Haircut 400

OK, so I’m sure y’all know that John Edwards got a couple of expensive haircut housecalls. I’m wondering if something like the following would work for him, given as part of a stump speech at a rally with supporters, with the news cameras filming him.

You probably have heard pundits and columnists gossiping about me lately. So I’ll tell you two things about me that you may already know.

I’m rich, and I have good hair.

I wasn’t always rich. I made it big. You know that. I hope some of you strike it rich someday, like I did, with hard work and a lot of luck. Some of you have a sense already of what you might like to spend a little money on, if you were rich. Maybe it wouldn’t be a haircut. Maybe it would be one of those big TVs. Maybe it would be one of those expensive fishing rods. Actually—I bought one of those, too. For me, well, I admit I’m vain enough that I’d rather have them write about my expensive haircuts than my bad haircuts.

It’s true. I have good hair, and I’m rich. I’m rich enough that the barber will come to me, if I don’t have time to go to the barber, and boy, will he charge me extra for the house call. My father worked in the textile mills, and if the barber came to him, it’s because she was married to him.

When I talk about two Americas, it’s because I’ve seen them both. The one at the top, that let me in when I had the money for it, and the one for everybody else who struggles to get by. If I tell you that the people at the top have their own barbers—their own schools, their own police in their own walled towns, their own health care system, their own their own water supplies in designer bottles—it’s because I’ve been there. And I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to have a cheap haircut, either.

[return to Two Americas stump speech]

Now, this may be worse than simply ignoring it, and trying to let other people talk about how silly it is to be even talking about a haircut when we’re at war, the whole fucking world is going to crap, the fucking bees are dying, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Our Only President and his cabal of incompetents and crooks were selling bee pelts to each other with our treasury’s money. But Mr. Edwards can’t talk about how silly the attack is. He can’t whine about the press not giving him a break. That is, he can, but he’ll only look worse. The only thing he can do that will help—help him and help the country—is to turn the $400 haircut into a symbol not of his own vanity, but of a deeper structural problem, which any individual $400 haircut doesn’t make worse or better, but that Our Only President has made worse, and that he can make better, good hair and all.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.