My 6-year-old son has an unfortunate cowlick that leaves his hair looking like Eddie Munster’s. You know:

My kid has other fine qualities, but today I couldn’t take any more of looking at that downward dagger of hair, so I took him to Supercuts, where I pointed out the problematic fibers to what I naturally assumed was a hair-cutting professional. She promised she could help, but then asked the question I always find impossible to understand: “What number should I use?” As in, which numbered attachment should she slip onto the electric trimmer. To which I always reply: “I don’t know. You’re the hair-cutting professional.” If I knew how to do this, I wouldn’t need her, and could save $13 and having to make some elaborate bargain with my 6-year-old to get his hair cut. (Today it involved my buying extra darts for his Nerf gun.) She told me she would do her best to make it look nice and I sat down to play poker on my iPhone, looking up intermittently to see that the kid was, indeed, shedding hair but not blood.

Several minutes later, the woman called me over to consult. She fingered the offending hair pattern, lifting it to display whorls on each side that result in the defiant inverted pyramid. There is no way to eliminate it, she told me, without shaving that section of his forehead. Imagining how badly this could go for me back at home, where my bedridden wife wasn’t cheery to begin with, I demurred. The Supercuts woman finished off the rest of the haircut, I gave the kid a glance over, paid, collected his two siblings, and off we were to buy spongy darts to be shot at me.

It was at Toys ‘r’ Us that I really took a look at the haircut. I thought I was hallucinating. The entire head of hair was cut across in uneven straight lines of varying depths. I couldn’t decide if my son’s hair looked more like a display of carpet samples, or a textbook example of crop rotation.

I told the kids not to say anything to my wife. “Let’s see if she notices,” I said. Later at home when I heard her shriek from the bedroom, I called in response, “I’m taking him back tomorrow!”

But here’s where I learned two things — and this ultimately is the point of this story.

First, my wife’s insight: “You can’t just drop in to Supercuts. You have to know who’s working that day.” If this is true, then either my wife or I or Supercuts has a real misunderstanding about their business. Because when my wife is saying that, for example, Julie is good at cutting hair at Supercuts but Magda isn’t, she’s saying that Supercuts has specialists. But I believe Supercuts to be in a commodities business, one where there are only so many different shapes of heads, and only a few basic models of haircuts, and everything can be standardized into the equivalent of the black rotary telephone. Hence the customary demand for the customer to name the numbered attachment. Hence the ability to render a haircut in only the time it takes most of us to go to the refrigerator. If Supercuts is not the tonsorial equivalent of Jiffy Lube, and it is also clearly not the chic gay salon I pass on the way to the theatre, then it is somewhere in the middle — and I don’t think that’s where they want to be. And yet I cannot deny that just last week I myself got a haircut at this same Supercuts, performed by Julie, and it has worked out just fine. So based upon the evidence, it does help to get the right person, and one shouldn’t just drop in and let the sausage-maker wield the scissors. Lesson learned.

Second, my own insight: This episode provided me with another reminder that just because one person says something can’t be done, that doesn’t mean that someone else can’t do it. (And, relatedly, we should never confuse elevated status with actual expertise. Case in point: Any number of world leaders throughout history.) Just because Magda, as I’ve named her, couldn’t fashionably level the pyramid, that doesn’t mean that someone else couldn’t have.

The haircut is a disaster of 7.0 on the Richter scale, and while taking my son to get it provided a mild diversion, taking him back for correction (or full head-shaving) is an infuriating time suck. But it may have been worth that, plus the purchase price, to be reminded that respect for expertise must be earned.

I think most of us know what “no taste” means: a preference for paneling in the rec room and Kenny Rogers on the stereo.

“Poor taste” is somehow more licentious than “bad taste,” and often implies something sexual that is misaimed. It shows poor taste to make double entendres to middle-schoolers.

“Bad taste” is summed up by Rush Limbaugh’s song “Obama the Magic Negro.”

I’m not sure what to call a candidate for Republic National Committee chair having sent that record out as campaign collateral for himself. It’s surely a combination of all above, and more: poor taste, no taste, bad taste, and sheer stupidity.

Most people know the John Lennon song “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” What’s less well-known is that in 1974 George Harrison put out his own Christmas song, “Ding Dong Ding Dong.” This isn’t quite it.

That’s what we hope for President-elect Obama and for the rest of us. The sooner the better.

