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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
GAT d@ -p+ c++(++++) l++ u++ e+++ m+ s-/- n-@ h--- f+ g+ w+ t++@ r- y?