Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (16 page)

We now spend days obsessing over the killer’s personal life—and why? What’s with the interest in evil? It’s because “cool” made it so. It’s no longer necessary to follow any structural norm to be respected or envied. As long as you do something huge, with enormous worldwide impact, you will have an audience’s
attention. And the audience now seeks to know “why”—because the explanation has to be more than “they’re evil.” We love to dig deep into the psyche instead of accepting the simplicity and banality of evil.

The result is that we spend less time trying to stop evil and more time trying to understand it. And that enhances and encourages the “evil” personality. Even more, over time we tend to like them—glamorize them, even. We become the Clarice to their Hannibal. The Harry Morgan to Dexter Morgan. Dana Perino to her dog. Celebrities buy art made by serial killers. Rock stars move into homes where gruesome crimes unfolded. Aging actors make celluloid valentines for hippie terrorists. All of this is connected to the cool embrace of darkness. Modern pop culture has trained us to gravitate toward the guilty instead of their victims. The media has turned us all into naive defense attorneys. Johnnie Cochran wasn’t the truly cool one. The female prosecutor and her black assistant were. Quick, can you name them? Of course not.
^*
They didn’t get the endless media accolades. And they didn’t get the conviction, either, for similar reasons. They were on the uncool side of the case.

The media’s obsession with a killer’s emotional depth (of which there usually is none) inevitably makes them more appealing. What if we had just decided to stop covering the bombers once the arrest was made? What if we made a pact not to discuss their backgrounds and stopped showing their damn pictures? What if we stopped making it advantageous to the angry and lonely to do horrible things? What if I stopped asking questions?

Here is my prediction for the future of the surviving Boston Bomber. He’ll get life in prison. He’ll get married (after choosing
from a number of proposals). He’ll get fans. He’ll get a PhD. He’ll get published (poetry, my guess). He’ll get famous friends (who’ll claim he’s innocent). He’ll get laid. In short he’ll have a richer life than most people who didn’t bomb the limbs off Americans. And he’ll have famous admirers to thank for all of it.

Take Amanda Palmer, apparently a singer no one has really heard of for a while, who wrote an actual,
dreadful
love poem to the surviving terrorist. Instead of writing a poem for the victim, she chose the killer as her muse. Perhaps, in her head, she’ll be that one crazy lady who marries him—because she sees his good side!

Here is a sampling of her horrible nonrhyming mess, entitled “a poem for dzhokhar,” published on April 21, 2013:

Yes, she really is empathizing with a terrorist’s need for his iPhone. She is empathizing with his fear of waterboarding. She is also empathizing with his orgasms, I guess. She is empathizing with a creep who just blew up a child. She is without question beyond pond scum. (If there were a planet full of pond scum, the pond scum who lived there would refer to her as “lower than us.”)

So what is her message here? Well, that terror really is a lifestyle choice. It’s like taking up lacrosse or joining a frat. Or becoming a cool singer with ego-driven opinions disguised as thoughtfulness. If you’d only put yourself in
their
shoes, you’d understand, says the cool singer. However, Palmer doesn’t put herself in the shoes of the victims, because they were blown off.

What I hate most: How the cool pretend to be so smart
when they contemplate the root causes of bad men. They act like what they’re doing is somehow educational—even helpful or, most laughably, thoughtful. It’s none of that. Instead it’s pure selfishness—mental masturbation, in front of a crowd—an act of self-pleasure masquerading as analysis. In a way, they make the whole mess a lot worse because they dilute the comprehension and condemnation of horror. They turn evil into a therapy session. Instead of taking his life, now we offer the murderer a new one. Explain root causes to their families, please.

My helpful tip when someone brings up root causes: Remind them of that youthful bomber laying his deadly contraption right behind that young boy. Or the fact that the scum shot the MIT police officer Sean Collier in the back of the head.

Mindless root-causers cannot handle the contemplation of those deeds, however. They refuse to ponder the actual deeds: to look at evil in its face instead of rooting through the killer’s background for “signs” that he might have been bullied. The more they ask “why,” the more they avoid “how” and “who.”

People seem shocked that one of the bombers actually went to a party after the bombing. And to the gym! Oh,
why
would he do that! Oh my, the bomber was on Twitter!
Why
would he go there? Stop asking why, for God’s sake.

Evil people do work out and go to parties. It’s what makes them evil. They don’t care. Remember, it’s not like they did anything majestic. All they proved is that it’s very easy to leave primitive bombs among innocents and run. That’s all it takes for cowards.

But isn’t that what being cool is all about? The ability to subvert society and throw existing structures into chaos? Walking into a crowd and fucking shit up? Don’t those lowlifes who wish to leave a horrific impact really wish to be cool? The wake
of destruction behind them is so awesome! This is where godless self-involvement and Muslim supremacy meet: a desire to die big, to be remembered.

