VN AfterTaste

by David Raffin

Occasionally, in clothing stores, I am waylaid by the hat rack. I even stop and try a few on. But the truth is, the absolute truth, I am not a hat person.
I’m sure it does not help to have an unusually large head. Most hats simply don’t fit. Luckily, hat wearing in society is no longer a cultural necessity. People are now free to not wear hats.

In the past everyone wore hats. The hat you wore informed society everything they needed to know about you. Were you poor? Were you rich? What were your beliefs? Instead of going bare people showed their hats to the world.
Eventually, people stopped wearing hats. But, for a while, they continued to wear hats when attending church.

Religious headgear

The honest truth is - if it weren’t for hats I couldn’t tell any of the world’s religions apart. Frankly, some guy telling me about his god and my imminent destruction sounds an awful lot alike after you’ve heard it once or twice. It can even be argued that the most popular religions, the big three: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are actually all the same religion. They are, in fact, all descended from the Judaic tradition. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once pointed out, “you who hate the Jews, why did you adopt their religion?”

Once a guy in the park handing out literature told me, with a smile on his face, that it was a beautiful day and the end times were coming.
Now I have to say that he was not wearing a hat and this on some level offends me. It did not afford me the opportunity to give him a wide berth; though I did take his literature, as is my habit, and turn it into a flyer for a punk rock show.

Unfortunately in our modern world, even amongst the world’s religions, people are wearing fewer and fewer hats. Religious people who don’t wear hats are sneaky little bastards.

Now, the Catholics, they have some beautiful hats. Distinctive. I can usually tell, right away, who in the hell they are. Nuns, bishops, the pope.
Let’s talk about the Pope. He has a very grand hat. A pope hat. One of the largest pieces of religious headgear ever worn. Now the pope, as the Catholics believe, is the go-between between god and man - the Word of God made flesh. Therefore he has to have a giant, giant hat. Because a man like this has a giant, giant head. Luckily, heavy is not the hat that sits atop a giant head. Because the giant pope hat… is hollow.
In fact, the pope’s hat doubles as a kite. Bet you didn’t know that. But if you go to Vatican City and you are very, very lucky - and very, very observant you may see the pope flying his hat. In the past there were occasionally more than one pope, antipopes, they now call them, and this resulted in the pope hat kite lines sometimes getting tangled. This is why the Church is adamant that there be only one pope at a time. The last thing anyone wants is pope hats breaking free and getting caught in trees.

Now, being the pope, one of the pope’s duties is to pontificate. A good pope pontificates and pontificates. That’s why another name for the pope is the pontiff.
There is an Old Zen Koan, propagated by old zen lumberjacks, which goes something like this: “Does the Pope pontificate in the woods? More importantly, if the pope pontificates in the woods and there is no one there to receive it as papal doctrine, does it still become official Dogma?”

Put that in your pipe and smoke it. But not in the Vatican City. It’s not legal there.

Protestants continue to bother me by being: 1. evangelical and 2. increasingly hatless. I suppose I could deal with one or the other but both? Remember, religious people who don’t wear hats are sneaky little bastards.

Christians are constantly telling me to turn the other cheek. Then again, lately they’ve been constantly telling me it’s okay to waterboard people. Torture, of course, goes way back in religious circles; either to elicit confessions or to force conversion. And what is a forced conversion? It’s someone torturing you in order to get you to wear their choice of hat. Today, increasingly, there’s not even a hat. They threaten you and then expect you to wear a metaphorical hat. What a gyp.

So they torture people. After all many Christian sects are almost totally focussed on the brutal death of Jesus Christ on a torture instrument. They have a torture esthetic. An inclination. Who can argue?

Jews, of course, wear hats. Their hat wearing pleases me. It’s not a showy hat. In fact it’s kind of utilitarian. You’re probably familiar with it. It’s a little hat sits on top of the head called a yarmulke. Very similar to a beanie. Now some beanies do have the advantage of having propellers on them. This is a later advancement, and only the most reformed sects of Judaism wear yarmulkes with propellers. It probably need not be pointed out to you, dear reader, that a yarmulke makes a terrible kite. However, this is no advantage vis-à-vis Christianity versus Judaism - since only one person gets to wear the giant kite hat in Christianity, but all male Jews get to wear a propeller-less beanie. Women too, in the privacy of their own home.

Many men get a bald spot in that area. This is the utilitarian part of the headgear. The yarmulke perfectly sits on top of the bald spot. I don’t have this problem, but if you do perhaps Judaism is right for you.

The problem with Jews is that they have a tendency to run over people with bulldozers. This is probably unfair, since there are Jews all over the world and they don’t run people over with bulldozers, but in Israel they do. And it’s not because the hat in some way obstructs the view of the bulldozer driver. As I pointed out the only purpose of the hat is to cover the bald spot.
Therefore I am left with no other choice but to believe some people in Israel are running other people over with bulldozers for kicks. How you square this with Yom Kippur atonement has never been fully explained to me. It is one of the great mysteries.

It has been explained to me that the only way an Israelite can drive a bulldozer on the Sabbath is to start the bulldozer running before nightfall and leave it idling until the next day. Driving a bulldozer on the Sabbath also presents a problem in steering and braking. I mean, they can’t brake and they can’t steer. To not run over those people therefore becomes an offense against God; however, to run all those people down is another offense against God. This is known in theology as the Israelite’s conundrum.
Oh, but what can be done about it?

Now, Islam is the youngest of the three faiths descended from Judaism.
Muslims pray on a schedule five times a day. Five Times. I am amazed you can get any suicide killings planned and carried out on that kind of a schedule.
In this country a lot of people believe “Moslem” is synonymous with “terrorist.”
This is probably unfair. Like all the Jews who don’t run people over with bulldozers, and all the Christians who don’t torture people, there are all those Moslems who defy categorization by not blowing anything up. In mathematics there is a phrase for all of these people in all three groups: they are individuals who fall outside the standard deviation.

It should be pointed out that men wearing turbans are more than likely not Moslems but Sikhs. I have nothing disparaging to say about the turban. The turban is a perfectly fine piece of headgear. In fact, I like to think the turban is a great mystery box that may hold many fascinating things.
In the 1970s, in the Saturday morning cartoon starring the Harlem Globetrotters, there was a character (“Sweet Lou” Dunbar) who could at any point reach into his giant Afro and pull out whatever was needed. I like to think this about the turban.
It may not be true, but that has never stopped the propagation of any belief.