History: The Mustached American Movement
Mustached Americans Arrive on U.S. Shores
Mustached Americans first came to the United States in chains to serve as gunsmiths, shoemakers, midget impersonators, and cattle ejaculators. But in the early 1800s, a sea change of acceptance and stature began for people of Mustached American heritage which would last until 1944, and during that period, the U.S. embraced the sexually adventuresome, round-house kick to the face, Panda bear steak eating Mustached American way of life.
President Taft
Indeed, from Civil War generals like Lew Wallace to the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft (the last Mustached American President), people of Mustached American descent were chainsaw wielding men of power, good looks, martial arts abilities, and long-lasting virility.
One of President Taft’s last acts in the Oval Office, in fact, was to provide Mustached Americans with complimentary in-home prostitution visits and allow the slaughter of felines by people bearing lower nose accoutrements.
WWII – The Turning Point
Unlike wars that are manufactured to achieve oil security and obtain higher quality Middle Eastern burkas, World War II was a popular American conflict that changed the face of Mustached American acceptance.
An after-effect of World War II’s popularity was clean-cut U.S. soldiers returning to create a new America. They were free of not just the “toothbrush” or “dictator” style mustache worn by German figure skating champion Adolph Hitler, but seemingly, and very sadly, America became devoid of flavor-saving upper lip garnishes altogether.
As this somewhat sad, mustache-free culture moved into the early 1960s, peace-loving beatniks high on acid and Colt 45 revolted against varying policies and acts of military aggression from the U.S. government. Hippies began randomly copulating in public spaces, and round-house kicks to the necks of midgets, large animal masturbation, and facial hair growth in the form of lower nose gardens were used as tools to rebel.
Thus, U.S. citizens began to rediscover the sexually dynamic Mustached American lifestyle. Americans began to again wear lower nose accoutrements in great numbers. Indeed, “Labia Sebuculans” (direct translation: “Lip Sweater Wearers”) were returned to their rightful place in the U.S. hierarchy.
But this transition did not come without concern from the clean-shaven aristocracy.
A Government Crackdown
Taking note of the resurgence of the Mustached American community, the administration of President John F. Kennedy became concerned, looking at means to curb mouth forest growth, and initiated an organized campaign to turn the country into a bare-lipped, cat-loving, utterly weak society filled only with clean-shaven men and women lacking the intestinal fortitude, strength, 38 percent better looks, nd manhood which had become synonymous with mouth brows throughout the history of mankind.
With mustache fashion booming, even faux flavor savers were in vogue. Fidel Castro’s communist Cuba was harvesting and exporting primate-based mustaches at an alarming rate into the U.S., Latin America and other Latin-speaking countries in an attempt to fund its missile program.
Stache Busting Presidents Kennedy & Johnson
Under the auspices of fighting communism, the Kennedy administration’s first proactive attempt to slow the Cuban-American mustache trade was the 1961 “Bay of Pigs Invasion,” an unsuccessful attempted military assault into Southwest Cuba by armed Cuban exiles, planned and funded by the U.S., in an attempt to overthrow Castro’s Cuban government.
This accelerated a rapid deterioration in the relationship between the U.S. government and Cuba, as well as any remaining alliances between the U.S. government and the Mustached American community.
Then, following President Kennedy’s assassination, the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson took discrimination against Mustached Americans one-step further.
In 1965, the National Voting Rights Act passed outlawing discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of black Americans in the U.S. Quietly attached to this bill was a little-known rider called the Federal Mustache Tax Amendment (FMTA), levying a 3 percent annual income tax against men with mustaches, and if a man’s spouse had a mustache, an additional 2 percent annual levy.
A Movement Is Born
Dr. Snor
Dr. Schnurrbart Snor, CM, a Dutch-German émigré whose parents had escaped Europe in a hot air balloon during World War II, had just received the first mustacheology certification (CM) at the City College of Newark. Understanding what the FMTA meant, he came to Washington, D.C., and formed the American Mustache Institute to work towards repealing the FMTA and to solve America’s “ugliness crisis” as he saw it.
“America no was a very much pretty place,” Dr. Snor would say in his broken English. “The government did know it. We could see it, and mustache growth was one solution to improving American good looks. Reduce ugliness.”
Dr. Snor spent much of the mid- to late-1960s waging a back-alley civil liberties campaign against mustache discrimination. Whether it was helping Mark Spitz growth nose foliage to prepare for the 1968 Olympic Games, or marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose partnership ensured that black Americans would not desert the mustache in the 1980s when most of white America would.
