Peace Signs and David Beeson's Hair
Story time.
Lubbock, the city I call my hometown, is often hailed as one of the most conservative cities in the US. It's the largest dry city in the US (meaning no alcohol, but the climate is certainly dry as well). It has more churches per capita than just about anywhere outside Rome. At election time, a large number of Republican candidates typically run uncontested on the ticket.
As I was growing up, this conservatism often expressed itself in other ways as well, and the way which was most visible to me as a student were the myriad hyper-controlling school board policies.
Throughout my junior high years, the school board conducted an increasingly strict dress code crackdown. Initially shorts could be no shorter than 2 inches above the knee. When that became difficult to regulate, the rule was changed to top of the kneecap (it's a good thing Jams were a big fashion then, is all I have to say about our un-air-conditioned Texas schools).
Next target was earrings and long hair on boys. Males' hair was not to touch the shirt collar (ironic, considering the late 1960s-era portraits of some of the school board members in our school hallway), and male earrings were strictly verboten. These were the days of the heavy metal hair bands, remember, and I recall arriving at school one morning to see a former hard-edged headbanger reduced to a sobbing mess by his new brat-pack looking hairdo.
I began to wonder about one guy in particular, a rather witty thrash-metal fan named David Beeson, who sat next to me in homeroom class, who sported a head of rather impressive waist-length hair. I didn't mingle with that crowd much myself, but I thought David was a pretty interesting guy, and the thought of him having to shear off that much hair was pretty troubling.
Sure enough, next time homeroom class rolled around, David was nearly unrecognizable. His long blond curls had been replaced with a short cropped spiky hairdo, dyed jet black. It looked pretty hip, but still, at what cost?
"Oh my God," I said to him. "You actually did it."
"Eh," he answered laconically. "Whatcha gonna do, right?"
This marked the first skirmish in an escalating stream of battles over the appearance of Lubbock's youth.
Spuds Mackenzie shirts were outlawed because of their association with alcohol sales. Those Corona Extra "cerveza mas fina" shirts were right out as well.
Sleeveless shirts, also right out (nobody really missed these on guys, but their restriction from the girls as well was quite troubling to both sexes).
Cassette tapes and t-shirts of various bands and comedians were also banned from school premises.
"Non-traditional colours" for hair dyes also got cut.
Finally, when i was in grade 10 or so, there had been some kind of local scare (I have no idea whether it ever turned out to be justified or not) regarding Satanist cults. The school board paid some kind of alleged national expert on the topic to come present an evening lecture for any parents and teachers who were interested. As part of the lecture, he passed out a multi-page xeroxed handout of symbols and signs which had supposedly been associated with cult activities over the years.
Many of the symbols you'd expect to see were there:
the Sigil of Baphomet
several other varieties of pentagrams
various inverted crosses, including the Cross of Confusion
the 666 number of the beast
various other unsavoury symbols like swastikas and the like
. . . you get the idea. About a week after the lecture, when all of us had been dutifully given the handout in our homeroom classes, the superintendent of schools decided that one easy way to "do something about the problem" was to make any and all symbols from the list forbidden anywhere on school property. This included any representations of the symbols on drawings on book covers, designs on t-shirts, of course, and inclusion on jewelry and other charms.
You may say, "Okay, well, sure, it's kind of an extreme move, and was sure to piss off some Blue Oyster Cult fans, but otherwise what did it hurt, really?"
Well, the problem was that the superintendent either didn't read, didn't pay attention to, or at worst, was too ignorant to know the significance of other symbols on the list, which also included:
☥ the egyptian Ankh
卍 the non-inverted Buddhist swastika, described by the handout as "a broken cross, representing the downfall of Christianity"
☯ the Taoist Taijitu (also known as the Yin-Yang), described by the pamphlet simply as "a miscellaneous cult symbol"
☮ the CND symbol, better known as "the peace symbol," but described by the handout as "a Satanic broken cross"
...and perhaps most inflammatory of all, amongst all the pentagrams and pentacles, and various stars of other shapes and sizes, was this: ✡ — that's right, the Star of David. Satanic symbol par excellence, apparently.
Wow, we all said.
And wow, indeed. Many people took it to the streets. The next morning 19th Street was clogged with protesters both in front of my high school, and further down the street in front of the school board office.
