I’m wearing a beard these days, and I’m not alone. Maybe its a figment of my imagination, or simply recognition that I am now part of a large, hirsute fraternity, but i’m suddenly noticing beards popping up on guys all over. A-list celebrities like George Clooney, Adrian Brody, Bradd Pitt and Tobey McGuire sporting them. Hell, Celebrity blog TMZ has a whole feature devoted to celeb beards (though we’re a bit disappointed that they had to pad it with the likes of Nick Nolte). The bigger phenomenon, though, is on the streets, where thousands of Joe The Plumbers have sprouted them, too. This is all anecdotal, of course, but I looked around me in line at the local CVS and noted that 100% of the men standing about me were wearing them. True, true, we’re still a minority of the faces out there, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the longer our national malaise drags on, the scruffier our collective mug is going to get. If 2008 was the year of the mustache, I feel pretty confident that 10% unemployment, political grid lock and all around angst about our future will make 2010 the year of the ZZ-Top style chin to kneecap beard.
There’s good precedence for this –folks started noting (and coining) “recession beards” (now an official word in the Urban Dictionary) right around the time Bear Stearns and Lehman went belly up — that noticeable stubble that sprouts on the chins of the newly unemployed. There’s something that makes intuitive sense — beards signify masculinity, maturity and strength as we stare into the face of a raging economic upheaval. Frankly, I grew mine to keep my face warm during long, winter runs. But its not a stretch to see that recession weary American men might long for whatever primal insulation we can muster — jogging or not.
