Labels: WHERE I HANG MY HAT.

     John Fitzgerald Kennedy might be the last president to wear a dress hat, a fedora. Like everything he wore he wore it with aplomb. Maybe not like Fred Astaire or Frank Sinatra, but he looked good to my 8 years old sense of fashion. His predecessor, Dwight D Eisenhour wore a hat, too. He wore it with the brim up all the way around, Trilby fashion. Many men wore hats with a dip in the brim over the eyes, like Humpgry Bogart. Most of them white men. The black men wore their hats more like Eisenhauer, that hat was called a Pork Pie hat. That difference in headwear between Ike and JFK is fitting. Eisenhauer was a 5-star general, two-term president, a statesman with some skills, in the waning years of his rich life. I should mention, in light of current events, that he was a Republican also, a political designation that still held merit in those days, Joe McCarthy aside. Kennedy was the opposite: young, handsome, maybe a little too full of himself, but we loved him and sang Camelot as if we were in the Castle with King Arthur himself. Five bullets fired from an Italian sniper rifle with a poor reputation for accuracy,  from the sixth-floor window in the Texas School Book Depository ended that wonderful time. The classy brims went away with Camelot. Hats didn't go away, but the fedora was seen only in gangster films after that. Hats were a way of identifying a man in those days as being a serious guy. Women wore hats too, but were not thought of as serious, in that pre-feminist time. Their hats were frivolous. Held in place with bobbypins. 

     We wear many styles of hat today. Men mostly. We wear Irish driver's hats, Scottish Tam-o-Shanter (if we are daring), feed caps, baseball hats, stocking caps. Stetson Cowboy hats seem to be more common in western states. Thinking caps have yet to emerge with any regularity. "Hats make the man" is a saying left over from the Frank Sinatra days. We wear hats today as a sort of mood-ring. What hat befits the occasion? In some cases they label people who merely look silly.

     In the same way that we wear hats to portray to the world who we want to be, the multiplicity of me, we can have passionate attachments to multiple ideas in life. Those, unlike the hats, come with opinions. They are the medieval shield with the family heraldry displayed. Some of us can have a wall of hooks to hang our shields on. Opinions are not always a good thing, but little progress is made without opinions. There is a trope out there that says, "I have a right to my opinions". It's more complicated than that, as you would expect of something that requires thinking on a scale above your mundane exertions. For some people an opinion is like a faded feed cap carried in the rear pocket, and when worn, worn with the brim covering their neck, or even worse-sideways. For others an opinion is worked over meticulously the way men of the 50's and 60's worked the brim of a fedora, or a stetson, putting  the hat on by holding the crown by the dimple, then running your fingers over the forward part of the brim in a  final flourish. Those latter opinions are usually the opinions worth considering. This may sound elitist to those who fear elitism, but one doesn't reach a level of expertise by not leaving the rest of us in their wake. We display the things that are our core beliefs. We cannot help it. From our first childish pronouncements, we must show some theatrical panache, stomping out of the room or throwing our hands in the air. And a hat is often the appropriate display for adults. What good is holding a belief if you are indifferent to displaying it. Some things you may be passionate about but careful where you display it. Some things people should just keep hidden until it shrivels and dies. Not everybody recognizes the difference. Things like racism, white nationalism, and homophobia should never be given an audience. For a while those aberrations were concealed from the world because, aside from mimeographed material passed around the shop floor or at meetings, they were given no public acceptance. Now we display our opinions, our labels in our Facebook profile or some other social media account as if they are an expensive Borsalino. Social media offers enough exposure to find like-minded friends. It offers obscurity as well, until your social media accounts are subpoenaed by the FBI. Those who wear their faded feed cap of opinion can feel comfortable knowing that the number of people who would demand from them an explanation for those strongly held, though indefensible, opinions is small. Even so, the backward feedcap wearer might feel free to disparage the well-thought out opinions of the people who work those opinions the way Little Joe Cartwright worked his cowboy hat. 

     Opinion, it seems to me, must have some relationship to logic and reason. Can we be confident that we are using logic and reason? Some of us some of the time, while some of us think logic and reason are controlled by the gut. Should we be confident of what they opine? No. An expressed opinion must be vulnerable to a countervailing opinion. It must make sense. The mere expression of something must be tempered by something. Something like, the only thing that stops the bad guy with an opinion is a good guy with an opinion. And those opinions that are not challenged are like the martial arts practitioner who doesn't practice martial arts; Steven Siegal for example. This reverence for opinion is often overblown. Listen to the speeches delivered prior to an election. Some speakers make ad hominem statements unaccompanied by substantiation. They can be confident that there will be few people to demand that missing substance among the admiring crowd. In that vacuum is the castle of the tyrant. The press that the right calls 'fake news' is constrained in their interviews from delving too deeply into the candidates statements, lest they should appear too partisan. The rightwing media will only ask softball questions of those candidates they prefer. We mere mortals are left to choose between overblown and fatuous opinion on the one hand, or tepid investigation, hampered by the threat that they will have to contend with needlessly defending their opinion in the court of public opinion, on the other.

     We can never be absolutely sure of the merit of our opinions. Confident as we are, we must constantly be examining those beliefs we hold dear, in the same way that science examines its hypotheses, even once they become theory. That theory may someday be disproved as new evidence emerges. Consequently, there can be no space given to a concept of originalism. The founding fathers gave us the ninth Amendment because they had the foresight to see that. There can be no absolutism in pursuit of an opinion. An opinion being common to all of us, no matter how much time we spend in thought. 

     I was driving from Portland to Sacramento many years ago. There is a dead radio space between Ashland and Corning, California. Country music and rightwing talk lived in that dead space. I paused my search to listen to a radio evangelist opine on the "tyranny of relativism". This was a man who must occasionally wear a hat, I think. Not to protect the flabby mass within his skull, but to protect the baldspot on his head from sunburn. I imagine him wearing a Stetson. The kind of Stetson Hopalong Cassidy wore; a gaudy white  Stetson with no smudges of dirt, the crown with only the factory dimples on each side of the crease, the brim unchanged from hats like it. A hat, like some peoples opinions, that is proudly worn but never caressed and molded into something uniquely expressive. Or perhaps this radio preacher wears one of those stupid leather cowboy hats, like John Eastman wears. John Eastman, the anti-elitist attorney whose law degree allows him to append his name with Esquire. That stupid leather brim is his way of saying to the fawning rabble, "I am one of you, I am stupid enough to wear this leather hat that no man in his right mind would buy unless it was on sale at Goodwill and inclement weather demands it." At the risk of being absolutist, there should be no pardon for that either.