by Wayne Myers

Created on: June 24, 2010

How To Destroy All Meaning

     There was a time, it doesn't seem that awfully long ago, that a shaved or bald head usually meant something. Of course it has always meant that you didn't have any hair but beyond that it's meaning generally narrowed down to two or three possibilities: (1.) You were a Neo-Nazi. (2.) You were a monk (3.) You were undergoing chemo-therapy. If you're a thinking man or woman you might have noticed that these three dissimilar reasons for having a bald head all share something in common and that is that they all-three require a profound degree of emotional involvement; There are reasons why these people all sport bare heads. Whether it is the dire suffering of the cancer patient or the devotion to God of the monk or the commitment to stupidity of the Nazi, all three forms of bald head have meaning.

Somehow or another though, the bald look proliferated. Telly Savalis may or may not have had something to do with it but I'm inclined to go with the latter because of the span of time stretching between the Kojak television series and the sudden popularity of the bald look in mainstream society. No, it was something else and I suspect it had little to do with chemo-therapy and nothing at all to do with monks so we're left with the unsettling possibility that it had much to do with Neo-Nazis. But how? How could something so indescribably evil and socially-unacceptable have fostered such a popular trend in personal grooming...or uber-grooming, if you will? How could a crewcut-gone-bad, a look that usually adorned the head of an angry caucasian with a brick in one hand and a molotov-cocktail in the other become popular among black men, hispanic men, white men, cops, robbers, athletes, physicists, actors, lawyers and, well, everybody...even Jews? I have a better question: WHO CARES? For my purposes it is only important that the omnipresence of shaved heads is acknowledged so that I can get on with my essay, the theme of which is: How to destroy all meaning...

     If you agree that shaved/bald heads are everywhere you'll also have to admit that, in a very real sense, the meaning that Neo-Nazi skinheads must have attached to bald heads at one time, whatever the hell that meaning was, has been stolen from them completely and for all time. And with that I say: Voila! There you have it! That is how you steal a "things" meaning...you do it or you say it or you buy it, ad nauseum. Furthermore, you urge your

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