Re: On Growing beards

[James Marshall Boswell <jboswel@emory.edu>]

On Wed, 20 Mar 1996 Brian.Cady@turner.com wrote:

>      I've always wondered what the phrase "and their beards have all grown 
>      longer overnight" in "Won't Get Fooled Again" meant.  About a year ago 
>      I discovered a smilar phrase in a George Orwell article.  He discusses 
>      British Communist Party members who became anti-communists after the 
>      Hitler-Stalin Pact and said that they "grew their beards."  I would 
>      assume that the phrase means to radically change one's political 
>      beliefs.

That's sounds dead right to me.  I always thought the line referred to the
hippies or the longhairs or whatever and their connection to leftist
politics.  Townshend seems to be saying, "We grew our hair longer
(overnight!) and thought we were changing things, but the new boss is the
same as the old boss."  The "overnight" idea is the key: the shift in 
thinking was too quick, too facile.  The Orwell gloss only reinforces this
reading, I think: beards as symbols of political ideas, political ideas
regarded as fashion (this latter idea being on old metaphor: see Thomas
Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus").  Townshend reprises this idea ten years
later, it seems to me, with the lines,

We are marching as to war
We won't be obscure no more
But we're really fighting for our uniform, our uniform

In both cases, it is his irony, snide and knowing, that I love.  I'm a 
graduate student in the humanities right now (though not for long!), and 
nowhere on the planet right now do dogmatic and ill-conceived (though on 
the whole generally well-meaning) political ideas get a louder and more 
enthusiastic hearing.  The bears get longer or shorter, but nothing 
changes, not really.

Marshall