I Paid a Lot of Money to Learn This
Last night I spent four hours sitting in the same chair as both of my classes are in the same room on Tuesdays. My ass is now in the shape of those big fancy wooden chairs with the school shield thingy that ivy league schools have for no apparent reason.
Out of those four hours one very interesting fact stood out:
Aparently American kids picked up the habbit of wearing a baseball cap backwards from seeing American black Muslims do it. Muslims across the world (I was studying Turkey last night) wear brimmed hats backwards so that when they pray they can touch their foreheads to the ground. In Turkey the word "hat" was not even used until 1928 (when hats were required and fezes banned) because the word brought such strong images of infidel imperialist pigs. They called them "brimmed headdress of infidels". And Muslims traditionally wore sandals and slippers not just because they lived in hot, sandy Arabia, but because they had to wash their feet five times a day to pray and taking shoes on and off is a bother. The mid-to-late 19th century was when Ottoman armies were first required to wear boots to battle.
I learned something today. I learned that it is ironic for a kid with a backwards baseball cap to hate on Muslims.
posted by Bry at 12:27 PM
6 Comments:
hat
hate
hat
hate
eeeeeeeeeeee!
Now someone has to explain to me how the backwards hat morphed into the sideways hat.
I would like your professor to cite his source as that is exactly the kind of made up bullshit that I would expect from an Ivy League hippy liberal protesting democrat liberal arts professor.
Have they made you read "The Sound and the Fury" yet? You'll love the self congradualtions they give themselves for having got a job at Harvard when they send you down to the bridge Quentin throws his watch off of.
I do not know the exact source, but he said he learned this from a French sociologist studying American cultural trends. I suppose you don't believe it because the dude's French.
I fucking hate Ivy League hippie bullshit and I had read Sound and the Fury with a Texan professor who was as snobby as they come. I hated it and him.
But don't confuse the issues here. I have a future blog entry in me about two of the major laws of humanity: the law of logistics (as in wearing slippers because it's a bitch to take shoes off to pray) and the law of influence/assimilation. The second is what makes it possible that first blacks and then whites in the U.S. took to wearing their hats backward. But, of course, the backward hat may have come from a number of other sources; catchers turn their hats backward to wear a mask in baseball, there was a fad a few years ago where everyone wore everything backward (KrisKross rocks) and a number of other possibilities. But this theory is entirely possible and I'd like to see some evidence of another reason we wear hats backwards before I discard it. A lot of urban clothing trends have been influenced by the prisons (don't get me started on poor urban blacks getting fucked over by the judicial system) and because there are way too many blacks in the prisons there are also a lot of black Muslims. It is not an unreasonable theory.
And for the record: calling a theory "made up bullshit" "from an Ivy League hippy liberal" is not an argument, it's name calling. And that's either stupid or lazy. Often both. You're smarter than that, Dean.
The "wear your pants down past your hips" (look?) is in fact inspired by inmates in prison. Why in the world does someone want to wear their pants like that? They keep having to pull them up and walk like they have a permenant limp. Quite silly really. I do not care to see your underpants G-Dog. As far as the hats backward thing, there is a poin to wearing a baseball or trucker hat with a brim/bill/lid (I am not sure what you call it). First, it shields your eyes from the sun and second it shows off the logo on the front. Shows who y'all reprezentin' yo! Anyway Bry, you and I should have a discussion about the history of fashion. Maybe we could pinpoint exactly when it became fashionable? to have a muffin top. Run little rabbits! Run! Oh wait you cain't (not a spelling error) run b'cuz y'all wearing yur pants so low.
The irony is, of course, that inmates wear their pants low but once on the outside it does inhibit running (as in from the police).
They wore 'em low in prison because everyone was given the same size: XL. And I'll bet my booty that they don't give you belts in prison.
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