January 5, 2005
Comb Over

A new year and a new Congress.  Though I have long agreed with the laissez faire philosophy of elected officials spending the bulk of their time at cocktail parties and fund raisers, activities that consume their waking hours to the point they have no time to get involved in misguided attempts to introduce legislation protecting us from ourselves, i.e. the ridiculous financial boilerplate mouthed by speed readers and tied to the end of snowmobile and car commercials by legislative fiat, it’s time for the newly convened 109^th Congress to gather their body politic and legislate into oblivion the ever present visual scarring of our world as we know it.  The time is at hand to make the “male comb over” a punishable offense. 

A huge segment of the over thirty population in our land, and I speak from very personal experience, is afflicted with “male-pattern baldness”.  Hey it happens in the best of families.  Yet many of the “follicley challenged” among us refuse to accept their fate and, as David Letterman suggests, “let their foreheads come out and play.” 

Far too many males waste way too much time each and every morning in front of the bathroom mirror vainly attempting to make the few do the work of many in guiding long strands of hair from the nether reaches of the cranium up and over the barren landscape comprising the top of their head in the false hope of hiding from the world their own personal “follicle fallout.”  A good portion of each morning’s ablutions are spent guiding those few, proud hairs into place where they’re double coated with a lacquer of hair spray.  With each solitary hair precisely placed with a precision that would fill a diamond cutter with envy our “comb over” goes out the door to face the world.  Where he’s greeted by an ever so slight gust of wind causing one of two events to occur.  Either the hairs are glued together so tightly the breeze causes them to lift en masse giving the appearance of a small stealth bomber rotating off a shiny runway or the gust quickly dis-assembles all of the morning’s hard work and leaves our “comb-over kid” with a noggin featuring what appears to be six rows of shucked corn.

The preponderance of “comb-overs” in our society leads one to surmise the average balding male is unable to detect how ridiculous he appears attempting to convince the world he’s  “fully follicled” by combing strands from somewhere in sideburn country over the top of the head.  “I still have hair” he continually assures himself.  But years go by until his forehead is so far back there’s no forehead left. 

So if one is going to legislate a law protecting the American male from himself at what point in hairstyles does a “part” deteriorate to a “comb-over”?  The conundrum legislators face is much like the problem presented former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart when attempting to regulate pornography. “I may not be able to define it,” said the judge,  “But I know it when I see it.”  It’s the same with comb-overs.  But, let us assume any hair brought over the top of the head from an anchor position somewhere south of an ear” qualifies as a “comb over”.  The same would be true of any hairs swept upward from below a shirt collar.  Also precluded by statute would be growing the eyebrows long and combing them straight back.