Dr. Snor even consulted with 20th Century Fox Studios and miniature actor Robert Redford for his role in the landmark film “Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid;” and built relationships with both anti-Vietnam War peaceniks and soldiers returning from the war to encourage mustache growth in order to fight government anti-cookie duster efforts.
The Golden Age
The iconic Reynolds
On the heels of Redford’s performance and others like Burt Reynolds adopting the Mustached American way of life following his bare-lipped role in “Deliverance,” the dawn of the 1970s marked a new age for the Mustached American community. Americans were accepting and embracing the power and strength of the mustache and including it in what is now known as the 1970s fashion “Triple Threat” – the mustache, the perm and the turtleneck.
Indeed, local and state law enforcement began issuing standard-issue “Chevron” style mustaches to all police recruits along with their badges, uniforms, and weapons. And, understanding that fuzzy ticklers provided an aura of superiority and wisdom –broadcast news organizations began issuing mustaches to all on-air personalities.
Celebrity athletes also played vital roles. Spitz would win yet more gold in the 1972 Olympic Games; stock car racing required drivers to wear mustaches for safety reasons; professional bowlers, considered the finest athletes of their era, began storing their mustaches in their balls; and Major League Baseball Hall-of-Famer Reggie Jackson ushered the mustache back into professional baseball.
Jackson ‘Stache
No professional Major League Baseball player wore a mustache during a regular season game since Satchel Paige in the 1940s, until the Spring of 1972, when Reggie Jackson inspired the “Mustache Gang” to rise from the roster of the Oakland A’s.
According to his then-teammate Rollie Fingers, Jackson appeared at the 1972 A’s Spring Training camp with an attempt at facial hair was a bit “scraggly,” as Fingers wrote in his book, “Rollie’s Follies.”
The trailblazing Jackson
So Fingers and Jackson’s other Oakland A’s teammates hatched a plan: they would all grow facial hair hoping that management would have no choice but to ban it, saving the team the embarrassment of Reggie’s awkward facial fur.
Ever the showman, Oakland A’s owner Charlie Finley saw things differently. He and manager Dick Williams offered players $300 each to grow mustaches by opening day — and $300 at that time amounted to a week’s pay for many players.
So the “Mustache Gang” was launched, the first mustaches were worn by players during the regular season in some 30 years, and the soup straining implements of navigation of the likes of Fingers, Joe Rudi, Catfish Hunter and others inspired mustache nights at the ballpark, as well as other teams like the Cincinnati Reds, Chicago Cubs, New York Yankees, and Milwaukee Brewers were fielding heavily lip-furred teams across America.
Thank you Reggie.
A Political Road to Extinction
While the 1970s were glorious, Dr. Snor and the American Mustache Institute took nothing for granted, inserting former intern G. Gordon Liddy into the administration of President Richard M. Nixon to maintain strong relations between the U.S. government and Mustached American community.
Liddy was of course later implicated in the Watergate scandal and AMI severed ties with him, ultimately crafting a bridge into the administration of President Gerald F. Ford, who repealed the Federal Mustache Tax Amendment (FMTA) in 1976.
Billy Dee: Everytime
The 1980s, however, nearly ushered Mustached Americans into extinction despite the wild success of heavily mustached vehicles such as “Magnum P.I.” and Billy Dee Williams’ triumph as Lando Calrissian in “The Empire Strikes Back.” The decade was an unquestionably painful one for lip fur zealots and holdovers like Burt Reynolds and Gene Shalit.
You see, as Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency of the U.S. in 1980, one of his first legislative actions was to reinstitute the FMTA on February 10, 1980. Reagan’s version added disturbing new wrinkles: 1) a “don’t ask don’t tell” rider was adopted all U.S. military personnel, causing thousands of military women and men to spend more time covering their mustaches than defending freedom; and 2) corporate tariffs cropped up, having an immediate effect on companies across the U.S. as the mustached corporate executive disappeared.
And there was no coincidence about the timing of a retirement announcement by Walter Cronkite.Perhaps the most influential American mustache of the 20th Century announced it was leaving the airwaves on Feb. 14, 1980, just four days after Reagan brought FMTA back to life.
Taking over as anchor of The CBS Evening News in 1962, Cronkite was the first, and one of the last, of a rare species known as “Mustachiopithicus” or “Cronkite Man.” Mustachiopithicus was a breed of humans who walked the earth, holding down the integral role of telling Americans about the news and not, as it is today, making news in the most craven manner.
Mustachiopithicus
His retirement caused a chain reaction among mustached anchormen, who began mysteriously dying or simply disappearing from the television landscape without its species anchor. The numbers of those who remained were scant, but brave mustached newsman Geraldo Rivera and Pat O’Brien did plod on.