There was a time that being a pop-culture fan was frowned upon. I remember when as a senior in Stephen Dunn’s fiction class I wandered into class early and found a largish student reading a magazine. “What are you reading?” I asked, because it looked familiar. None-too-pleased but caught in the headlights, he lifted it up for me to see, and it was indeed the Comics Journal. “Oh, I write for that,” I said. I watched the strain of being seen in flagrante delicto drain away and a friendship was born. In the 1970’s and 80’s, being a comic-book or fantasy or science-fiction or horror fan meant exchanging secret signals like the early Christians.

All this has drained away as the pop cult has grown from clandestine conclaves into the megachurches of Comic Con and the global multiplex. And being of this generation that did that, Barack Obama is revealed, unsurprisingly, as a “Star Trek” fan. This will delight my friend Larry Nemecek to no end, and rightly so: Like Obama’s election, “Star Trek” has always represented hope. Jesus had it almost right: It’s the geek who shall inherit the earth.

Now it’s the elitists I feel sorry for. This results partly from my usual siding with an underdog, and largely from my deep gratitude to great artists with small fan bases. Increasingly, we live in a post-text age. (As I often tell corporate writing clients when reviewing their existing efforts, “This is too texty. Nobody’s reading Great Russian Novels any more.”) As Wallace Shawn noted in “The Designated Mourner,” soon no one will grieve for the loss of John Donne.

As liberating as it is to publicly carry around a “graphic novel” (really just an overpriced and beautifully printed comic book, one that won’t decay into brittle but beautifully aromatic pulp), I continue to hope for a dialectical synthesis, one where a discussion of Tony Stark’s roiling inner conflict can glide effortlessly into references to “Hamlet” and onto Jung, and necessarily back to Joseph Campbell on Darth Vader, an unformed man hiding in an encasement of his own making. Mr. Obama holds hope for us in that arena as well, because while “Star Trek” inspired him, it’s a lifetime of heady reading that’s driving his policy efforts. So maybe that’s it:  High culture rules the head, while pop culture holds our heart.

Nothing much to say.

Yet.

(Pause.)

In response to my recent post about the Atlantic Monthly’s take on the state of the economy, longtime friend (and reader of this blog) Joe Stafford sent this  photo of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and this comment:

Now here is the face of a man asking “WHA HAPPEN’d?”
A bit too wide eyed if you ask me.  Maybe his contacts are worn out.

My question is:  How come in a nation built on CAPITALISM, the crime of abuse of money isn’t the CAPITAL of ALL capital crimes?
Punishable by death, live, in living color, by firing squad?
Mayhaps I’m gullible.

I suspect that in 2009 we’re going to hear more and more calls for retribution of some sort. Which would be fit against people who broke laws and gamed the system in the way Enron executives did.

But if it’s blame we’re looking to assess, most of it lies in our collective mirror. That’s something we should all remember when the next credit-card bill comes.

I just got home from a late movie on Christmas Eve and judging from the tree, the fat man has already visited us. I hope you find something good waiting for you.

Throughout the recent presidential campaign, there were numerous comparisons between Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln, most of them originating from Obama. Like Lincoln, Obama was a relatively unknown legislator of meager circumstances from the backwoods (meaning, in this case, Hawaii and Indonesia) with a gift for rhetoric and an affinity for black people who promised to unite a divided nation. Post-election, the narrative has continued, most recently with Obama naming his own “team of rivals” to serve on his cabinet. Today, it was announced that he will take the oath of office using the Bible that Lincoln used.

The point having been made, I think it would be useful now for the president-elect to cease this simile. Because we all know how that other, earlier, story ended.

Today I finished reading two especially timely articles in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

In one, a former financial insider explains why Wall Street never learns its lesson, and will always shuttle between boom and bust on about a 30-year cycle. The essential thrust is that inevitably regulations fall away because we succumb to our own greed.

In the other, the man who oversees $200 billion of China’s $2 trillion in dollar holdings lends some sage advice to those who need him most: us. It boils down to “learn that you aren’t special and you can’t continue to live this way,” and “be nice to us, because you need to be nice to us.”

I thought about these two pieces while driving home tonight from the liquor store. I would think that most Americans reading these pieces would need to stop at the liquor store.

Here’s what was awaiting me when I got home: four different “you’re pre-approved!” offers from credit-card companies. Two were for Visa cards attached to airlines, one was from American Express, and one was from Discover. The beginning interest rates ran from 9.99% to 14.99%. All four cards were adjustable-rate. Behind all these cards, in one way or another, was bailout money that we recently borrowed from the future with money printed today. I shredded all four applications.

But not before wondering if I couldn’t accept these cards and charge them up, default on the payments, use the money to buy some historically low stocks, have the government bail me out, and then stick the Chinese with the bill.