The UN Declaration On Hair Rights And U.S. Status As A "Vogue State"

Sloan Plotsky

[Editor's note: This document arrived at MS99 HQ in an unmarked envelope. "Sloan Plotsky" may or may not be an alias. While its contents are not specifically mustache-related, the abuses it seeks to uncover are of vital importance to all of us.]

The anniversary of the UN Declaration on The Rights of Hair arrives once again during a crescendo of U.S. atrocities in the area of human genetic expression. Not only has the U.S. (both literally and figuratively) been holding out a straight razor to one of the world's most hirsute nations, Serbia, it has, on every occasion, to use the words of Jerzy Labrooche, chief couture editor for the New York Times and longtime proponent of American cosmetological "liberation" theory, "scraped the face" of the developing nations in their quest for follicular parity with the world's most vicious fashion superpower.

Of course, the State Department has long justified these attacks on dermal integrity as "smoothing the path for democracy," but the truth could not be further from this ostensible "unfettered facial expression." We find this evidence not just in the recent bombing of Kosovo, or the slightly less recent bombing of Iraq, but much closer to home in the story of those who attempted to reach U.S. shores in Haitian boat lifts in the last decade. It was not widely reported by the press at the time, but virtually all of the passengers on the boats from Haiti were unshaven, and the U.S. refused to allow even the most extreme cases access to a lawyer before running them through pro forma deportation hearings and mandatory visits to a barber from Arkansas. (As occult as this news was, it was an even better-kept secret that this same Little Rock barber managed campaign funds for both President Carter and Newt Gingrich, and was busy stockpiling depilatory supplies for the senatorial bid of Hillary Clinton at the time this document went to press.)

U.S. insistence upon the near universal use of shavers, whether manual or electric, violates the UN Declaration repeatedly, but this has not been reported in the U.S. media, and has not dismayed the policy's defenders, such as former presidential groomer Michael "Mickey The Scissors" Court, who now heads the World

Mickey The Scissors

Haircutters Association and formerly led the International Barbers Union,an organization that staged an all out assault on bodily hair with full American complicity during the Reagan and Bush presidencies. And, as lacking in substance as the policies of these two presidents has been, the Clinton administration, which criticized Bush with a smokescreen based on the phrase "It's the economy stupid," intensified the war against hair almost immediately during an early-term Beverly Hills stylist appointment that ran a full forty-five minutes beyond its prescheduled termination. The excuse proffered for this abuse of both the American tolerance for government bloat and for the patience of the stylist's subsequent customers included a claim that the presidency required "decent attire." As we have seen, it is just the supposed demand for "decent attire" which has fueled the American propaganda machine with the bulk of excuses for deadly incursions into nations where expensive and often wasteful haircutting practices are not supported by the impoverished citizenry.

Though frequently touted as a policy of "cosmetological enlightenment," our actions in the Caribbean nations, as well as in Central America, have proven that American corporate desires to hawk such items as electric hair trimmers, disposable razors, shaving cream, electrolysis apparatus, and, inspired by President Reagan's insanely wasteful and problem-fraught SDI initiative, laser hair-removal surgical equipment, supersede all previous expenditures in this area. That U.S. corporate interests predominate is no secret, but that they manage to completely contradict and undercut the advertized intention of products like the "Gillette Mark III" - which seeks to ascribe a "manly attractiveness" to those without facial hair - is a truly noteworthy expansion of the American Corporate attack on "out of place" hair, an attack which has proceeded unaltered since the Potsdam Treaty and the 1975 Sasson Accords. In every case, the U.S. has defended its violations and security council vetoes of UN Declaration provisions on the basis of "personal stylistic self determination" which amounts to nothing more than a thinly disguised belief in its own facial superiority. The U.S. has has consistently defended its egregiously violent behavior in the international domain by claiming status as a "vogue state" whose rights include a fascist fashion hegemony and a nightmarish international suppression of follicular expression. The brutality covered up by this public relations coup could not be greater.

One example of U.S. covert cruelty suppressed with methods even the most totalitarian of our adversaries would marvel at involves a CNN story which was scheduled to air in October of 1998. The story, cut for unexplained "editorial" reasons, detailed the U.S. use of "Agent George," a fast-acting, toxic depilatory designed for air delivery by scientists at Harvard which U2 spy planes (and later the SR-71), spread copiously across the Chernobyl region of the Soviet Union beginning in the 1960s. The existence of Agent George has never been acknowledged, and a CIA cover story that blamed the infamous nuclear reactor mishap accounts officially for the stark photos of bald "radiation" victims in Russian and Ukrainian hospitals, but as usual, whenever flagrant abuses of the rights of hair are "explained" by the mainstream media, the truth is much more horrifying.

Indeed, American transgressions of the UN Declaration have gone far beyond such indirect acts as clipper sales. Direct U.S. intervention has taken place not only in the Soviet Union, but throughout the globe, from the Caribbean and Central and South America to such far flung "fashion sinkholes" as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Rwanda, and the Philippines, and always justified as "clean-up operations." And where direct U.S. attacks would not do, as revealed by FOI documents that the mainstream media (most notably the New York Times, which touts itself as a watchdog on U.S. "sartorial and hygienic abuses") completely neglected to mention, U.S. client states in Turkey, South Africa, and Chile have carried out this "cutting-edge promotion of world hygiene" at our insistence.

While this only begins to touch on the topic of global cosmetological subversion by the U.S. and her complicit and well subsidized "freedom loving" allies, it is worth emphasizing that as this century's historic and extreme destruction and mischaracterization of stubble has occurred, the U.S. has steadfastly pointed its finger at such nations as Jamaica and even at domestic civic regions like San Francisco's Haight Ashbury neighborhood as "bastions of the corrosion which unchecked cranial and facial hair may evoke." This strategy succeeded in misdirecting the attention of the easily duped network news media so well that the CIA actually found it necessary to invent a special covert corporate tax break to "encourage a token news anchor figure to grow a beard." As a result of this secret fiscal misappropriation, we can now watch 60 Minutes' Ed Bradley.

While the CIA has succeeded in throwing an obfuscatory crumb to an American public which longs to enjoy the same follicular freedom found in even the most barbaric Eastern European prison, the vast majority of televised faces, those of Ted Koppel, Morley Safer, Mike Wallace, Hugh Downs, Peter Jennings, Sam Donaldson, David Letterman, Jay Leno, and even Jessica Savitch, have been stripped entirely of that natural dignity and insulation which is, according to the UN Declaration, "every person's birthright." (And this does not come close to addressing the attack on bodily expression which has come most recently from private corporate initiatives like "Vanishing Point," a California corporation bent on the complete eradication of any trace of human hair.)

Had the UN known that such a development was forthcoming when it published the Declaration On The Rights Of Bodily Hair in 1962, a time which witnessed such stylistic abuses as the "Beehive" and "Pompadour," it would have redoubled efforts to force the U.S. to attend World Court sessions on the duties of nations, or indeed to force the U.S. out of its chair on the International Court of Justice.

But then as now, U.S. duplicity in its upper-lip liberty rhetoric, coupled with the support of a veritable parade of cut-rate barbers in client states, went almost completely unchallenged in the American news media.