The newspaper the morning after that bore a huge front page picture of one of my high school's most notorious punks, complete with re-established green-dyed mohawk, jumping in front of 19th street traffic with a tremendous snarling grimace on his face, and bearing a giant poster with the text "✡ HITLER BANNED THIS TOO!!!! ✡"
While it seemed like a bit of a victory at the moment, and the superintendent quickly repealed the so-called "Satanic Jews" ban (claiming that he'd never meant for his order to be interpreted that all the symbols were actually banned, but that the "handout was merely to be used as a guideline by teachers and administrators"), in other areas they became stricter than ever:
Dress code guidelines became increasingly draconian, including entirely outlawing all shorts (including capris), and a male hair regulation tightened up to read as follows (graciously preserved via the Lubbock ISD police officer dresscode, which retains verbiage very close to the early 90s student dress code):
A first nations student's family sat embroiled in court battles over the school's insistence that he cut his long hair to conform to the regulations. He lost and was expelled.
A local Christian private school (not part of the public school district, but certainly a sign of the times) expelled two Hindu students for refusing to convert to Christianity.
And dozens and dozens students continued to be disciplined on a weekly basis for the tiniest banned clothing and paraphernalia violations.
It was a dark time.
As I trudged through my day-to-day activities, keeping my contraband peace-sign keychain carefully hidden in the pocket of my jeans at all times (it was my own small token of rebellion), I was pretty despondent about how things were going. But there was one thing which kept me thinking that all was not lost, and even if this kind of policy somehow one day extended beyond our little ultra-conservative school system into the city, state, or nation at large, that under these kinds of circumstances there was still room for some individual expression:
I kept thinking back to a day in 1988 or so, a Friday, the week the initial long hair crackdown happened. After my last class, I'd grabbed my Trapper Keeper and stack of homework books and started the long sun-baked walk across the athletic field towards the spot where my mom always picked up me and my friend Mike to take us home.
Squinting in the sunlight I could just make out the silhouette of David Beeson in his new spiky hairdo, flanked on either side by his headbanging buddies and their girlfriends who still retained their hairsprayed bleached blonde bangs which reached halfway to heaven.
Around the time David reached the midpoint of the field, a funny thing happened: he reached up and grabbed the top of his head, yanked off a black spiky wig, and shook his head to let his ultra-long hair tumble down his back.
Throughout those junior high and high school years, and even now, when I watch some of the right-wing back-swinging going on down south, that image has always been a bit of a symbol to me: That no matter how hard they cracked down, what clothes they banned, what music they outlawed, and whom they expelled, somehow David Beeson, through only the tiniest, most calculated compromise, always kept his hair.
Sometimes heroes come in very strange packages, indeed.
Lubbock, the city I call my hometown, is often hailed as one of the most conservative cities in the US. It's the largest dry city in the US (meaning no alcohol, but the climate is certainly dry as well). It has more churches per capita than just about anywhere outside Rome. At election time, a large number of Republican candidates typically run uncontested on the ticket.
As I was growing up, this conservatism often expressed itself in other ways as well, and the way which was most visible to me as a student were the myriad hyper-controlling school board policies.
Throughout my junior high years, the school board conducted an increasingly strict dress code crackdown. Initially shorts could be no shorter than 2 inches above the knee. When that became difficult to regulate, the rule was changed to top of the kneecap (it's a good thing Jams were a big fashion then, is all I have to say about our un-air-conditioned Texas schools).
Next target was earrings and long hair on boys. Males' hair was not to touch the shirt collar (ironic, considering the late 1960s-era portraits of some of the school board members in our school hallway), and male earrings were strictly verboten. These were the days of the heavy metal hair bands, remember, and I recall arriving at school one morning to see a former hard-edged headbanger reduced to a sobbing mess by his new brat-pack looking hairdo.
I began to wonder about one guy in particular, a rather witty thrash-metal fan named David Beeson, who sat next to me in homeroom class, who sported a head of rather impressive waist-length hair. I didn't mingle with that crowd much myself, but I thought David was a pretty interesting guy, and the thought of him having to shear off that much hair was pretty troubling.
Sure enough, next time homeroom class rolled around, David was nearly unrecognizable. His long blond curls had been replaced with a short cropped spiky hairdo, dyed jet black. It looked pretty hip, but still, at what cost?
"Oh my God," I said to him. "You actually did it."
"Eh," he answered laconically. "Whatcha gonna do, right?"
This marked the first skirmish in an escalating stream of battles over the appearance of Lubbock's youth.
Spuds Mackenzie shirts were outlawed because of their association with alcohol sales. Those Corona Extra "cerveza mas fina" shirts were right out as well.
