The Manifesto of Whiskerino

Manifesto Exhibition Series (3)

Original Source

One of the lovely things about manifestos is that by no means are all of them serious. That is not to say that their construction and publication are not serious--only that someone has undertaken to write seriously about a topic that might be considered not so seriously.

Case in point: The Manifesto of Whiskerino. It is quite a delightful, short, and to the point piece, about an issue about which I, as a bearded man, do feel partial. It begins by a good, strong, simple line depicting the problem, as well as a bit of evidence to follow it up. Then, it moves onward to find that this problem is the exception from the rule, rather than a justified state of affairs. After this, QED. We should all have beards, and we resolve to, in, one might note, all capital letters.

This literary "shouting" is quite illustrative of the goal of many manifestos, if not necessarily a common tactic.

The last sentence in particular is choice, and may well be an over-all motivator for the entire movement.

The website also contains numerous pictures of believers in the cause, with evidence to their commitment apparent.

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We are alienated from our own facial hair.

Society tells us that full beards are unacceptable. Businessmen, politicians, bankers, and the like are all clean shaven; all demonstrating the standards that middle class society expects us to maintain.

In other words, these are all examples of "the man" keeping down nascent beards everywhere. These are the people that alienate us from our masculinity, forcing us to shave and adopt public personas which might not reflect our own true inner animal.

But it wasn't always so.

Beards used to be glorified as signs of virility and manliness. A man that couldn't grow a strong beard was privately ridiculed. Some societies would only allow males to grow beards once they were married, thus denoting a sign of stature and respect in the community. To be shaved was to be emasculated.

In early America, men that could not grow facial hair were demeaned less advanced and uncivilized. Now we have come full circle where our own society promotes this emasculated version of maleness. Where to be a man is to be clean-shaved; to be respectable is not to have a beard.

Let us return to our roots! Let us return to true masculinity! Let us cry out with one voice:

"I WILL HAVE A BEARD!! I WILL BE A MAN!! I WILL NOT CONFORM TO YOUR RULES!"

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Here on Welcome to the Interdome, we're trying something new: a curated blog exhibition. There are many blogs that treat themselves as an ongoing exhibition of any number of topics. Welcome to the Interdome largely follows the interests of its author, wherever that may lead. But, for the next series of twenty-or-so posts (in hopefully quick succession) we're going to showcase some various manifestos found around the Internet. They are not comprehensive, not even representative of the full-breath of material that exists. But, they each represent something interesting about the form, and will be accompanied by curated comments.

None of the manifestos posted are posted with explicit permission. They are all found published on the web, free for any to read, and links will be provided to the original location. I am showing them out of the original context here, to first analyze the content. Then, one may proceed to the original site to look at other interesting things like host site, format, font, pictures, and other available materials.

We invite you to read, and to comment if you like. If you want to or have written your own manifesto, send it along! If it's interesting/funny/different we'll through it up there.

If at any time you want to see the full exhibit, click the tag "Manifestos Exhibition", below. That should take you to all the relevant exhibits, that all have the same tag. The preamble to the exhibition can be found here.

Enjoy!