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Re: On Growing beards
On Wed, 20 Mar 1996, James Marshall Boswell wrote:
>
>
> 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,
I always interpreted it to mean that after a revolution over the
establishment (the older bearded ones) the revolutionaries usually start
acting like the old establishment (i.e. they grow their own breads).
Just like what happens every 2 years in the US congress, where the "outsiders"
become the "insiders" overnight.
Paul Carter: <carter@aix1.ucok.edu> University of Central Oklahoma
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