Cutting Remarks

The Obama campaign has made much of an ancient report that while in prep school, Mitt Romney decrinited a fellow student in 1965 who, in an act of non-conformity, bleached is long hair blond and allowed it to fall over one eye.  The teenaged Romney decided this was just plain wrong.  In 1965, long hair was considered an offense against decency, so Romney and his high school pals tackled the student and apparently without physically injuring him, lopped off the libertine locks.

Rumor has it that the student was also gay, but apparently that had no bearing on Romney’s actions; the length, color and style of the boy’s hair was enough.  He’s since apologized for the boyish prank, not uncommon in the Sixties.  Many a schoolboy did far worse in those days.  At any rate, the other student has long gone to wherever non-conformists go once they shuffle off their mortal excrescence.

About the same time in 1965, a certain 6 year-old was weary of the way her mother gushed over her younger brother’s golden curls.  Those golden excrescences simply had to go.  So, she had her younger brother drag the household high-chair out onto the patio, tied him into it, then invited the neighborhood children over, at a price of 5 cents apiece, to witness a haircutting.

Fortuitously, the mother came out onto the patio just in time.  The neighborhood children scattered, the high-chair prisoner was freed, and the offender sentenced to a week in her room.  She also had to go to every neighborhood home and apologize.  But that was in 1965, when parents knew how to discipline their children.

When her older brother was about 13, just a few years later, he decided to let his hair grow long, in keeping with the current fashion.  Mother and father would have none of it.  When he refused to go with his father to the barbershop, they told him they’d cut his hair themselves.  Seeing the scissors come out, he tried to flee, but the mother and father pursued him up and down the stairs of the house, out around the yard, back into the lower portion of the house and up the lower stairs to the kitchen.  There, the mother was able to tackle him from behind, while the father sat on him.  Thus pinioned, the mother cut off the offending excrescences.  But that was back in the Sixties, when parents knew how to discipline their children.

Being a good conservative, I refused to don the latest fashion, blue jeans.  For this, and other offenses (I also hated rock music and refused to draw the peace sign in art class), I was mocked, ridiculed and tormented by my mostly Liberalized classmates.  The order of the day was supposed to be non-conformity.  But what the Liberals meant was conformity to their non-conformity.  Individuals weren’t supposed to decide for themselves what they would wear.  That was the 1960s, when parents younger than mine were learning that they didn’t necessarily have to discipline their children.  Thank you, Dr. Spock.

All this tells us that candidate Romney is pretty handy with a pair of scissors.  If he could do that to a Liberal kid flaunting Conservative values, imagine what he could do to the excrescences in our overblown Federal budget?  Make no mistake; this kid’s sexual preference had nothing to do with the prank.  It was all about the excess and if Romney will brook no excess, then he’s the president for us.  Romney will be the Barber of D.C.