This One Picture of Telly Savalas Refutes All Fears That Progress Has Ended

Intrigued? From my latest
Daily Beast column:

I started receiving People magazine recently,
and as I was leafing through its ho-hum 40th anniversary issue, I
stumbled across this 1974 cover featuring Telly Savalas, the man
who mainstreamed baldness into everyday life (screw you,
Yul Brynner!) and portrayed Kojak, one of the most memorable
small-screen detectives up to that point in TV history. This cover,
I submit, is as sharp a rebuke to the “progress is over!” crowd as
Samuel Johnson’s stone-kicking hissy fit was to Bishop
Berkeley….

The middle class can’t afford nothing no more, Amazon’s
warehouse workers are “today’s coal miners,” and even bomb-crazy
and jihad-suffering Middle Easternersare more optimistic about
the future than Americans and Europeans. The Experts (with a
capital E!) have spoken: We’ve reached The
End of Progress….

bear with me here. Cue up Telly’s
incomparable semi-parlando rendering of If. Get
lost in the Aegean-deep pools of Telly’s eyes and marvel at his
gold-chain-and-bracelet set. As you contemplate a naked celebrity
torso apparently unfamiliar with any form of exercise, let’s count
the ways in which the world has not just gotten a little bit better
but a whole fucking lot better since Kojak was on the case.

Read the while thing, baby.