11 months ago
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
last of the mohicans
last night marta shaved off my mohawk, the one that she shaved in seven days ago, on the 4th of july (see happy independence day). the main thing i learned from my week with a mohawk comes from the comparison with my month with a mustache. unlike guys with mustaches, there seems to be no friendly bond between guys with mohawks. guys with mohawks are just as likely to sneer at each other as they are at anyone else in the general population. the friendly nod that the mustached give each other invites newcomers into their fold. mohawkers have no such friendly fold. let me be clear that i'm not suggesting that the mohawked are a bad group. i did enjoy my week as one of them. i'm only suggesting that they need to work on group cohesiveness.
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I think the distinction goes to the very heart of the type of hair accessory itself. While the once hard-edge bravado a Mohawk carried may have softened some in recent years, traditionally Mohawks are a way of saying "F-you, I don't need to have a normal haircut like the rest of you squares." Although you might see a person with a Mohawk gathered with other ner'-do-wells, rapscallions and their ilk, the group typically won't contain more than one Mohawk, or at least not a majority. The typical group is a Mohawk, a spiked, a shaved and maybe a Euro-do as well. While the Mohawk is a piece of one's membership pass into the black combat boot wearing, eyebrow pierced, sneer society, it just was not meant to stand alone.
The mustache on the other hand has, at least from what I can scrape together from popular culture over the last 30 years, has always been associated with tight-knit groups of like-minded uniformed working-men that subject themselves to personal physical risk on a daily basis(i.e.: firemen, policemen, soldiers, PI's and the like). All of the aforementioned occupations require a stiff upper-lip, and therefore their members can benefit from a little softening. It also, as you point out, serves as an advertisement of their status and can help to establish an at-first-sight bond between members of the club. Unlike Mohawks, the mustache alone is sufficient as an identifier. In fact, it was meant to serve as the sole identifier at the end of the day when they take off their uniforms and go home. In a sense, the mustache is the actual uniform.
I couldn't have said it better myself, not even close in fact.
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