Musharraf: the unanswered question

Now that Musharraf’s gone it’s time to say the unsayable.

Did you ever see anyone wearing a more outrageous wig? You’d see him on television and it would be dictatorship blah blah war on terror blah blah Taliban blah ISI blah, blah, blah and I’m thinking what an incredibly stupidly, obvious wig. He’s running the place. If he can’t get a better wig, why doesn’t he make baldness compulsory? I couldn’t get past it. It was impenetrable.

And no-one mentioned it. Not one journalist. Not one so-called speaker of truth to power so much as said: hey, supreme commander, what the fuck have you got on your head? Not one chin stroker so much as alluded to the bonce bonsai.

You know, maybe that’s they key to the whole dictatorship thing. He kept an iron grip on the country precisely so that he could wear the dumbest wig in creation and no-one would utter a peep.

- You like my hair, President Bush.
- Errr. Yes, it’s, errrr…
- Luxuriant? Virile?
- Why, yes general. Virile is the word.

Yes, that’s it. Think of a wig stamping on a human face forever.

Comments

[Fellow Traveller]

No, his authority depended upon the visibility of the wig; without it he wouldn't have lasted. Its very artificiality enhanced its function as a symbol of his power, his stature ('man likes his symbols and he likes them clear'):

"In Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar, all the characters are wearing fringes. Some have them curly, some straggly, some tufted, some oily, all have them well combed, and the bald are not admitted, although there are plenty to be found in Roman history. Those who have little hair have not been let off for all that, and the hairdresser - the king-pin of the film - has still managed to produce one last lock which duly reaches the top of the forehead, one of those Roman foreheads, whose smallness has at all times indicated a specific mixture of self-righteousness, virtue and conquest.

What then is associated with these insistent fringes? Quite simply the label of Roman-ness. We therefore see here the mainspring of the Spectacle - the sign - operating in the open. The frontal lock overwhelms one with evidence, no one can doubt he is in Ancient Rome. And this certainty is permanent: the actors speak, act, torment themselves, debate 'questions of universal import', without losing, thanks to this little flag displayed on their foreheads, any of their historical plausibility. Their general representativeness can even expand in complete safety, cross the ocean and the centuries, and merge into the Yankee mugs of Hollywood extras: no matter, everyone is reassured, installed in the quiet certainty of a universe without duplicity, where Romans are Romans thanks to the most legible of signs: hair on the forehead."

-- The Romans in Films from Mythologies (1957) Roland Barthes

Musharraf becomes the modern equivalent of the most 'Roman of Romans' because of the wig, which permitted him to stand at the front with the leading world statesmen of our era.

Will we one day see an expose of the important role played by his hairdresser and wig-maker?

[Charlie Whitaker]

Not convinced:

http://gdb.rferl.org/2DA9CA21-C1B2-4347-8EA7-8C65D6856D09.jpg

[jamie]

No, that's a hell of a shadow under the widow's peak. I hold my position.

"A hairy man enslaved the state, a hairy man who was scant of hair."