Oh how I hate these things. I didn't mind them when a few people wore them. Then it served as the rudimentary expression of taste, or as the vague outline of identity. But soon everyone began putting them on their heads. It's gotten so black kids from the ghetto have to wear them with the bill pulled down over their eyes just so they won't be mistaken for yuppie bankers.

The baseball cap's insinuation that life is a game with transparent rules gets to me. Also the insinuation that by wearing a baseball cap in inappropriate situations--like indoors--you have what it takes to break the rules and win the game. And I'm bothered by the herdlike nature of the baseball-cap trend mixed with its affectation of insouciance. The baseball-cap people want to have the lofty cool indifference of an aristocrat, yet their need to have it in the standard approved way makes them anything but cool and indifferent.

But the baseball cap signifies, most of all, a lazily defiant casualness. It's less insouciant than I-don't-give-a-shit. I have an inborn antagonism toward any type of hierarchy, but I think natural elegance is the best reply to assigned status, not sloppy rebellion. Wearing your standard-issue baseball cap in a restaurant isn't a blow for egalitarianism; it's a hopelessness about the possibility of originality ever to fly in the face of hierarchy. It also gives the impression of someone whose ego is angrily planted on his head. NO, I won't take it off!When I see someone wearing a baseball cap in a movie theater, I want them to bring back the guillotine.

Give me the egalitarianism of the park, and of a universal light, anytime.

This moron claims to have an inborn antagonism to hierarchy, and yet he disses ghetto kids for how they wear their hats. Anyone who obsesses about other people's attire to the point of fantasizing about their execution is in desperate need of an intervention. Please don't let him hit 'post' again. I wonder what he thinks about, I don't know, bolo ties. Do they also signify "a lazily defiant casualness"? I can't believe this guy gets paid (with benefits) to write on culture. He has no understanding of culture. He certainly has no clue about the blogosphere. And to think he would criticize Markos for his lack of enthusiasm, as a child, for Maoist revolutionaries overrunning his country. But then Seigel, shall I call him Buggsy, can't even get Markos's last name correct.

Did I forget to mention he thinks Jon Stewart is destroying democracy by cultivating cynicism about politicians?