Nob Heads Getting Bigger

The Graphs and Charts division of the Allied Hatters and Milliners Association of Corporate America is reinforcing today the findings from a number of scientific studies showing that the heads of the so-called swells in society are literally swelling.

Said James Cavanagh from Graphs and Charts, “In some industries, for instance in banking, we’re seeing heads puff up as much as two full hat sizes and more.”

Explained Dr. Natalie Mitchell, professor of Epidemiological Studies at Princeton University, “When the Centers for Disease Control started connecting the dots on all the bigwigs if you will complaining to their private doctors that their top hats were cutting off the blood flow to their brains and their comb-overs were no longer reaching the other side, we knew we had an outbreak of spontaneous macrocephaly on our hands.

“We of course at first assumed we were dealing with a bad reaction to some new fad that had swept exclusively through elite circles. Perhaps some impossibly rare and pricey black market male enhancement potion or miracle hair growth ointment.

“We even worried that the nob class if you will had gone back to thinking drinkable gold is the mythical Elixir of Life.

“These early conjectures, however, did not end up panning out if you will. Certainly we found plenty of trendy, unbelievably expensive sovereign remedy abuse. Addiction to the powdered organs of endangered species, for example, was rampant. But none of these costly nostrums could be tied to water on the brain or cranial hyperostosis or any sort of systemic inflammatory response syndrome.

“So we handed this head scratcher if you will over to our colleague Dr. Trina Martinez in the Department of Epidemiological Psychology.”

Said Dr. Martinez, “Our first working hypothesis was that these people were collectively suffering from a hysterical swelling of the brain as a consequence of mentally beating themselves up for the unprecedented harm all their greed and their runaway sense of self-importance have caused societies and individuals across the globe.

“But we couldn’t find one single shred of evidence that these people were feeling the least bit of shame or guilt whatsoever.

“So we reasoned that the swelling must be a consequence of cudgeling their brains, as they say, to reconcile all the overwhelming evidence that they are the banes of the species with their certainty that they are its stars.

“But our fMRI studies have shown that when the ultra-rich are forced to entertain the obvious truth that the world would be a better place without them, they exhibit no more brain activity than it takes them to dismiss a butler, say, or liquidate a company.”

Said Dr. Mitchell, “The breakthrough came when we teamed up with our colleagues over in Evolutionary Social Biology. It seems that what we’re seeing is a re-awakening of a long dormant social evolutionary survival mechanism from our more communal hunter and gatherer days.

“In a collective dynamic not yet fully understood, those among our prehistoric ancestors who grew overly proud of themselves, and thus threatened to unravel the tight-knit social fabric, experienced a swelling of the head that made them quite unattractive to the females of the species, who of course didn’t exactly relish the idea of passing the huge-headed gene-delivery boys of these stone-age megalomaniacs through their birth canal and into the next generation.

“As for how much more head swelling we can expect to see in the modern-day versions of these threats to the social fabric, archeological evidence suggests that the heads of their ancestral counterparts kept growing till they exploded.

“So there’s hope.”