"The toothbrush moustache (also called Hitler moustache, Charlie Chaplin moustache, 1/3 moustache, philtrum moustache, the postage stamp, or soul (mou)stache)..."

"... is a moustache, shaved at the edges, except for three to five centimeters above the centre of the lip. The sides of the moustache are vertical rather than tapered."

I found this Wikipedia article — "Toothbrush moustache" — last night after asserting that Hitler adopted the Hilter mustache to emulate Charlie Chaplin. The topic came up in connection with the array of photographs — Obama/Hitler/Stalin — that we're talking about in the previous post. Meade didn't believe me, and my belief — even if it's wrong — is at least common enough that I could easily do the research. (A couple weeks ago, the roles were reversed: Meade asserted a misconception common enough to have a Snopes article declaring it false.)

So, according to Wikipedia, the toothbrush mustache "originally became popular in America in the late 19th century."

It was a neat, uniform, low-maintenance style that echoed the standardization and uniformity brought on by industrialization, in contrast to the more flamboyant moustaches typical of the 19th century such as the Imperial, Walrus, Handlebar, Horseshoe, Pencil and Fantastico moustaches.

Brought on by industrialization? Is that some stray unsupported — Marxist? — opinion that needs editing out of Wikipedia? There is a citation. It's to a 2007 Vanity Fair article by Rich Cohen called "Becoming Adolf" ("Hitler's Toothbrush mustache is one of the most powerful symbols of the last century, an inch of hair that represents infinite evil. The author had his reasons for deciding to wear one.") All Cohen says is that the toothbrush mustache was "a bit of modern efficiency," replacing the old style mustache, which paralleled the way "the old, monarchical world... was about to be crushed by the rising tide of assembly-line America."

There's a big sidetrack here about whether the taste for the modern — clean lines, low ornamentation — corresponds to a loss of individuality inherent in assembly line production. And we've got to get back to the question at hand: whether Hitler adopted the mustache to look like Chaplin. But I must take this sidetrack long enough to say that in the 1940 movie "The Great Dictator," when Chaplin exploits his resemblance to Hitler by playing a Hitler character and a Jewish man who looks like him, he concludes with a big speech that is mostly about overcoming, not fascism, but machines.

[M]achinery that gives abundance has left us in want.... More than machinery we need humanity.... Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines....

(I've read Chaplin's Autobiography, and it is full of fretting about modern machines. (And in the movie "Modern Times," the Chaplin character goes nuts doing assembly line work and then gets caught up inside a big machine.))

Now, back to the question: Did Hitler try to look like Chaplin? I'm sticking with the Rich Cohen article, because the writing is better than Wikipedia's generic style.

Ron Rosenbaum, perhaps the only historian to give the mustache its proper due, fixes its appearance with confidence. "It was Chaplin's first, before Hitler's," he writes in an essay from The Secret Parts of Fortune. "Chaplin adopted a little black crepe blot beneath the nose for his Mack Sennett silent comedies after 1915, Hitler didn't adopt his until late 1919...."

But, Cohen says, there's some conflicting material. Someone who served with Hitler in WWI wrote an essay saying he cut a bigger mustache down so it would fit under the gas mask. And then there's Hitler's sister-in-law Bridget.

Bridget Hitler was Irish and lived in Liverpool, where, according to the memoir, the young Adolf spent a lost winter. 

I'm reading this out loud and Meade shouts "The Fifth Beatle!" — which suggests a fantastico idea for a photoshop using this iconic early Beatles pic, adding Hitler, and dabbing the Fab Four with little black smudges across the philtrum. I continue with the dubious tale of Bridget Hitler:

Bridget (or whoever) says she often bickered with her brother-in-law. Because he was disagreeable, but mostly because she could not stand his unruly 'stache. In one of the great inadvertent summaries of historical character, she writes that in this, as in everything, he went too far.

The year in question was 1912–13. So we're currently observing the 100th anniversary of the mustache, if Bridget Hitler — not the gas mask or Chaplin — inspired distinctive shaving.  But we do know that...

