Posted on 01/09/2005 4:37:00 AM PST by skullocrushah
N Korea wages war on long hair
Men's hairstyles reflect their 'ideological spirit' North Korea has launched an intensive media assault on its latest arch enemy - the wrong haircut.
A campaign exhorting men to get a proper short-back-and-sides has been aired by state-run Pyongyang television.
The series is entitled Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle.
While the campaign has been carried out primarily on television, reports have appeared in North Korean press and radio, urging tidy hairstyles and proper attire.
It is the strongest media campaign against men's sloppy appearances mounted in the reclusive and impoverished Communist state in recent years.
The propaganda drive on grooming standards has gone a stage further than previous attempts. This time television identifies specific individuals deemed too shoddy.
Pyongyang television started the campaign last autumn with a five-part series in its regular TV Common Sense programme.
Stressing hygiene and health, it showed various state-approved short hairstyles including the "flat-top crew cut," "middle hairstyle," "low hairstyle," and "high hairstyle" - variations from one to five centimetres in length.
The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.
It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.
Men should get a haircut every 15 days, it recommended.
Named and shamed
A second, and unprecedented, TV series this winter showed hidden-camera style video of "long-haired" men in various locations throughout Pyongyang.
In a break with North Korean TV's usual approach, the programme gave their names and addresses, and challenged the fashion victims directly over their appearance.
The North Korean media normally reserves the reporting of names of its citizens to exemplary individuals who show high communist virtues.
The series was shot at various public locations - on the street, at a sports stadium, a barbershop, a bus stop, a restaurant, a department store.
Some unruly-haired pedestrians or customers captured on camera "meanly ran away", the programme said, while others made excuses about being too busy to get a trim.
Television newsreels such as "Employees of Pyongyang Textile Plant keep their hairstyle and dressing neat and tidy" and "Hairdressers at Ch'anggwangwo'n manage men's hair according to the demands of the military-first era" have also aired.
What not to wear
State radio programmes such as "Dressing in accordance with our people's emotion and taste" link clothes and appearance with the wearer's "ideological and mental state".
People who wear other's style of dress and live in other's style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin
Nodong Sinmun newspaper
Tidy attire "is important in repelling the enemies' manoeuvres to infiltrate corrupt capitalist ideas and lifestyle and establishing the socialist lifestyle of the military-first era," the radio says.
Newspapers too highlight the civic advantages of short hair and smart shoes.
Hair is a "very important issue that shows the people's cultural standards and mental and moral state", argues Minju Choson, a government daily.
"No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one's personality will be downgraded."
For party papers such as Nodong Sinmun, the struggle against foreign and anti-communist influence is being fought out in the arena of personal appearance.
"People who wear other's style of dress and live in other's style will become fools and that nation will come to ruin," it says.
The programme allowed men aged over 50 seven centimetres of upper hair to cover balding.Comrade Comb-over!
Hey, complain all you want. At least I got a cool new tagline out of the deal.
snip...It stressed the "negative effects" of long hair on "human intelligence development", noting that long hair "consumes a great deal of nutrition" and could thus rob the brain of energy.
Socialists and Mad Red Queens the world over are infamous for their "my personal feelings should be the law' reasoning. In NK the Red Queen has decided she doesn't like long hair so long hair becomes guilty of causing brain starvation. This is as sane as some of the pablum regurgitated by Americas' Red Queens. Stuff like.......SUVs & Bush are guilty of causing nonexistant global warming; cigarette smoking is a major social problem so cigarettes should be banned, but the epidemic of STDs is somehow or another not connected to promiscuous sex but to a lack of yet more abortions and condoms wearing.
If you took all of the lefty cranks and crackpots and big-government dreamers and professional bureaucrats in this country and shipped them off and gave them their own little country to run, this is what it would end up being.
They wouldn't be all torqued about haircuts per se, it'd be something else equally inane.
If this were actually true it would go a long, long way towards explaining liberals.
I think they should all get Mohawks...
Their government probably figured out a way to grind the clippings into food.
The NK's only acceptable social policy.
Hair drains brain power?
Then what does Breck Girl's prissied-up hair do? Open a black hole in the center of the sun?
In other N.Korean news, the Uni-brow will be outlawed. Possesion of one could be punished with the penalty of death.
Comrades, let us tirelessly pluck nose hairs for the Revolution!
.....& make Kool-Aid drinkin', wearin' tie-dyed t-shirts, sandal wearin', & pot smokin' illegal too, while you're at it!
(A bit of sarcasm here, folks!)
Stylish Devil
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