Scan the campus on any given day, especially one of the few days when it’s not raining around here, and you are bound to see one of them — the trucker hat.

That’s right. You know what I’m talking about. Maybe you even have a trucker hat perched on your head right now as you are reading this column.

For those of you who don’t know what a trucker hat is, it’s one of those new-wave retro-trendy hats with the foam fronts and the mesh backs that are being sported by the oh-so-trendy here on campus as we speak.

How far has this gone? Right now, for a mere $10.95 (plus shipping and handling) you can have your very own Bush-Cheney 2004 Election Campaign trucker hat. Just be careful when you burn it though. The fumes might make you sick.

Well, friends and neighbors, I have bad news for you. It’s over. That’s right, the trucker hat revolution has ended. It’s official. Even the Fashion and Style section of the New York Times says so.

“But wait,” you say, “I just bought one! And didn’t the trucker hat rage just begin? I just saw Justin Timberlake wearing one a week ago! And that Punk’d guy, too!”

Well, I’m sorry. Apparently this trend has been going on awhile now, and here in the backwaters of Northwest Ohio, we just didn’t know about it. According to the aforementioned New York Times, the trucker hat phenomenon began a long time ago.

Of course we all know that trucker hats have been worn by, well, truckers for years and years. Farmers too. Together, these two groups of people, the backbone of America, used the trucker hat as a cheap sunshade and to advertise the farm equipment and tobaccos that made their lives worth living.

According to the Times, young people in Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles began wearing them as a sarcastic response to the high-priced logo-festooned hats everyone else was wearing.

What a mess they’ve made.

What a monster they’ve created.

But I think the New York Times is lying. In fact, I know when and where the trucker hat revolution really began; it all started with a man named Ben Jones. For those of you familiar with the TV show “Dukes of Hazzard,” Jones played Crazy Cooter, the Duke brothers’ mechanically gifted ally who would spout lines like “This is Crazy Cooter, I may be crazy, but I ain’t dumb,” and “Rosco, that dog don’t hunt.”

And everywhere Crazy Cooter went, well, he had that damn trucker hat on, didn’t he? This, I believe was the beginning. Millions of kids my age saw Crazy Cooter wearing a trucker hat and the trucker hat resurgence was set in stone.

For those of you who are political science majors, it should also be noted that Mr. Jones served as a Congressman from Georgia in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Now every hipster-in-waiting is sporting foam and mesh like it was meant to be. I can always spot the truly trendy people, because they’ve got trucker hats on and they’re wearing them sideways.

While I’m sure the trucker hat resurgence has been quite a boon for the foam and mesh industries in China and Indonesia, where all of the hats are made before being sold at The Gap for $35, I won’t be sad to see this trend suffer the heinous death that tie-dye has been eluding for thirty years.

I feel that the tradition of the masses taking fashion cues from celebrities should be ended. If we don’t get out now, who knows what we might get stuck with for a few years.

Remember when people wore bib overalls with one of the straps undone? Or how about flannel shirts? Flannel shirts — the horror!

If we don’t stop now, before we know it, everyone around here is going to be wearing something very silly, and somewhere a marketing executive or movie star with a sick sense of humor is going to be laughing at our ridiculousness.

Please. Stop now.

Please.

But anyway, no matter what people wear in the future, the trucker hat trend is in the books. As one snippy boutique worker in Manhattan sneers in the Times story, “When tourists from Virginia are buying them at flea markets on Broadway, it’s not really our thing anymore.”

Ouch.

But don’t despair. The mesh from your now out-of-fashion trucker hat can be used as a fishing net for minnows, and you could use the foam to fill a life preserver of something. Now you’re ready for fishing! Or you could scrawl something like “Kiss the Cook” on yours, set up some barbequing, and let nature take its course.

Or maybe you could send them to West Virginia, where the trucker hat is immortal, and the only other place than Bowling Green that hasn’t heard this flash-in-the-pan trend has bitten the long, dusty road.

Shaun may know more about trucker hats than we think. For more insight, e-mail him at [email protected].