Eyebrows and hair, the key to the White House?

Ron Paul.

A friend of mine posted about fashion in politics on her blog, Applying Aesthetics, and I would like to address a similar issue. In less than a month, two articles have come up in my Google Reader from the NY Times regarding the appearances of the GOP candidates. Unlike the Applying Aesthetics post, both articles were about the men. In her post, Meghana discusses how women are prone to more scrutiny when it comes to how they dress and present themselves, but I think men are not immune to this scrutiny, especially in politics.

The first article that came up was about Ron Paul's eyebrows. Basically Ron Paul used fake eyebrows and in the hot studio lights of the presidential debate at Dartmouth, and the adhesive melted causing his fake eyebrow slipped creating the awkward appearance you can see to your right. A campaign spokesperson blamed Paul's allergies and denied that Ron Paul used fake eyebrows. I believe that was the best explanation, because everyone knows that allergies cause abrnomal growth of your eyebrows. What I am really curious about though is why Paul felt that he needed bushier eyebrows? This goes back to an earlier post I did about the advantages of appearance in elections. There must be data out there to support that voters favor candidates with fuller brows.

Mitt Romney.

The second article that I stumbled upon had to do with Mitt Romney's hair. The article describes how Romney's hair has come to represent him, "many [see] in his thick locks everything they love and loathe about the Republican candidate for the White House. (Commanding, reassuring, presidential, crow fans; too stiff, too slick, too perfect, complain critics)", claims the article. I always seem to underestimate the power of appearances. Literally Mitt Romney's hair could either be the key to the White House, or his demise. I thought back to the 2008 presidential election when Mike Huckabee took a crack at Romney by saying, "I want to be a president who reminds you of the guy you work with, not the guy who laid you off". This comment killed him. His image became one of a slick, greedy business man and not a trustworthy leader. None of these critiques center around actions or ideology, but rather appearances.

An Illustration of Military Spending.

This is a really striking graphic that illustrates our military expenditures that I found on the Bold Faith Type blog:


From: MilitaryEducation.org

This graphic really puts things into perspective and makes me question what our priorities are as a nation.

Catholics, Muslims, and American History

These images were first shown to me in a presentation by a University of Chicago professor, Alex Barna, regarding historical stereotypes and their relation to the current negative Islamic stereotypes. What struck me about the two images was that they were expressing the same negative stereotype using the same symbolism, but they were created roughly 100 years apart and address two totally different groups.

The first image depicts the Statue of Liberty with a Catholic clergyman as lady liberty and he stands on a bed of skulls. The second image depicts the Statue of Liberty shrouded in a burqa. Both warn of the impending invasion and take over of American values by a certain religious group. Having grown up in Chicago where almost all my neighbors are Catholic, anti-Catholicism in the United States is completely foreign to me, but there was a time in our history when Catholicism was seen as a threat, some argued we couldn't let Catholics into the government otherwise the Pope and Rome would eventually take control of the United States. This situation is eerily similar to the current movements in 13 states to ban the use of Sharia (Islamic law) in American courts. This article is somewhat biased, but it echoes my views. Fears about Sharia overtaking the American judicial system are completely unfounded. Sharia has many different interpretations and we can rest assured that no one will be sentenced to death by stoning for committing adultery in the United States, just as they are not in many Muslim countries.

I think it helps to think about our Islamophobia in the context of the anti-Catholicism that used to be rampant in the United States. A lot of our fear and misconceptions come for a general ignorance about Islam, but having much more exposure to Catholicism, it seems absurd to me that people were ever afraid of Catholic invasion. The Pope has yet take control of the United States and I'm sure he does not plan on it. It is harder to dismiss Catholics as all a bunch of fundamentalist crazies because we know more about them. Now if we take a step back, we see that history is repeating itself, but this time people are screaming about a Muslim invasion. In this blog post by Americans for an Informed Democracy, they do a fantastic job of discussing a variety of factors that have contributed to anti-Muslim sentiment as well as a brief history of it. It cites media, politicians, and the $40 million efforts of seven anti-Islam organizations as some of the major causes for our misunderstanding of the faith and its follwers.

We seem to always have a scapegoat. What we as a society claim are their faults don't change much, and neither do the threats they pose. We merely put a new outfit on the Statue of Liberty and warn our fellow Americans of the new impending invasion.