Americans long have leavened their powerful global image with goofiness, a cheerful confidence that can deflect international wonder over certain strains of ignorance into a smile.
Behold, for example, the cheesehead hat.
Made of sofa foam and sunny yellow defiance, the hat was created in the late 1980s in response to the taunting faced by supporters of sports teams in Wisconsin, which has long called itself America’s dairyland.
“Cheeseheads!” residents of neighboring Illinois said. The insult was embraced and, yes, turned on its head — particularly in the realm of a certain football team named the Green Bay Packers.
Soon, Wisconsin sports fans were appearing at events wearing the hats shaped like large, dimpled wedges of cheddar. (The dimples evoked Swiss, but U.S. notions of cheese, especially processed versions, are another slice of Americana.)
This doesn’t mean that a single state has a lock on silly hats, though the “Wisconsin Cheesehead” is now included in the Smithsonian’s American History Museum. U.S. sports — college sports especially — bounces with fans who throw inhibition aside and put on horns or animal ears, or strip off shirts and paint their torsos even in freezing weather.
The seasonal display is perhaps the most colorful, and harmless, of the “Hold my beer” exuberance that’s defined generations of Americans at home and overseas.
We are loud. We do dumb things. We are tribal in ways both superficial (sports) and significant (the current political landscape).
We have a pretty good record of stumbling into greatness. “I wasn’t thinking too deeply about it,” the creator of the cheesehead hat, Ralph Bruno, once told Milwaukee magazine about his inspiration, which is now trademarked, owned by a professional football team and sells for $28.99 apiece.
Above all — literally, with this towering block of fake cheese that just might be a metaphor — Americans are known for being able to laugh at ourselves.
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Part of a recurring series, “American Objects,” marking the 250th anniversary of the United States. For more American objects, click here. For more stories on the anniversary, click here.
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