The Mad Hatter

What, in the name of all that is good and decent and leather, has happened to hats? No, I'm not talking about these baseball caps and all their self-self-conscious irony: the ones with the dirty, scratched, frilled bills (some from genuine use, others painstakingly "pre-distressed" at the hands of their owners or the more calloused, brown hands of Din, the Vietnamese who makes 18 cents an hour to fuck up articles of clothing so that Americans will pay more for them), or the Flying Von Dutchman worn crooked as a New Jersey gubenatorial administration. What I am talking about are honest to God hats.

When's the last time you could say, without flinching, that you were going to throw your hat into the race? Or upon losing by 3.7 million in the popular vote, that you simply had to tip your hat to your opponent? The fact is that most of the great men of history were bonafide hat-wearers. You never saw George Washington out and about without his favorite old three-corner atop his would-be kingly dome. Lincoln's stovepipe hat was a trademark, and a convenient place to hide the Constitution when suspending Habeus Corpus. Hell, had he been sporting that night at Ford's theatre, it might have even saved his life. Leaders and iconoclasts from all generations favored one kind or another: Popes wore big hats, Kings wore gold hats, and J.C. himself was known to sport a Halo---surely the ultimate hat. It seems highly dubious indeed that Napoleon would have had as much stature-swelling success without his chapeau, or that Patton would have marched quite so far up Hitler's ass without his four-starred Fritz helmet. If you're still not convinced just think about Harry S. Truman, the man who ushered the world into the nuclear age. Original trade: haberdasher.

So the next time you see a man in a fez, wish him the best. Don't bawl at the bowler. Don't diss the derby. Don't ha-ha the Hombourg. Instead, stick-up for the Stetson. Fend for the Fedora. Befriend the beret. Ok, well maybe scratch that last one, but you get the point. Hats are more than just the things we wear because it's socially unacceptable to adorn our phalluses. Sometimes, like on a frosty evening, locked outside a cheap hotel in Brussels, smelling of stale wine and cheap perfume, they are the only thing between you and indecent exposure until you can ring your tailor. So, to all the proud covered heads around the world (and to that umbrageous if not sprightly young Flemish prostitue), I say "Hats off!"

DRF