I know I know cowboy hats and baseball caps are a big part of our American culture, but so are Saturday night specials and the Ku Klux Klan. So how can you rant about something as basic as an everyday, ever-so-common hat, you ask? Why, because we aren’t wearing the tilts, cloches, fedoras, or the pillboxes of an earlier generation. 
Watch a Bogie and Bacall movie to see some cool, proper hats, or better yet, you can watch footage of Kate the Duchess of Cambridge. She’s doing for hats what Mark Wahlberg did for men’s underwear and Bo Derek did for cornrows and beads. Here are the hats, or to be more precise, some of the hat-wearers that really drive me bonkers:
Country Music Stars in Hats Wearing a cowboy hat onstage may be appropriate if the hat accents the image the performer is trying to project. Look at me; I’m a country boy, a cowboy, a hick, a whatever. But letting the hat become an integral part, and often the key part, of your persona is not.
Country music artists who wear their hats 24/7 drive me up the damn wall. They see nothing wrong with dining at gala banquets with their hats on, wearing formal wear with their totally inappropriate cowboy hats, or appearing onstage, indoors, at night with their hats pulled down low over their eyes like its midday on the prairie.
I looked up Emily Post’s (and she knows everything) guidelines for men and their hats, and she says men should take their hats/caps off in someone’s home, at the table, while being introduced, in a church, in all public buildings, in restaurants and coffee shops, at a movie or an indoor performance, when the national anthem is played, and when our flag passes by in a parade. That’s not that hard. Someone should teach these country music assholes some manners.
Our Army in Goofy Berets Somewhere along the line the US Army adopted the beret as their official uniform hat. It looks awful. It’s not the cool, flat-on-the-head beret you might see some suave Spaniard or Frenchman wearing, but a misshaped, uncharacteristically raised-in-the-front wad of cloth adorned with a huge, inappropriate military patch. It’s an ugly bastardization of a beret at best. Famous beret aficionados like Marlene Dietrich, Che Guevara, Greta Garbo, or Pablo Picasso would be appalled at what our army has done to their beloved headwear. Not only did the army choose the black beret for their ordinary soldiers they came up with different colors for their so-called elite troops. The Airborne have maroon berets, the Rangers wear tan, while the Special Forces don green. Whoop de doo da. I read somewhere the army adopted the beret to “enhance morale.” I can tell you, as a Marine who only wore traditional Marine headgear, a piss cutter (garrison cap), a barracks cover (of the jarhead variety), a utility cover, and more often than not, an M1 helmet; we never had to bolster morale by wearing corny hats or differentiate ourselves from other Marines with some funny color.
I had difficulty mourning the loss of a true American hero, Pat Tillman, because the army released his official photo showing him in a misshaped tan beret pulled down low over his right eye like he was some sort of tough Veronica Lake look-alike. He looked a helluva lot better in his ASU and Cardinals football helmets.
Baseball Caps and More Baseball Caps I confess I own and wear a handful to this ubiquitous form of headgear. Remember when we were kids we wore baseball caps only when we were playing baseball. Now everybody wears them everywhere. I take that back—Americans wear them everywhere. Kids wear them with their brims at odd angles to show that they’re cool, and old guys wear them to cover their bald heads while everyone else wears them to make some sort of statement. They’re kinda like bumper stickers for your head.
We’ve got sports-team hats that show everyone what team you root for, the veterans hats that let everyone know you were in this war or that, and in what branch you served, and the promotion hats that advertise some something: a company, a product, an event, something.
Going through life as a walking billboard for Budweiser or some other equally mundane product is not cool no matter how much beer you drink. And how about the place hats that tells everyone that you’ve been to Yellowstone or worse yet, Branson. Do you think Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin wore hats that said The Moon on them? Probably not. I went into a hat shop at our local mall and asked the sales clerk (a know-nothing teenage kid like they all seem to be) if he had any hats that didn’t say anything. He was at a loss to speak, so I poked around and rediscovered something I already knew; there are no just-plain hats.
To Hat or Not to Hat Don’t get me wrong, I like hats that denote something about the wearer like their occupation or position in life. Who doesn’t admire the policeman in his stylized hat, or better yet, the fireman in his distinctive headgear, or any military person wearing an honest-to-god military hat? I especially like the mortarboards of academia and how about the heavily starched cornette that Sally Field wore when she was flying around on TV. Now that was a hat. Speaking of Catholics, the pope’s job comes with some really cool hats. He gets three, a Papal Tiara with jewels, a ceremonial tall white Mitre, and a beanie called a Zucchetto. How about that, a three hat job. I like hats that symbolize a nationality like a Greek fisherman’s cap, a Scotsman’s tam-o’-shanter, a French beret, a Mexican sombrero, a Bavarian Alpine hat, or a good-looking Panama hat. I’ll bet you didn’t know that the toquilla straw hats that we call Panama are really from Ecuador. They got that name way back when Ecuador shipped their hats to the world from ports in Panama. I also like really outrageous hats like the bearskin caps of the British Foot Guards. Those goofy hats are 18 inches tall, weigh 1.5 pounds, and are made exclusively from the fur of Canadian black bears. The PETA folks must not be too active in the UK.
The Jewish shtreimel is almost as outrageous a fur hat as the Brit’s bearskin. Okay, you’re right, it’s even more outrageous. Other unusual hats that I find interesting are Arabic fezes, Balmoral bonnets, the French kepi, and the conical hats of Asia, like the ones the Vietnamese call nón lá (leaf hats).
Thinking Further Now that I’ve had time to ponder all of this, I’m really only pissed at the total lack of manners of American hat wearers like our country music performers, the damn army’s ugly-assed berets, and anyone that wears a baseball cap for anything other than playing baseball. And I’ve just learned that there is a subcategory of ugly baseball hats called trucker hats, and they have become the mainstream fashion trend for our suburban youth. These so-called trucker hats are true bumper-sticker hats and often come adorned with obscene social messages. Give me a break! Take this Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake (famous trucker hat wearers), Tim McGraw, Dwight Yokum, Kenny Chesney, Alan Jackson (famous 24/7 cowboy hat jerks) and all you old guys shopping at Walmart or eating at a Dairy Queen and shove it up your hat racks. Better yet, take your hat racks and shove ’em up your… Miss Manners, Emily Post, Jacqueline Whitmore, Amy Vanderbilt, somebody where are you? We really need you! Our country needs you!
Too Much Tequila, Too Little Sunscreen 
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