It’s a bit peculiar over at the left-wing websites right now. Perhaps I should say “a bit more peculiar than usual.”
Visiting New York Magazine today, I found these titles among the top 10 “most viewed”:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
90 Percent of Teachers Say Trump’s Win Has Had a Negative Effect in Classrooms (A deeply silly headline, to say the least.)
Your Hate Only Makes Amanda Chantal Bacon Stronger (Not about what you may think, although of course “your hate” is always about what you probably think. Contains the deathless passage: “She’s a successful small-business owner, treats her body with respect, and most importantly sells $10 shots of bee pollen and hand-harvested resin made from primordial matter gathered from a Himalayan mountainside to white people in Silver Lake. That’s bossy as f**k.”)
My personal favorite is probably this one:
Time to Go Home, Michelle Obama Already Wore the Best Holiday Look of the Year
And yes, it’s a paean to that interesting pickled-kale-and-radicchio gown she wore to the Kennedy Center Honors gala. You’ve got to love the stalwart determination of the Obama faithful.
Maybe its a good thing @michelleobama 's designers vowed not to dress Melania – https://t.co/Lm15bRotR8
— 2nd_To_None (@2nd_To_None) December 7, 2016
But this next one runs a close second, and seems to powerfully evoke the post-Obama, not-Hillary moment, in what we might call a powerful and evocative way.
If you were wondering what Hillary groupies do when Trump wins, now you know. They change their hair. Big time.
For the past 20 years, Julianna Evans, the director of marketing for the Lumberyard, a contemporary performing-arts company based in New York City, has had the same flowing brown locks. Her stylist in her hometown of Washington, D.C., has been trimming her hair every 12 months for as long as she can remember, and always colors it the same medium-brown shade. Then came the November 8 election upset, and Evans fell into a downward spiral. “I cried for three days,” the Atlanta native, 45, recalls. “I felt like it was the worst thing, politically, that ever happened in my lifetime. It was catastrophic.” By Friday she noticed grays growing in, so she put on her big-girl panties and dragged herself to the drugstore. “Literally without thinking, I grabbed the Natural Black box by Garnier,” she says. “I was like, f** it! The election deadened my soul. I think I wanted to do something defiant to feel stronger.”
Stylists are reporting an unusual surge in business, as progressive women, so to speak, wash that man Trump right out of their hair.
Over at Georgetown Salon & Spa, one of the most exclusive salons in D.C., much-sought-after colorist and stylist Mariangela Moore has witnessed this “take control” movement daily for the past month. “One of my clients said, ‘Think of Melania Trump and go in the opposite direction,’” she says. “She said, ‘I don’t want to be that person people see as sexual, I want to be seen as strong.’” Another professional woman cut her hair into a flattop. One client got rid of the blonde highlights she maintained forever, “because she said she never wants to be seen as cheap.”
It’s certainly a window into what the political class has been doing with itself, there in the Eastern corridor between our our nation’s cultural and political capitals:
Julianna Evans likes the narrative she’s commanding, and says she’s keeping her goth look, though her stylist has added some more natural lowlights. “You have to live here to understand that we are immersed in politics every day,” the mother of two explains. “For many of us, with this election, it’s like your boyfriend dumped you in a really shocking way with no explanation and then moved in next door.”
As I mentioned before, when I see things like this, I see a sign lit up against a night sky with a message in 12-foot-high neon letters: “GOVERNMENT IS TOO BIG.” Who are these people, and why are they hovering around “the government” like it’s their boyfriend, and it matters to it what their hair looks like?
I point these things out because you may have missed them, and may not understand the lifestyle/performance-art gig “politics” is for so many of our friends on the left.
Our government has become a weird, weird thing. A federal government that busied itself with collecting tariffs and securing the borders would be too boring to bother with. You’d never care what signal it thought your hair was sending.
But now we’ve got a government so all-pervasive that it has women making defensive hair preparations, as totemic ceremonies against some confusing, occult effect the next president is supposed to have on their status in the culture. What is such a government? It sure isn’t what I’ve been thinking I was paying for, all these years.