And the Reagan government didn’t stop there.
The administration’s 1986 Iran Contra affair began as an operation to increase U.S.-Iranian relations, wherein Israel would ship weapons to a moderate, politically influential group of Iranians opposed to the Ayatollah Khomeini. In return, the Iranians would teach CIA agents how to how to yodel in a Middle-Eastern dialect.
In reality, Iran Contra was aimed at taking mustaches under duress from Americans and shipping them along with the Israeli arms – to Iran to fully-mustache Iranians. This was part of a 25-year administration plan developed by then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, formerly head of the CIA, so that eventually the U.S. could have the political weight to refer to Iranians as part of an “Axis of Evil.”
Seeds of rebirth
The turning point came in 1992, President Bill Clinton held high level talks with AMI in an effort to make sweeping, drastic changes to the FMTA.
A longtime sufferer of ‘Bare Upper Lip Disorder’ (BULD), President Clinton could never grow a mustache on his own. But in spite of that, he was committed to the movement and to the equality of exotic dancers, so he partnered with AMI to bring FMTA, and his intern class, to its knees.
On August 22, 1996, after four years of behind-doors wrangling with the Republican Congress, President Clinton signed into law a new welfare reform bill which quietly impacted FMTA by repealing the military “don’t ask don’t tell” mustache provision, removing the corporate tax breaks for executive mustache discrimination, and changing tax code to provide annual 7 percent reductions to all Mustached Americans – male and female.
This marked a tipping point for the Mustached American community.
Suddenly, Ted Turner was again allowed on magazine covers. Film director John Waters went from being a “smut peddler” to “director extraordinaire.” Estelle Geddy was permitted to appear on television again. And the executive torch was officially passed as Mexico’s deliciously-mustached Carlos Slim becomes the richest – and certainly manliest – man in world, passing bare-lipped mortal Bill Gates.
Selleck reunited lip-stache
The seeds could be seen across generations. Members of Generation Y and Millennials began to ignore the advice of professional recruiters and wear the mustache as a form of expression.
Tom Selleck reunited with the mustache he had shaved in the late 1980s. In 2004, actor/comedian Will Ferrell and writer/director Adam McKay produced “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” reminding Americans of the lost race of mustached broadcasters that was lost upon Cronkite’s retirement.
In 2006, mustached newsman Borat Sagdiyev of Kazakhstan launched a popular effort to explore American culture in his documentary: “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”
And 2007 would see a record number of films starring leading men with mustaches including: the cheerful comedy “No Country for Old Men” starring Josh Brolin; the horrific “Oceans 13” with Casey Affleck, “Charlie Wilson’s War” starring the slender Phillip Seymour Hoffman; the nearly unwatchable “Lars & The Real Girl” featuring Ryan Gossling; “The Simpsons Movie” with its Muslim character Ned Flanders; “Talk To Me” starring Caucasian actor Don Cheadle; and of course, “Harry Twatter and the Prisoner of Ass-ka-bang” starring the ever-popular Nicky Kenmore.
The pop culture zenith was reached, of course, when Daniel Day Lewis, playing the heavily mustached and light-hearted character Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood,” won the Oscar for Best Male Actor. Lewis’ victory was the first mustached character to win the award since 1986 when Paul Newman won for the character Fast Eddie Felson in “The Color of Money” despite harsh protests by the Reagan Administration and Gloria Steinem.
Holder broke glass ceiling
But then the Mustached American people witnessed a heritage hate and despair come full-circle — going beyond entertainment and into the world of elected leaders — when Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States.
President Obama’s campaign was not only engineered by the Mustached American political operative David Axelrod, but the President then appointed Eric Holder as the United States Attorney General — the first Mustached American to hold such office since Francis Biddle between 1941-45.
Throughout the pain and suffering, the sacrifice and struggles, and the clear discrimination, the Mustached American people — led by the American Mustache Institute — has come full circle: From William Howard Taft to Eric Holder.
AMI has fought off the charges of the anti-mustache movement in government and abroad, the lower nose accoutrement has rightly become more than just a delicate tuft of fur served atop a man’s or woman’s lip, and transformed into a metaphor for all that is good, pure, and manly, along with things like fried chicken, pickup trucks, hard-core midget porn, and chainsaws.
All the while AMI has become known as one of the bravest, fiercest, best looking organizations in the history of mankind behind only the United States military and the post-Jim Henson Muppets.
Indeed, AMI is content to wage future battles with the clean shaven aristocracy, men who own cats, the noxious fans and stars of ”Sex & the City,” and of course, Dave Navarro, who is worthless.
Stache Watches 