HUMOR: Grooming
Drew had to switch barbers. Alas, gone are the days of a great clip. In its place? Jameson, the Minnesota flag, and a Somali star.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
I used to get my haircut at The Jackknife Barber in downtown Fredericksburg because they sponsored a volleyball team that I played for, and I wanted to support our sponsor. The running joke in the league was that our team, with the exception of the ‘college puke’ as I was fondly called, appeared to be the team least likely to be sponsored by a barbershop because most of the players had heavy beards and hair that had not been cut since the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.
My haircuts were typically uneventful beyond trying to find parking on Amelia Street, but I do remember the owner talking about how good The Jayhawks were as a rock band. He was correct, they are good.
The Jackknife Barber has been closed for quite some time so now I go to a nondescript barber shop in a Spotsylvania strip mall, but I learn far more there beyond the fact that “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” is a great song.
At the barbershop a few months ago, I learned that a close relative of the inventor of Jameson’s whiskey was a cannibal. More recently I learned that the adoption of the new Minnesota state flag was a signal to Somali immigrants that the North Star state is open for them stealing jobs from hardworking Americans and not ever having to pay taxes or open daycare centers. I was duly impressed that some of the barbers and some of the patrons were familiar with both the Minnesota and Somali flags as well as a piece of Irish history that had eluded me thus far in life.
I am of Irish descent, so I found the Jameson story especially intriguing and not one that I had encountered during a long-ago trip to Ireland where most of my time was spent between castles and pubs though I did not consume any Jameson’s because I’ve found that I tend to break out in handcuffs when I drink Irish whiskey.
Surprisingly, the story about Jameson and cannibalism has only a passing resemblance to an actual moment in history. The patron in the chair next to me was so excited about Jameson and cannibalism that when he heard that a relative of the founder of the whiskey used to eat people, he joyfully announced to the shop: “That’s why I drink Jameson’s!” (I’d like to believe that his utterance was clouded by exuberance in that moment rather than any desire to eat his fellow man since there is a Subway sandwich shop right next door, and he could get a 6-inch sub lunch special for $6.99.)
The Jameson story has become an odd bit of urban legend that appears to come up for air on social media newsfeeds every few years for reasons that can only indicate algorithms get lazy from time to time as well. The actual story is far more layered than my fellow customer would probably want to do a shot over.
It is alleged that one of Jameson’s grandsons, the Scottish naturalist James Sligo Jameson, went on an expedition in Africa and that during the expedition he wanted to witness cannibalism. He traded six handkerchiefs for a young girl and then gave her to a native tribe who hacked her to pieces and ate her as the grandson sketched the scene for what he hoped would be a later series of watercolors.
The whiff of cannibalism was not generally received as good for the whiskey brand in late 19th Century Ireland. There was some doubt as to whether or not it really happened and the grandson maintained he thought it was a tragic misunderstanding and that he was buying the girl’s freedom. The full truth never came to light because the grandson contracted a fever during the expedition and died a short time later. The naturalist has three birds named for him including the Jameson’s antpecker, which is a songbird found mainly in Central Africa. Knowing about the bird would surely make my fellow barbershop patron reconsider his choice of whiskey for fear of becoming gay if he was found drinking from a family lineage that included a songbird with ‘pecker’ in the name.
One theme that appears to run through my barbershop at a volume that would seem to indicate all are welcome here as long as you voted like we did or, even better, didn’t bother to vote, is the history of the Dark Continent. Both the whiskey myth and Minnesota flag are grounded in a ready knowledge of African culture which one might not expect along the Route 3 commercial corridor.
In 2024, Minnesota adopted a new state flag because, at least publicly, they felt the previous flag was too intricate to be seen from a distance and contained some questionable imagery involving a Native American that could be construed as a reminder that while settling this great land of ours we had to kill a ton of darker-skinned people who already lived here. The decision to change the state flag predated the recent DEI cleansing of government archives and culture, but certainly the Trump Administration would have approved of a flag with no reference points to past genocides.
The new Minnesota flag is rather simple and plain and contains an eight-pointed North Star on a field of dark blue with a lighter blue to its right. The blues are separated by a border that is angled to look like an outline of the state. There is no mention in any of the articles I read of the star being a VACANCY sign to Somali immigrants, but surely the semiologists at my local barber shop know better.
The prevailing conspiracy theory at the barbershop is that the flag of Somalia also contains a star on a blue field. Of course, it does not matter that the Somali star is the same one used in the advertisements for the musical “Hamilton” (except without Lin Manuel Miranda standing as the top point of the star) or the Dallas Cowboy’s emblem. It’s also the same five-pointed star used on every American flag since the days of Betsy Ross. It’s important to note that the Somalia flag has a five-pointed star and Minnesota has an eight-sided star. These are different. Just like you don’t want to use a number 2 clipper when the customer asks for a number 7 for their haircut. If Somali immigrants are really looking for a welcome mat based upon the use of five-sided white stars on a blue field they should be headed to Papua New Guinea or the Solomon Islands.
Many readers might suggest that I need to find a new barbershop. Maybe one with a quartet. But until my most recent haircut I had no idea what the flag of Minnesota looked like or the flag of Somalia. Before that, I had no idea that an heir to the Jameson whiskey empire might have been the inspiration for Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” which contains a passage that I should have quoted to my self-aware fellow customers at the barbershop.
Droll thing life is — that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself — that comes too late — a crop of inextinguishable regrets.”
One of my inextinguishable regrets is that the Jackknife Barber is closed.
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Brilliant take on the strange ecosystem of barbershop conversation. The Jameson cannibalism bit and Minnesota flag conspiracty is perfect absurdism. I've found similar dynamics in my old neighborhood barber where every haircut came with unsolicted geopolitics lectures. The juxtaposition of routine grooming and wild cultural mythology is what makes these spaces so weirdly memorable.