Republican Party Reptile(46)
Z is for Zany, eternal class clown, Who won’t stop kidding, who won’t sit down. Bane of the Boys’ Dean, cursed by the teachers, Source of amusement in classrooms and bleachers. Zany is cute in a kitten or pup. But as an adult, please shut the fuck up.
Horrible Protestant Hats
I was getting ready to go outdoors on a drizzly afternoon. I put on a trench coat, picked up an umbrella, and deposited a waterproof canvas rain hat on my head. My girlfriend, a Catholic, began to laugh and point. “Oh!” she said, “what a horrible Protestant hat!” I looked in the mirror. True, the porkpie-style Brooks Brothers rain hat with the brim turned down on all sides does give one the look of. . . well, a poorly machined something on a recalled American car. It set me thinking.
Protestants do wear terrible hats, especially well-off adult male Protestants of the type we usually call WASPs. They wear woven-vegetable-matter summer hats with madras hatbands. These look like hospital gifts that died at the florists. They wear “Irish” tweed hats no self-respecting Irishman would put on his plowhorse. They wear herringbone wool caps that can give a bank president the semblance of a rioting English coalminer. Old artsy WASPs wear embarrassing berets. Middle-aged WASPs who’ve just gotten a divorce and a sports car wear dopey suede touring caps with a snap on the brim. Then there are the unspeakable hats favored by federal investigative agents and the fur Astrakhans worn by lawyers who, I guess, want their clients to think they run a gulag on the side.
Beyond city limits the situation is worse. Where I live in New England the summer people look like they’re trying to prove that slouch hats cause Down’s syndrome in adults. Panama hats produce a different effect—imbecility combined with moral turpitude. And there is no polite phrase in English for what a vacationing financial services executive looks like in a Greek fisherman’s cap.
Getting anywhere near the water seems to produce WASP hat lunacy. Fly fishermen wear astonishing things on their heads and always decorate them with dozens of dry flies as though at any minute they might dip their very skulls into the torrent and land giant trout with their necks. It’s hard to look more stupid than a deep-sea fisherman does in his swordbill cap. Hard, but not impossible. The ordinary Kennebunk cruiser hat accomplishes the task. This is simply the cap from a child’s sailor suit with its brim yanked down over eyes, ears, and sometimes nose. Worn thus it resembles nothing so much as a white cotton condom for the brain. Boat hats, indeed, run the gamut of foolery starting with the simple watch cap, making its wearers seem only unlettered, and winding up with the enormous yellow rubber sou’wester foul-weather chapeau, in which even George Bush would look like a drunk cartoon character doing a tuna-fish commercial.
Snow and other frozen forms of water make for no improvement. If there is anything—vassalage, Bolshevism, purdah—more deleterious to the spirit of human dignity than the knit ski cap, I have not seen it. Professional circus clowns, medieval court jesters, Trans-Carpathian village idiots—any one of them would balk at wearing a five-foot-long purple, green, red, pink, and orange cranial sock with a yard-wide pom-pom on the end. And even this is not so bad as what a WASP will wear in the winter when not on the ski slopes. That is when he goes out to shovel the walk in a vinyl-brimmed plaid cap with earflaps that tie up over the head—the worst hat on earth, the hat that turned America’s Midwest into the world’s laughingstock.
I am only half Protestant, but when I look on my closet shelf I find a disgusting Moose River canoeing hat, a regrettable corduroy Cragsmere, an incredibly idiotic Florida Keys bonefishing hat with brims at both ends, several crownless tennis visors that make me look like an Olympic contestant in double-entry bookkeeping, a John Lennon cap left over from my hippie days, and a plethora of the ubiquitous ad-emblazoned baseball caps. To judge by these I have been renting out frontal-lobe space to Purolator, Firestone, the NRA, and the Kittery, Maine, 1978 Jubilee Days. And let’s not even discuss the International Signal Orange dunce cap I wear to go bird shooting.
Now, it’s true, other ethnic groups also wear unusual headgear. Blacks, Orthodox Jews, Mexican archbishops, Italian steelworkers, to name a few. But the Stetsons of 125th Street are intentionally outrageous, yarmulkes are items of religious faith, and so forth. WASPs wear their hats in all seriousness, without spiritual reasons or historical traditions for doing so, and not a single one of their bizarre toppers would be any help if an I-beam fell on it. Nonetheless a WASP will tell you his hat is functional. It has been my experience that whenever anyone uses the word “functional” he’s in the first sentence of a lame excuse. The real reason WASPs wear goofy hats is that goofy-hat wearing satisfies a deep-seated need. In gin-and-tonic veritas. Give a WASP six drinks and he’ll always put something silly on his head—a lampshade, ladies’ underwear, Gorham silver nut dish, L. L. Bean dog bed, you name it. In more sober and inhibited moments he’ll make do with an Australian bush hat, a tam-o’-shanter, or the Texan monstrosity all WASPs affect when they get within telexing distance of a cow.