Hair Color Antagonisms
A spectre is haunting Meghan... the spectre of Gray Hair. All the Powers of old Meghan have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: tweezers and hands, comb and brush, bungee and hair clip, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the hair dye in opposition that has not been decried as Gray Hair by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Gray Hair, against the more advanced hair products, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Gray Hair is already acknowledged by all brown hairs to be itself a Power.
II. It is high time that Gray Hairs should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Gray Hair with a Manifesto of the head of hair itself.
To this end, Gray Hairs of various scalp locations have assembled around my right ear, and sketched the following Manifesto, published in the English language.
I. Gray Hair and Brown Hair
The history of all hitherto human heads is the history of this class struggle. White and black, gray and blonde, brown and white, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in hair dying or in the eventual takeover of the white hair at large.... My head of hair as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Gray Hair and brown.
II. Gray Hair and Brown Hair
In what relation do the Gray Hairs stand to the brown hairs as a whole?
The Gray Hairs do not form a separate party opposed to other graying parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the head of hair as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the gray hair movement.
In a sense, the theory of the Gray Hair may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of Brown Hair.
III. Gray Hair and White Hair Literature
A. Reactionary Measures
I could overpower the Gray Hair with a combination of chemicals so potent as to virtually eliminate their presence. What I might upbraid the Gray Hair with is not so much that it creates a new look, but that it creates a revolutionary new look.
B. Conservative, or Bourgeois, Measures
A part of the brown hair is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of a brown head of hair. The brown hair desires the existing state of the scalp minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a brown mass without a proletariat gray mass.
C. Critical-Utopian Measures
The founders of these color systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements, in the prevailing scalp pattern. But the Gray Hair, yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a head of hair without any historical initiative or any independent political movement. Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of other forms of aging, the present hair color situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions of the emancipation of the Gray Hair. I mean, can you even see it?
IV. Position of the Gray Hair in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties
The Gray Hair fights for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the rest of my hair; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of future movement. But they never cease, for a single instant, to instill into the scalp the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between Gray Hair and brown, in order that I may straightway use, as so many weapons are available against the Gray Hair, that the fight against the brown hair may immediately begin.
In short, the Gray Hair everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing brown order of things. The Gray Hair openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing scalp conditions. Let the brown hair tremble at at Gray Hair revolution. My head has nothing to lose but its chains. It has a world to win.
GRAY HAIR ON ALL REGIONS OF MY HEAD, UNITE!
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