Sleeveless shirts, also right out (nobody really missed these on guys, but their restriction from the girls as well was quite troubling to both sexes).
Cassette tapes and t-shirts of various bands and comedians were also banned from school premises.
"Non-traditional colours" for hair dyes also got cut.
Finally, when i was in grade 10 or so, there had been some kind of local scare (I have no idea whether it ever turned out to be justified or not) regarding Satanist cults. The school board paid some kind of alleged national expert on the topic to come present an evening lecture for any parents and teachers who were interested. As part of the lecture, he passed out a multi-page xeroxed handout of symbols and signs which had supposedly been associated with cult activities over the years.
Many of the symbols you'd expect to see were there:
. . . you get the idea. About a week after the lecture, when all of us had been dutifully given the handout in our homeroom classes, the superintendent of schools decided that one easy way to "do something about the problem" was to make any and all symbols from the list forbidden anywhere on school property. This included any representations of the symbols on drawings on book covers, designs on t-shirts, of course, and inclusion on jewelry and other charms.
You may say, "Okay, well, sure, it's kind of an extreme move, and was sure to piss off some Blue Oyster Cult fans, but otherwise what did it hurt, really?"
Well, the problem was that the superintendent either didn't read, didn't pay attention to, or at worst, was too ignorant to know the significance of other symbols on the list, which also included:
☥ the egyptian Ankh
卍 the non-inverted Buddhist swastika, described by the handout as "a broken cross, representing the downfall of Christianity"
☯ the Taoist Taijitu (also known as the Yin-Yang), described by the pamphlet simply as "a miscellaneous cult symbol"
☮ the CND symbol, better known as "the peace symbol," but described by the handout as "a Satanic broken cross"
...and perhaps most inflammatory of all, amongst all the pentagrams and pentacles, and various stars of other shapes and sizes, was this: ✡ — that's right, the Star of David. Satanic symbol par excellence, apparently.
Wow, we all said.
And wow, indeed. Many people took it to the streets. The next morning 19th Street was clogged with protesters both in front of my high school, and further down the street in front of the school board office.
The newspaper the morning after that bore a huge front page picture of one of my high school's most notorious punks, complete with re-established green-dyed mohawk, jumping in front of 19th street traffic with a tremendous snarling grimace on his face, and bearing a giant poster with the text "✡ HITLER BANNED THIS TOO!!!! ✡"
While it seemed like a bit of a victory at the moment, and the superintendent quickly repealed the so-called "Satanic Jews" ban (claiming that he'd never meant for his order to be interpreted that all the symbols were actually banned, but that the "handout was merely to be used as a guideline by teachers and administrators"), in other areas they became stricter than ever:
Boys shall keep their hair properly trimmed. The hair shall be at least moderately tapered, shall not extend below the top of the shirt collar nor cover any portion of the ear.
Sideburns shall not extend below the bottom of the ear nor be wider at the bottom than at the top and shall be neatly trimmed.
Mustaches shall be neatly trimmed and shall not extend below or beyond the corners of the mouth nor over the defined line of the upper lip.
It was a dark time.
As I trudged through my day-to-day activities, keeping my contraband peace-sign keychain carefully hidden in the pocket of my jeans at all times (it was my own small token of rebellion), I was pretty despondent about how things were going. But there was one thing which kept me thinking that all was not lost, and even if this kind of policy somehow one day extended beyond our little ultra-conservative school system into the city, state, or nation at large, that under these kinds of circumstances there was still room for some individual expression:
I kept thinking back to a day in 1988 or so, a Friday, the week the initial long hair crackdown happened. After my last class, I'd grabbed my Trapper Keeper and stack of homework books and started the long sun-baked walk across the athletic field towards the spot where my mom always picked up me and my friend Mike to take us home.
Squinting in the sunlight I could just make out the silhouette of David Beeson in his new spiky hairdo, flanked on either side by his headbanging buddies and their girlfriends who still retained their hairsprayed bleached blonde bangs which reached halfway to heaven.
Around the time David reached the midpoint of the field, a funny thing happened: he reached up and grabbed the top of his head, yanked off a black spiky wig, and shook his head to let his ultra-long hair tumble down his back.
Throughout those junior high and high school years, and even now, when I watch some of the right-wing back-swinging going on down south, that image has always been a bit of a symbol to me: That no matter how hard they cracked down, what clothes they banned, what music they outlawed, and whom they expelled, somehow David Beeson, through only the tiniest, most calculated compromise, always kept his hair.
Sometimes heroes come in very strange packages, indeed.