Howard Fineman’s Hair
by Joan Arnold
In these troubled, dynamic times, my husband Jim and I spend our evenings in the thrall of MSNBC. No more of Walter Cronkite’s trim, fatherly report to punctuate the evening. Now we have the night-long cascade of clips, news and opinion mocking those we hate and apprising us in detail of everything we fear. The talking heads talk, and our evening is covered.
Howard Fineman, as news junkies know, is a regular in Newsweek and on our nightly Keith-a-thon that, when desperate, can be viewed twice of an evening. Because we see Howard daily, we can track the progress of the silver roots that, day by day, are claiming their manifest destiny on his head. As we have closely tracked the youthification of Michael Bechloss – the receding hairline rescued by those cautious plugs, dazzling teeth and suspect tan – so can we study the sage-ification of Howard.
Before he braved the march of time with the brown we know well – the same dull brown we have seen on so many middle-aged heads, we assume that the flat brown relieves the wearer of the merciless daily evidence, the mirror reflection shouting that, unlike Benjamin Button, there’s no going back.
I find this nightly progress of gray refreshing. As a student of human movement and function, I find the vitality of that growth reassuring, its veracity refreshing, a chance to see the sun both rise and set on a single pate.
“A woman could never do that on TV,” said I to my couch mate. There is no woman I can think of in public life who would bear on her own head its true color. Between the facial surgery and insistence on the hues of youth framing and accentuating the pallor of age, watching commentators or political leaders, I always wonder: Would it be so devastating to see Nancy Pelosi or Dianne Feinstein’s real face and hair? Even on a sitcom like Everybody Loves Raymond, the men are dressed for home or work, the women for presentation – bejeweled and disguised for infantile America so we can avert our eyes from the inevitable: the earth surely will reclaim us. So what’s the big deal? The terrification of mortality can be soothed by a little cut ‘n color.
Howard is claiming the rights of his gender to be, in this liberated age, real. We can watch as the flat brown helmet surrenders to the march of sterling, with the variety, the subtlety, the shades of gray like the clarion call of truth. I feel the shining soul of Howard beaming through his silvery locks. Soon the false skin will have been shed. How will he look when, in a mere few days, those shrinking brown tips are gone? Will we miss them? Will we yearn for our chance to witness this intimate process on national TV?
Booms always mask many cases of embezzlement, said John Kenneth Galbraith in The Great Crash, which come to light during the bust. Like the cover ripped from Madoff, like the truth about Guantanamo, we have an ongoing metaphor for the ripping away of the cover of delusion to reveal the timeless reality beneath. We have the rare privilege to watch the slow emergence the slow, steady progress in Howard Fineman’s hair. The skin brightens, the false self dissipates, and we can all proceed from that deluding mud brown to reality’s complex, distinguished silvery gray. Howard, I salute you.
Howard -- Before
Howard -- After
Tags: Politics
