acquaintance once told me. 'Blogging' is a popular pasttime and, adjectively speaking, 'blog' can describe posts, sites, and material. Oh, and just in case you thought the logosphere was entirely too pretentious, the blogosphere is dominated by plebeians and has almost entirely superceded it.

It seems more and more likely that those whose hidebound and reactionary views toward language cause them to revile the neologisms generated by information technology will be shoved aside by the force of a living, growing language. Acceptance of these new terms may well be the litmus test that determines which of us possesses the flexibility and mental adaptability to excel in the information age.

Unfortunately, I still hate the word 'blog.'