[Hitler] was wearing the Toothbrush at the first Nazi meetings, when there were just a few people in a room full of empty chairs. One day, an early financial supporter of the Nazi Party advised Hitler to grow out his mustache. He did this delicately but firmly, in the manner of a man trying to protect an investment. The mustache made the Nazi look freakish. Hitler was advised to grow it at least "to the end of the lips." Hitler was a vain man, and you can almost feel him bristle. Here's what Hitler said: "If it is not the fashion now, it will be later because I wear it."

The exact opposite became true: It can never be in fashion, because he wore it. You can't even indulge a love of Chaplin, because as Rich Cohen puts is: "If you dress like Chaplin, you run the risk of being mistaken for Hitler, as, if you dress like Evel Knievel, as I do when it rains, you run the risk of being mistaken for Elvis."

Ron Rosenbaum argues that the presence of Chaplin's 'stache on Hitler's face encouraged Western leaders to underestimate the Führer. "Chaplin's mustache became a lens through which to look at Hitler," he writes. "A glass in which Hitler became merely Chaplinesque: a figure to be mocked more than feared, a comic villain whose pretensions would collapse of his own disproportionate weight like the Little Tramp collapsing on his cane. Someone to be ridiculed rather than resisted."

So, it can't be ascertained whether Hitler first shaved his mustache down because of Chaplin, but the resemblance to Chaplin certainly mattered. I think it's more likely that Hitler was not trying to look like Chaplin — even if it's true that Hitler — like most people — loved Chaplin. First: Why would a political leader choose to look like a clown? Even if it helped him to have some people not take him seriously, he needed to be taken seriously to acquire power. Second: The toothbrush mustache was a big fashion in Germany early enough that the New York Times published an item in 1907: "'Toothbrush' Mustache/German Women Resent Its Usurpation of the 'Kaiserbart.'"

"Man is naturally very ugly," [wrote one German woman.] "The only natural adornment he ever had was his mustache, and that he is now ruthlessly mutilating. Instead of the peaceful hirsute ornament of the past he is marring his face with a lot of bristles."

Peaceful! An interesting association. To bristle is — I'm quoting the OED — "to display temper or indignation, to 'show fight.'" Imagine blaming the mustache. But that is how some people like to think. It's not the human being, but the inanimate thing that is the source of evil. Cohen lampoons that kind of thinking:

... I had seen Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, interviewed by Bill O'Reilly, who, citing Stalin and Hitler, said he thought atheists, because of their lack of restraining faith, were more susceptible to evil. To which Dawkins (in essence) replied: both Stalin and Hitler wore mustaches — do we therefore think the mustache was the cause of their behavior? I experienced this as an epiphany: By Jove! I said to myself. It was the mustache!

"It's no accident that religions around the world have used unison singing and chanting, because unison singing and chanting is itself a mechanism for high fidelity."

Says Daniel Dennett, in a discussion with Richard Dawkins. Both atheists, they're talking about the way religion evolves.

I was interested in the quote beyond that context, because I've had to listen to so much political singing and chanting here in Wisconsin over the past year or so. Political chanting troubles me. See, e.g.:

"Occupy Wall Street, Occupy State Street, Occupy Everything and Never Give It Back!"

"Wisconsin 'Singalong' Protesters Confront Workers and Chant About Boycotting Their Employer."

"Do you really want to use rote chanting to train kids to protest against authority?"

"We know there must be thousands of clergy out there who have secretly abandoned their faith but have nowhere to turn."

“Now they do have a place to meet, a true sanctuary, a congregation of those of us who have replaced faith and dogma with reason and human well-being.”

Said Dan Barker, a former preacher, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, about the Clergy Project. Richard Dawkins — the atheism proselytizer — is also involved in this project. He writes:

"If a farmer tires of the outdoor life and wants to become an accountant or a teacher or a shopkeeper, he faces difficulties, to be sure. He must learn new skills, raise money, move to another area perhaps. But he doesn't risk losing all his friends, being cast out by his family, being ostracized by his whole community...

"Clergy who lose their faith suffer double jeopardy. It's as though they lose their job and their marriage and their children on the same day."

A farmer who "tires of the outdoor life" is not a fraud, is not deceiving the people he cares about telling the truth to. It's funny that Dawkins didn't put that problem first. That says something about Dawkins, no?

