The way you wear your hat

… no American male under the age of 70 really knows how to wear a hat, not the way the average schnook did in the period between the wars, and up until the Kennedy/Sinatra Administration.  For lots of reasons, almost none of them having to do with the myth that JFK didn’t wear a hat to his inauguration (see point 6), one day in the 1960s American men decided en masse to drop an item of apparel that for centuries had been considered as vital  to respectability as wearing trousers. In retrospect, this was an early warning sign of the Decline of America.  For, once men stopped wearing hats, they also stopped being men, which meant they stopped driving the culture, which meant the country was now ruled by fears, worries, feelings and emotions — in other words, by The New York Times — instead of right reason, a whiff o’ the grape and a taste of the lash, with which feminized consequences we are now living.