Double Life – Hair politics

By Daniela Fubini*

There must be something political about hair. Something I cannot completely grasp and therefore lingers in my mind while I watch the news and the social media posts. Photo-shopped caricatures merging Donald John Trump and Silvio Bunga Bunga Berlusconi are already out there, I suppose with big nuisance to Mr. B, who would have loved to have any kind of hair, even the impossible cloud of yellowish emptiness sported by the Trump.

Many years ago, during my last spring in New York, I went to a very large party, organized by Dor Chadash, a network of Israeli and American young professionals, in honor of Yom Hatzmaut. At the door I started speaking with a nice and proudly bald guy wearing a white shirt, and I told my friends I wanted to talk with him again before the evening was over. They laughed at my face. I understood why only when we got really inside the hall. Half of the men were proudly bald and wearing a white shirt. Israelis. Now I live in Israel and I have daily proof that Israeli men can have hair, sometimes a lot of it. But when they don’t, they simply don’t. No big deal.

So now, when I watch the Trump (new expression, take note: “The Trump”, it’s a state of mind, more than anything else; a destructive, blunt, offensive, racist and sexist one), I am unable to listen. Maybe it’s for my own good, but my mind only wanders in and out the puffy cotton candy thing he has on his head. The opposite pole to our Mr. B’s solid shoe shine crust that walked with him for decades. Two sides of the same coin. We should invite both the hair-challenged leaders to Israel, and show them how men can be successful, powerful, manly and even credible, also without hair. A self-confidence tour. Only, let’s avoid any meeting with Bibi, another one with odd opinions about several issues, including the likely shape and colour of hair.

*Daniela Fubini (Twitter @d_fubini) lives and writes in Tel Aviv, where she arrived in 2008 from Turin via New York.