Saturday, June 17, 2006
Bad Hair Day * The President's Turd Blossom
Saturday's Snippets
Another delightful column in the Post by Alaka Basu of Cornell University. It took me back to the India I knew. It was not only girls, we boys too applied copious amounts of oil to our hair. Talk about a greasy look ! But the fact is I know of Indian women and men working and living in the United States who still follow the routine. Some traditions die hard. "But the lessons the nuns taught were clearly poorly absorbed. For even a simple term such as "bad hair," something on which a clear, literal definition was surely possible, meant different things to us and to those who controlled us. To our mothers, bad hair was hair that was cut so short that, when it was worn loose down the back, one could not sit on it. Bad hair was what resulted when we refused to let Granny massage her home-extracted hibiscus oil into our scalps twice a week. (Here we were one with the nuns, who also gagged on the smell of that oil.) Bad hair was hair that fell in bangs on the forehead, and caused our eyelashes to flutter unduly through them. Bad hair was hair that smelled of some capitalist-conspiracy-inspired shampoo instead of the sandalwood incense in which live coals were bathed for us to dry our freshly washed hair over."
- Soon all the bad hair girls formed a bold and confident group around Sister Aquinas. She agreed that it was not immoral to want to look nice (we often wondered if she ever regretted her own clean-shaven head). But she also told us that it was immoral not to discover all the other joys that the world had to offer, joys that did not spring from male admirers alone. So she took us for long walks along the beach to savor the sand under our toes and the sunset above our heads; she introduced us to "How Green Was My Valley" and "The Scarlet Pimpernel." She assured us that it was important to know our native literature and our own gods as well as we were being taught to know William Golding and Jesus Christ."
Karl Rove Back in the Saddle
Did champagne corks pop in the White House? We'll never know but President Bush expressed his pleasure. Karl Rove, the master political strategist is back to serve the president. He has his work cut out for him. The political scenario has changed; not all of Rove's plans paid off. Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz in the Post:"Rove gambled that Bush could bend Congress and a skeptical public to his will. He was wrong."When you look at the history of this second term, the Social Security proposal and selling of it . . . was a big tactical mistake," said a former White House official, who would discuss internal operations only under the condition of anonymity. "The problem was the opportunity cost: When Bush was busy selling Social Security ineffectively, the numbers on Iraq were dropping precipitously."
