America was shocked enough this week that one of its own would be coming home after five years in Taliban captivity. But then, last Saturday afternoon, there was President Obama standing beside a solemn gentleman who bore more resemblance to a Sasquatch than a Middle American dad. The collective horror stemmed from a singular source: the unkempt, untrimmed and un-hip beard of Robert Bergdahl, the father of hero/traitor Bowe, who has sparked his own, far more serious controversy this week.

But as a fellow beardy, my first reaction to the Bob sideshow – Bill O'Reilly said "he looks like a Muslim", among other moments of Fox News grooming outrage – was one of deep offense at the prejudice against the follicularly-gifted.

What is it about a race (the human one, that is) that has turned it so far against boisterous facial hair? Especially when the dawn of man saw the growth of massive, woolly mammoth-size beards and (for a few hundred years, at least) spared us sightings of the dreaded, trimmed goatee?

Early fashionistas debated the male facial hair aesthetic even before the invention of razors or – even more bizarrely – before your favorite band was cool. Some Neanderthals practiced an artisanal shaving technique – plucking the hairs out with their fingers – while other cavemen saw nothing wrong with growing a fearsome nest of facial tresses. What better bodily feature exists, after all, to intimidate baby-faced enemies?

In Ancient Egypt, beards were so important that men often wore carefully crafted metallic false beards as a sign of their own royalty. This was not because they lacked the cojones to grow a manly face-mane but because, according to Mental Floss, Egyptians believed that the god Osiris (who lorded over the afterlife) was himself the scruffy type. In the centuries since the female pharaoh Hatshepsut broke with that storied tradition by abandoning her ceremonial false beard, the beard has fallen out of favor – until recently.

My beard's origins are far less noble than that of the Egyptian pharaohs or the elder Bergdahl, who grew his "out of a desire to better understand the world from which his son could not escape". On September 30, 2009, I moved into a new apartment and accidentally left a bag of toiletries behind in the old building's elevator (alongside a pile of mouldering trash). After a week of "forgetting" to go to a store and purchase a new razor – as well as other then-desperately needed hygienic products – I decided to try out this newfangled beard thing and just let it grow out for awhile.

Five months later, I still hadn't shaved.

To this day, there exists an unfortunate picture of me from that fifth month, in which I am standing alongside a bemused Bill Murray, who is obviously embarrassed at having positively ID'd Bigfoot.



When Murray spotted a magnificent beard in the wild. Photograph: Dan Katz/ DanKatz.com

Although my beard, now trimmed to a more presentable shape, is far less controversial than Bob Bergdahl's, I nonetheless took it rather poorly when Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade offhandedly said the Terroristic Beard made its owner "look like a member of the Taliban". Apparently, now Fox is not only convicting American troops of treason – it's convicting the beards belonging to family members of American troops of giving comfort to the enemy.

If, as the Guardian reported in April, we have reached "peak beard" – if the explosion in bearded Brooklynites has caused an irrevocable anti-hipster backlash to end the be-whisker-ization of America – than the issue may be that the US has finally found a single target for all the discrimination previously vented in the direction of gay men and females: the dirty beardo.

But, then again, if beards have that kind of strength and political sway (at least in the depths of both anarchic Afghanistan and the couches of Fox & Friends), perhaps they are not going out of style. Maybe the beard is becoming more powerful – and more dangerous – than ever.



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On the serious side, in this exclusive Guardian video, Robert Bergdahl discusses the lead-up to his son's release, including the thinking that made him grow out his beard...

