Thirty years ago a friend gave me a Stetson fedora he’d bought for a buck at a thrift store on Aurora. It looked like the Indiana Jones hat. I’d never worn a hat before in my life and had always been told that wearing hats makes men go bald. So I thought, why not? Let’s test that theory.
So for years, I wore that hat almost all day every day, looking for signs of male pattern baldness every evening. All I got was a slowly receding hairline. Nothing dramatic I could point to and say,
“Aha, mother was right.” My research remains inconclusive, but it’s beginning to look like mother wasn’t right.
That Stetson also helped me test one of dad’s theories. He said everything and everybody has a price. A dollar and cents value could be attached to anything in the world, and therefore, if you had unlimited funds you could have anything you wanted.
Also, any person has a price, so if you had enough money, you could get them to do anything you wanted. This theory struck me as having at least two flaws.
What’s the price of the person who has unlimited funds, for one thing? How do you buy off Bill Gates? And then, what if someone refuses to sell — precisely to annoy the rich guy? What is annoying a rich guy worth? Clearly, the more frustrated he is, the more frustrating him is worth.
Setting up a supply-and-demand loop can drive a price to infinity.
About five years into my baldness study, I was sitting in a donut-dunking establishment in the University District at 3 a.m., after a night’s work as a janitor. I was with a coworker, who happened to be a karate expert — I’ll just mention in passing, as if it wasn’t relevant. As always in those days, I was wearing the Stetson, trying to slowly compost my hair, when a stranger who was the only other customer in the shop said, “Nice hat. What do you want for it?”
I said, thanks, but it’s not for sale.
He said, “Yes it is. Everything has its price. What do you want for the hat?”
I thought, what we have here is a failure to grasp a fundamental premise. If I say, “The hat is not for sale,” that implies, upon a brief reflection, that it has no price. Indeed, were it to have a price, it would be for sale at that price, thus contradicting the premise “not for sale.” Therefore, it can’t have a price.
I attempted to explain this to the gentleman, using words that I thought he might understand, like “premise,” “reflection,” “contradiction,” “therefore” and “no.”
Hearing my rebuttal to his assertion that the hat had a price clearly angered the man. When I finished laying out my reasoning, I expected he would counter my arguments with his own logical propositions, which I would again attempt to counter with my own. Instead, he said he would go to his pickup truck in the parking lot and fetch his .45, and my hat would be his.
I said, “The hat’s not for sale, not even for a .45.”
The look on his face at that moment proved my point in itself: It was priceless. He nearly choked on his sugar donut. He then proceeded to go out to his pickup truck. I briefly entertained the idea that I would die from a bullet wound, but that before taking my last breath, I would have the satisfaction of seeing my killer’s head kicked off by my friend. Actually, I am alive today to tell this story because the man was bluffing.
“What’s the point of all this, Wes?” you’re probably asking right now.
What I want is for people to be able to say the United States and its government isn’t for sale.
How hard is that? Think of it as highly as you would a treasured gift from a friend.