Anyway, it really is an awful problem, to believe you're called into the ministry and then to feel that's nothing at all. And yet, isn't that part of training for the ministry, struggling with "the dark night of the soul" and so forth?

Rebecca Watson says she had "a weird time on Bloggingheads" with me.

I enjoyed the conversation and tried to keep it interesting and enjoyable, and I had the impression that she was enjoying talking too. We went 10 minutes over an hour, and afterwards we talked, and she said she enjoyed it. So it's weird for me to read this.

Things didn’t go as I planned, though. While Althouse agreed with me that Dawkins was out of line and my sentiments were fair, she kept saying things that required me to unpack a lot of stuff before moving on. 

Wow! That sounds like good conversation to me. I would love it if someone would talk to me in a way that invited me to go places where I hadn't planned.

For instance, she agreed that Dawkins was smug, but aren’t all atheists smug and that’s kind of the problem? 

Actually, the discussion of the smugness of atheists came long before there was anything about Dawkins. And I never said Dawkins was smug. I was interested in talking about the way Dawkins turned something relatively minor and light into an viral internet event. It was, in fact, Rebecca who introduced the idea that atheists are smug. It was in response to my question why atheists congregate:



See? I just laughed when she said it. A little later, when she's talking about wanting to teach the convention atheists about their sexism, I asked a somewhat elaborate question that includes a reference to the smugness she had mentioned. That was in the context of saying that maybe atheists feel particularly advanced intellectually and might imagine that they can be a little edgy on the subject of gender without deserving (like lesser folk) to be thought of as sexist:



Her response, as you can hear in that clip is to switch to attacking religious people as more smug. As she says at her blog post:

So I had to back up and explain that no, atheists are not all smug just because they think they know the truth. Religious people, I tried to explain, think they know the truth and further many think that others who don’t know the truth are going to burn in Hell when they die. I would have gone on to explain how these same people believe this entire Universe was created especially for them, and what’s more smug than that, but Althouse kept interrupting me.

Okay, I do cut in, but I think I do it gently, trying to bring her back to the question, which wasn't who's smugger, atheists or religious folk, but whether possibly atheists feel less constrained in talking about gender matters. I could have been much more forceful in pointing out that she changed the subject and ran away from looking deeply into the minds of the atheists, instead preferring to drag in a convenient punching bag: those terrible religionists who think other people are going to hell. But I thought I was serving up pretty rich opportunities for her to show her stuff as an excellent spontaneous thinker and speaker (which is what I'm always trying to find for Bloggingheads).

This reminds me. I forgot to ask her a question I wanted to ask about the atheist in the elevator — the man who asked her if she'd like to come to his room for coffee. I wanted to know what she said to him at the time. We know that later, she slammed him in a blog post. And now, here I am, slammed in a blog post of hers days after the encounter. So I'm kind of empathizing with the elevator guy.

Email me, elevator guy!

"Richard Dawkins Gets into a Comments War with Feminists."

Drama!

This last comment finally pulled [Rebecca] Watson in. "This weekend when I read Dawkins' comments, I was, briefly, without hope. I had already seen the future of this movement dismissing these concerns, and now I was seeing the present do the same." She urges readers to protest Dawkins's work, declaring that "this person who I always admired for his intelligence and compassion does not care about my experience as an atheist woman and therefore will no longer be rewarded with my money, my praise, or my attention. I will no longer recommend his books to others, buy them as presents, or buy them for my own library," she writes.

And now is it more or less likely that you believe in God?

Let's look at arch-atheist Richard Dawkins and charming young actress Emma Watson, side by side:

[Image removed because it was screwing around with some browsers. You can still find it over at Unreality.]

Reassess your belief in God.
	It's more likely that there's a God.
	Less likely.
	My faith is ironclad. It remains the same no matter what.
	I respond to evidence, and this isn't.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: What is the extent of the Photoshopping? An emailer hints:



The odd thing is, I look like Bjork! Thanks for making me reflect upon my unelfinness.

"His maleness resounds from every monomaniacal sentence," said Germaine Greer about Malcolm Gladwell (Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, etc.).

"There is no answer to everything, and only a deluded male would spend his life trying to find it." Oh, so she's dissing men when she asks why women don't write large!

