Bad Dads We Love: Hair pulling and the hooscow

pulling_hair_outOkay, let’s be honest—I’m going bald and I’m none too happy about it. I mean, what kind of sick fucking cosmic joke would cover my entire body with hair but not my head? What exactly did I do to deserve that? Is it some sort of punishment for being Jewish?

Perhaps that’s why I reacted so strongly to this article, which I found on Strollerderby (the mother of all parenting blogs—blah, blah, blah), about a father in Chicago who took his children to jail (all right, the police station) for pulling his hair while driving.

Now according to the blog post, the father was just “trying to teach his children a lesson.”

Perhaps. Or maybe he was just trying to see that justice was served. Who knows? But if there is one lesson I would like JP (who would have no idea what I was talking about if I brought it up) to take from this entire sordid episode it would be this bit of witty doggerel from the immortal Samuel Goodman Hoffenstein:

Babies haven’t any hair:
Old men’s heads are just as bare;
From the cradle to the grave
Lies a haircut and a shave.

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About Theodore

Theodore Ross is an editor of Harper’s Magazine. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, Saveur, Tin House, the Mississippi Review, and (of course), the Vietnam News. He grew up in New York City by way of Gulfport, MS, and as a teen played the evil Nazi, Toht, in Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. He lives with his son, J.P. in Brooklyn, and is currently working on a book about Crypto-Jews.

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