The Penman Hummus Theorem

You can learn a lot about people from what they emphasize in life. If life was everlasting, emphasis wouldn't mean anything, since all proportions are equal when the denominator is infinity. But luckily I'm going to die, and you can know me by what I do. In other words, I only have so many entries I can write, and this one is about the Penman Hummus Theorem.

I wanted to give this blog some time, let readers accumulate, before I unleashed the idea. Didn't want to start logging in the forest of life if no one's there to hear the sound of the trees falling. But I'll graduate in a few semesters and Wikipedia doesn't know I exist. Infamy, here I come:

The Penman Hummus Theorem: The best single indicator of the degree to which an American is Democrat or Republican is the degree to which that person likes or dislikes hummus.

Let me give an example before I rigorously defend the theorem. I was raised in a conservative home notably lacking hummus. When I turned eighteen and registered to vote, I think I put Republican. But this spring and summer, during the excitement of the Democratic primaries, I studied abroad in China. I had one friend there, a British girl (thus outside the theorem's scope), who was adamant about the wonders of hummus. I tried it, swallowing a huge piece of bread tipped with hummus, and was stoically unconvinced.

Like things usually happen once hummus gets involved, though, events were transpiring beyond my knowledge. I relied on the New York Times for my news--liberal. I read Dreams from My Father--fantastic. And when we couldn't take Chinese food any more, we went to the Turkish restaurant to eat overpriced hummus.

Now I enjoyed hummus on limited occasions. That is, I voted Obama for president and Republican for everything else. Everyone I know is the same. My roommate, a closet Democrat, likes hummus only when he's eating by himself. Matches aren't often so specific. Rank yourself 1 to 10 on how liberal you are and 1 to 10 on how much you like hummus and the numbers are freakishly united. No formal studies have been conducted--yet--but I've tried to ask lots of different kinds of people--friends, enemies, girls, my black friend--and almost all of their answers bolsters the results. R² is better than any other factor I know of.

Well, even if there is a correlation, you argue, it could probably be explained in terms of geography. But they call California a blue state for a reason--they gobble the stuff over there. The Penman Hummus Theorem is a better predictor than red or blue state statistics would be. Florida is a swing state, but if I want to know who you supported, I wouldn't look to your age, or your gender, or your race, or your height. I'd ask if you like hummus.

I have my theories about what causation underlies the Penman Hummus Theorem's correlation. Republicans don't like foreigners or their food. Hummus is mashed-up babies, and Democrats like abortion. In the movie Aladdin, when they're escaping the Cave of Wonders, the lava shoots up to form the word "hummus" (subconsciously linking the ill-effects of estate tax on the government to a food--those cunning liberal Disney animators who want to limit Republican taste).

But I don't have to be right about why the Penman Hummus Theorem is true. It's enough to have contributed one theorem to the repository of human knowledge (and if it were to show up on Wikipedia, I would humbly bear the fame). I can die now, happy and hummus-ed.