Women, she said, are too sensible to try to write such broad-sweep theses. "They are more interested in understanding than explaining, in describing rather than accounting for."

In praise of detail work. Which Greer is not doing.

Do fantasy stories undermine rationality in children?

Richard Dawkins might want you kids to stop reading Harry Potter, fairy tales, and the like.

"I think it is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don't know"...

"I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious [e]ffect on rationality, I'm not sure. Perhaps it's something for research."

And he doesn't think much of the "Judeo-Christian myth".

He went on: "I plan to look at mythical accounts of various things and also the scientific account of the same thing. And the mythical account that I look at will be several different myths, of which the Judeo-Christian one will just be one of many.

"And the scientific one will be substantiated, but appeal to children to think for themselves; to look at the evidence. Always look at the evidence."

The funny thing is, talking like that, Dawkins sounds like a villainous character in a children's book. But he's quite serious, especially about children and religion:

"Do not ever call a child a Muslim child or a Christian child – that is a form of child abuse because a young child is too young to know what its views are about the cosmos or morality.

"It is evil to describe a child as a Muslim child or a Christian child. I think labelling children is child abuse and I think there is a very heavy issue, for example, about teaching about hell and torturing their minds with hell.

"It's a form of child abuse, even worse than physical child abuse. I wouldn't want to teach a young child, a terrifyingly young child, about hell when he dies, as it's as bad as many forms of physical abuse."

Why are those terrible anti-religionists so contemptuous?

Damon Linker, at TNR, offers some unsolicited advice to the highly successful anti-religionists Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Bill Maher. He signals a little cluelessness right away:

[T]o his credit, Maher hilariously exposes astonishing levels of ignorance and parochialism among the earnestly pious Americans he encounters in his travels around the country. (Maher's brief visits to other parts of the world are less amusing because the believers he interviews in Europe and the Middle East aren't as boorish.)

Aw, come on. I haven't seen the movie, but really... American believers are more boorish? I'll bet the folks in the Middle East weren't prodded with the same sort of questions and edited with the same vicious hostility. I've seen enough Maher on TV to know he finds comedy in being very cruel to Americans. It's a comic stance that he's built his career on. Attacking foreigners can be hilarious, but it's not in style and it's not Maher's thing.

Yet Maher has loftier ambitions than laughs. He wants to save the world from the idiocy he unearths in the American heartland, and he believes the best way to fulfill this aim is to mercilessly attack religion and all those who adhere to it. And that's why the film, like so much written by critics of religion in recent years, must ultimately be judged a failure.

It's only a failure if the purpose is what you say: to save people from religion. Maybe it's to sell books and movie tickets, to make those in-the-know laugh and feel superior, and to propagate the idea that the hip, smart people are atheists.

Like [Harris, Dawkins, and Hitchens], Maher harbors so much contempt for religion that he would rather score easy points than explore the messy reality of humanity's complicated--often sordid, but sometimes noble--religious impulses and experiences. That's why Maher takes on simpletons and extremists instead of seeking out theologians and other thoughtful believers to explain and defend their beliefs. That's also why moderate believers simply don't exist in Maher's America, which aside from the 16 percent of the country* that explicitly rejects institutional religion, seems to be populated only by fundamentalists awaiting (and perhaps even itching to hasten) the apocalypse. How else to explain the absurdly paranoid peroration with which he concludes the film? Over ominous music and images of mushroom clouds, Maher informs us that religious belief is a "neurological disorder" that must be eradicated for the sake of human survival. "Grow up or die," he warns, as if those were our only options.

Only contempt explains it? In any case, why can't a comedian or a polemicist deal in contempt?

It's not the only approach, but it's an approach. (And I don't think "contempt" is at all the right word for Dawkins, whose "God Delusion" I've read. It fits Hitchens -- and I've read "God Is Not Great." I haven't read the Harris book, but I don't think it's contemptuous.)

Instead of hurling insults and indiscriminate denunciations at religion-in-general, Maher and his fellow atheists could do far more good by encouraging the growth and flourishing of open-minded belief--the kind of belief that lives in productive tension with modern science and cultural pluralism.

Comedians as do-gooders? What good will that do?