...um, hair tomorrow.

One of the more grotesque things to come out of the continuing BP Gulf oil catastrophe was the hair-for-oil meme.  Bubbling up to address impotence in the face of environmental catastrophe, the media hyped it as the "human interest" aspect of the story, trivializing both the environmental impact, and the response at one fell swoop.  I mean, please: a bunch of pantyhose stuffed with human hair is the best soution to the worst oil disaster in America's history you can come up with? 

This is just the type of zany action aimed at empowering the little people that takes the focus off the true enormity of the task at hand.  The shear desperation (sorry, couldn't resist) of this personal act further obscures the real practical steps we could each take to lessen our dependence on oil, maybe even demand our representatives fix a regulatory process that is very, very broken. 

Of course, there may be something more primitive at work here.  Buddhist, Hindu, and many Christian monks shave their heads — it's called tonsuring — as a sign of renunciation. Muslims shave their heads for the Hajj. Some orthodox Jewish women shave their heads on the eve of their weddings. 

But perhaps the most appropriate historical analogy would be with ancient Greece, where the heads of slaves were shorn. 

We can only hope that the fact that BP has rejected this largely symbolic gesture (after the Coast Guard warned that "widespread deployment of the 'hair boom' could exacerbate the debris problem" — I mean, can you imagine the cost of a million gallons of Apivita Propoline Balancing Shampoo to deal with all that oily hair?) might possibly lead to much less symbolic measures in the future.