Are beards Evil?

I hadn't shaved this week until today when I jumped into the shower.

Instead of doing as I usually do and shaving all of my face I took the bold decision to leave a goatee beard. (It's a bold decision when your stubble grows through with a ginger tint to it. Believe me.)

Later on while I was at work I was told that a goatee makes me look as though I am some kind of devil worshipper. Ok, so it wasn't exactly phrased like that, it went more along the lines of "The beards a new look for you isn't it Ross?" But I saw through the thinly disguised subtext and figured what it was that the accuser meant by his statement.

And this caused me to wonder; Are beards evil?

Take the classic image of the devil; Horns sticking out his head, a menacing smile and a wispy goatee beard are almost standard issue. Several other evil people had beards. The Master (from the TV show Dr Who) wore a goatee and it's a well known fact that Rolf Harris has a goatee beard. And I'm sure we all know that he's the embodiment of evil.

Other goatfaced people include such evil fuckers as Anton La Vey, Rasputin, The Bee Gee's, Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Charles Manson, Count Dooku and Jeremy Beadle. Going by that you could, conceivably, come to the conclusion that a beard not only makes you evil but may also have a strange side-effect that makes the fingers on your right hand stubby and chipolata like.

Looking at the other side of the coin throws up famous beard wearers who were inspirational. John Lennon wore a beard. As did Aristotle, Ernest Hemingway, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, Socrates, Frank Zappa, Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill, Charles Darwin, Brian Blessed, Charles Dickens, Diogenes of Sinope, Dave Gorman, Matt Groening, Karl Marx, Sean Connery and Santa Claus.

The realization that there are just as many non-evil beard wearers as there are evil beard wearers may cause you to think that one cancels out the other. And you'd be right. To a certain extent.

There may be a kind of natural balance in the ratio of evil-with-beard/non-evil-with-beard that has developed over time. I don't know. I can only make wild stabs in the dark and hope that this somehow ends up making sense.

I wonder if I succeeded?