For those of you who scoff at the importance of good hair in politics, witness Stephen Harper who began his political career extremely hair challenged and much has been writ about the state of the Prime Ministerial hair. Stephen Harper himself is so concerned about the appearance of his hair he was the first PM to have a personal stylist-slash-psychic adviser paid for by Canadian taxpayers. The amount of time and hair product required to create Harper’s helmet hairdo must be staggering.
The media is obsessed with not only with hair but also the facial hair of politicians, splashing endless of ink at Jack Layton’s mustache and Tom-Thomas Mulcair’s beard. Now they are fixated on the lustrous locks of Justin Trudeau. Among the many indignities Mr. Trudeau has had to suffer, perhaps the worst is the obsessive hair crush of Ezra Levant, Sun TV’s most reptilian bingo caller.
Clearly hair matters in politics as it does in real life. But what else matters? What kind of special skill does it take to endure a life of good hair with people forever fawning or criticizing as if they were the owners of the good hair themselves?
Patience.
Despite years of practice being in the public eye, Stephen Harper has never found the grace to be patient or good-natured about excessive media scrutiny. He goes to great lengths to keep the media at a safe distance, behind a fence both figuratively and literally. Only the most loyal of prop people are allowed into the inner circle to stand behind Harper during photo ops. Despite all his carefully constructed controls, he still can’t hide his feelings when he’s losing it. First the irritated little smile, then the voice rising, the eyes with their steely cold fish stare and finally that exasperated tone and accompanying brush-off.
Justin Trudeau on the other hand, with only a few exceptions of late, seems to have an almost superhuman ability to remain unfazed by nearly everything. Nothing much bothers him, not even crazy Conservative commentators want to stroke his hair or journalists who keep shoving microphones and cameras in his face asking the same redundant questions over and over and over. “Are you gonna run? Are you gonna run? Are you gonna run?” It’s like the children in the back seat nagging, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” The impulse to swat someone in a situation like that must be nearly overwhelming.
So consider the lesson of the good hair to be this simple: it’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it. No matter how hard Stephen Harper works on his hair, he’ll always be an autocratic hall monitor with a short fuse. Harper’s good hair is just an illusion. He’s still the same nasty, narrow-minded policy plagiarist he was with bad hair and all the hair spray in the world will never change that.
