The truth and mullets

Hypothesis, H1:  The truth is a mullet.

Hypothesis, H2:  The mullet is the truth of all haircuts.

First, no matter how good or bad the truth is, it’ll always grow out, though this follows a distinct trajectory depending on how bad, good, or great the haircut (or truth) was in the first place.  The first few weeks of hair growth can turn a really bad haircut into a thing of beauty.  If the haircut was good in the first place, it becomes truly great during these first few weeks, as the early growth adds that “natural” look to a solid foundation.

By contrast, a really great haircut has nowhere to go but down:  it’s too good to be true (or too true to be good?).  Consider this a lesson in how to learn about truth from your hair.  Starting out at the top is never a good thing.  Adding insult to injury, you never realize how great that haircut really was until you see how bad it looks with just a couple weeks’ growth.

Null hypothesis, H0: The “truly great haircut” can endure.

Second, there are two undeniable truths about mullets:

(a)  No matter how unpopular the mullet may be in any given place or time, there will be at all times some community, somewhere, in which the mullet rules.

(b)  For this reason, the mullet is indeed the universal haircut, even though it will never be universally dominant in all places at one time.

This is the essence of the truth:  like the mullet or a proposition by Michel Foucault, the truth is everywhere and nowhere at all.  The only other thing one could wish for is a picture of Foucault with a mullet.

Third, the mullet passes muster as a universal truth.  I can still recall a group of kids in Brazil I knew about 15 years ago, playing soccer one afternoon.  They were poor kids, gang kids, people I worked with.  The star player was the spitting image, in miniature, of Richard Dean Anderson, complete with a picture-perfect MacGyver mullet – and of course all the boys called him MacGyver.

Finding: The mullet is a transcultural, transhistorical, and (potentially) post-national metanarrative that can reconcile Michel Foucault and Allan Bloom in less than 500 words.

Fourth and for further research, the mullet, like the truth, sets you free.  Ask anyone who has ever had a one.  When your hair is just a little bit longer in the back than in the front, anything is possible.  People will listen to you, fear you, love you, and revere you, like Billy Ray Cyrus in 1992.  But that’s the thing with mullets and truths and the freedom they create.

Mulletude, like truth and fame and some other, more ubiquitous pleasures, seems to last about fifteen minutes at a time.