I like hats, and I can not lie...
My girlfriend thinks I look awful in them. But I don't care (one of the few opinions of hers that I disregard). I like them, and I like hats that have some kind of personal connection - a sports team, something like that.
But lately, I've been having a few problems...
Consider this hat:
It appears to be a very fine hat indeed. It is of high quality, and signifies support of an excellent American Football team who last season suffered only two defeats in the entire season; one of them, sadly, in the Superbowl, where they came out second-best to a group of young gentlemen from Denver Colorado. Denver were a team which consisted of a defence so terrifying that grown men ran for cover, led by a QB so old that he no longer throws the football because of a well-founded fear that his arm might fall off.
I have been a Carolina Panthers fan for the entire life of the franchise - twenty-one years. When I lived in Bermuda, in the mid-nineties, my colleagues told me I had to have a team. Charlotte, Carolina, is the closest NFL franchise to Bermuda and they were, like me, new to the game. So I became a fan.
I have lived through the ups and downs of being a Panthers fan for all that time.....sorry up and downs. Two Superbowl appearances in 21 years - both lost. I could have switched to another team. But I didn't. Because the Panthers were my team. I've never even been to Charlotte. I've never, actually, been to America. But that doesn't matter. Because they were my team. Last season, as their unbeaten run stretched to nine games, I bought - in a fit of pride - a Panthers hat.
I like it very much.
But, relatively recently (since that Superbowl defeat), the State Legislature of North Carolina passed a law dictating which public washrooms transgender individuals might use to relieve themselves. More egregiously, but with much less publicity, they also passed a law which damages protection against discrimination in the workplace for LGBT people.
The E Street Band cancelled a gig in Charlotte. The Mumfords played their gig, but demanded a meeting with said legislature. I wholeheartedly applaud both those actions.
I stopped wearing my hat.
I know the Panthers probably have nothing to do with prejudicial legislation. But if I wear a Carolina Panthers hat, I am implicitly supporting that legislation. I am wearing a homophobic hat.
I don't want to do that.
So I dug out one of my holiday hats:
Safe, right? I love Turkey. I have Turkish friends. I regard Kemal Ataturk as a hero, one of the few (rephrase that: the only) truly noble and humanitarian leader to emerge from the First World War.
But now we have that silly Mr Erdogan, who not only is trying to get a hapless German comedian prosecuted for being rude about him, is also attempting, quietly, to impose upon Ataturk's fiercely secular and essentially liberal Muslim nation a different kind of Islamic law.
So now I'm wearing a crypto-fundamentalist hat which persecutes comedians for the sin of satire and thereby tramples all over the notion of free speech, and the long and noble tradition of cutting our political leaders down to size by having a bloody good laugh at them.
So now I can't wear that bloody hat, either.
Now, somewhere out there, another of my heroes, the libertarian American satirist PJ O'Rourke, is probably laughing himself silly at me; or even LSHHDHTAHSFO (Laughing So Hard He Dropped His Taco And His Sombrero Fell Off - the ultimate extension of ROFL). He's calling me a hand-wringing whiny fucking Liberal and equating me with such pariahs as Jimmy Carter ("The man who sold the whole show down the river in the first place"), the Kennedies (God help me) and all those ill-washed and badly-dressed non-Nicaraguan students who supported the Sandinistas against Violet Camarro, back in the day. He will certainly be guffawing at the notion of The Boss cancelling a gig over LGBT toilet rights.
But I'm not a Liberal.
I am, if anything, right-wing. Not the sort of right-wing that David Cameron is: but the sort of right-wing that PJ O'Rourke is. I believe that the duty of Government is to pave the roads, defend the realm and keep the fuck out of my life. And transgender people's toilet facilities. I don't believe in social engineering by any kind of politician, whether they attended Eton and Cambridge, or Hackney Wick High and the Department of Poli Sci at the LSE. They're all fuckwits, so why should we let them tell us how to live? As O'Rourke famously remarked: "Giving money and power to Government is like giving whisky and car keys to teenage boys".
But here's what I do believe in: equality. Actual, real equality. The sort where it doesn't matter what colour you are, what gender, what sexual orientation, you will progress in life based upon your ability, your effort and your human values.
Radical.
And the problem with ideology, and particularly with the whole "left-wing, right-wing" dichotomy is that it requires one to adopt an idealogy as a package, rather than being allowed to formulate one's own viewpoints on individual issues. It's an "off-the-shelf" solution, whereas it should be "pick and mix". If you look back on the views I've expressed, they may seem contradictory: some left-wing, some right. They're not. They are entirely consistent with the standpoint of an individual who believes in individual freedoms and the right to be an individual. They just don't fit into a convenient poli-sci box. Sorry.
Anyhow, I've solved the hat problem. I bought this one:
It is a Lancashire County Cricket Club hat. I have supported Lancs for all of my life, and therefore it fulfills the emotional requirement of expressing my allegiance. Plus, it is extremely unlikely that Lancashire County Council will pass homophobic legislation. Most of them probably can't even spell 'homophobic'.
They've probably never heard of PJ O'Rourke, either.