To a generation raised on barbershop trims and beauty salons (like my parents), punk hair is aberrant. It violates a univer sal law that only women have flamboyant hair, and only within certain limits, such as blond/black/brunette. It is, as my parents say, too "weird," as if that word explained everything about what was wrong with blue hair in a mohawk.
But it's weirdness, properly understood, that makes life worth living. Weirdness is the odd angle of vision, the exaggeration. Weirdness inhabits the limbo where the official and the moral meet but have nothing to say to one another. It's the taste of squeezed lime in the macho blandness of American beer. It's Talking Heads in the Muzak that coddles us everywhere. Weirdness is whatever people do to be eccentric, in the origins of that word: to be off the center.
What distinguishes weirdness from its estranged cousins -- slash-and-burn punk, on the one hand, and controlled yuppie dissipation on the other -- is it's gentle self-parody. Weirdness can't take itself seriously because it knows that once it does, it becomes official. (For "official" read: trend, fad, doctoral dissertation, useless.) It keeps itself from sobriety by chuckl ing at itself, by getting other people to chuckle along with it, to shake their heads in calm dismay, admit that a little streak of orange there, a judiciously-torn sweat shirt here doesn't mean the end of civilization. This is weird ness' politics: If we can laugh at ourselves, we can sabotage any tyranny.
To be sure, this is scant protection against the great god Homogenize stalking through Reagan Country, and the Top-Gun-itis that muscle equals morality. But it would be wrong to underesti mate the power of weirdness, at least in saving one's own spiritual arteries from the cholesterol of Republicanism and Pat Robertson. Let's bring it to a question: Why not a man or a woman wearing blue hair in a mohawk? Think about the question for a moment; it's not as stupid as it appears. Any debate over the answer shows that what an individual thinks right and proper about the universe is a matter of considerable prejudice and blindness. If we can accept the notion that blue hair is possible, and maybe even desirable, then it's probably true that we are wrong about a great many things we think are right, and that the world has more possibilities than we allow. A certain kind of freedom can begin here.
One of the few things Robert Frost said that I agree with is this: "A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity." Be civilized and pepper your lives with weirdness; love the burn of it, search out the spice.
Santa Claus At The Mall
Suck