That may be the ultimate consequence of cool: that a life of obscurity is viewed as somehow inferior to a life of infamy. Being a good person who lives quietly but valiantly on a pretty ruthless planet, but manages to find grace in everyday things, no longer means much. Better to scatter your hate into a thousand bloody pieces. And have idiots write a poem about it.

How has cool destroyed the pride one takes in work? Look around you. Pop culture, through music, television, and magazines, defines the “go-getter” as a clueless clone working for the man. From the first time you had to read
Death of a Salesman
, you were told that working nine to five was for suckers. (One wonders if it would have been so revered if it had been called
Death of a Performance Artist Named Chloe
or
Death of a Homeless Junkie Named Gentle Ben
.) I’m pretty sure that when the play was written, millions of people around the world would have died for that job and lifestyle. And did.

When I worked at Rodale, the publishing company that puts out magazines like
Prevention
and
Men’s Health
, the place seemed sincere in its mission. Which was to make lots of money while appearing not to be interested in making lots of money. Instead, it claimed to be interested in promoting “natural,” “organic,” and “pure.” (As in “pure profit.” Which I salute.)

There was also the magazine
Organic Farming
, which sadly had no centerfold. It later morphed into something called
Organic
Style
, which folded after becoming an “organic ATM.” This is no surprise in an arena (publishing) where losing money is an Olympic event. Also, the name
Organic Style
just sounds gross. I hear it, and I think of hair gel made of pig compost. It was no surprise to me that the publisher of such dreck, Maria Rodale, published an “open letter” to President Obama on the
Huffington Post
proclaiming that the gassing of Syrians with chemical weapons was no different from Americans using pesticides on their produce. We’re all Hitlers, it seems. You cannot create this idiocy in a lab, folks. It can only occur naturally.

Rodale reflected the ideology that natural is cool and man-made is evil. In the offices, you couldn’t swing a cat full of hemp without hitting a person on some macrobiotic diet or a weird regimen of shrubs and herbs. One of my first friends, “Ryan” (not his real name—he might still be alive and want to offer me a cleansing), was a handsome lad in his late thirties who could have been the town playboy if his skin hadn’t been dyed completely orange because of his obsessive eating of carrots and other beta-carotene products. He was a walking Creamsicle. He ran two or three times every day, never mind the weather. I would see him jogging on Lehigh Street wearing three or four layers of clothing—in the summer. He was the first manorexic I ever met, and, being orange and covered in layers, he resembled a homeless sherbet.

His lifestyle was odd but wholly defensible because it was cool. You could do anything nutty, as long as the earth didn’t get hurt and what you did to yourself was somehow “natural.” These were the folks who overdosed on fiber, lecturing you on climate change while passing gas that could power three tractors. (Never jog behind an organic/fitness freak. Talk about methane combustion. Who knew you could drown from flatulence?)

I get the whole thing. The earth is cool. If you like the earth, then you’re cool.

And you make yourself feel cool by embracing this cool relationship. So go ahead, hug an earthquake. What do I care?

What was uncool to planet-pleasers? People like you and me with a “dependent” relationship on the planet, who use this precious orb for their own personal desires. People like corporate lawyers, doctors, accountants, housewives, cops. Just about anyone in a uniform or a suit and a tie was evil because they abused the planet daily. The only organic garden they cultivated was in their shower drain. If you didn’t understand how far superior it was to mountain-bike in really expensive clothes and munch on organic buckwheat flapjacks with artisanal pomegranate syrup instead of scrambled eggs, then you weren’t
one of us
.

And that’s the essence of organic cool, really: exclusion. The organic health movement really is about excluding you and saying, “I am better than you because I care.” And can afford to care. The cool are united by their hidden bank accounts and the rhythmic regularity of their colons.

Which is why I must make a very simple point: These people are not just uncool, they are dupes. They are wrong. Nearly all of their hobbies and amusements cost way more than what a typical Joe Schmo takes part in. Their super-cool globe-hugging lifestyle actually puts more into our capitalistic society than I ever did. They’re rabid consumers in Luddite disguise and their clothing costs more than the crap I would buy on sale at the outlets in Reading, Pennsylvania.

And their philosophy is a joke too. The earth isn’t benevolent. And it’s far from cool. I could list all the ways that natural things kill you, but that book would be thicker than the health care bill, which is also deadly. Instead, I’ll just bring up one.

When I left Rodale, my next job was at
Stuff
magazine. I wrote a feature there called “A Leper Walks into a Bar,” which is, funnily enough, about a leper named José. José got leprosy when he was a teen, playing football. He got cleated on the field, and the soil there had entered his body. The soil contained armadillo feces, which spread leprosy. (Good to know this now, right?)

So, in short: My pal got leprosy from an armadillo, one of God’s great creatures, a natural beast that roams this adorable planet. He did not get leprosy from a Twinkie, a Camel cigarette, or a gallon of gas. He got it from an armadillo’s ass.

Anyway, José is fine, happily married, with kids—no thanks to the earth. To him, nature is uncool. Nature made him a leper. And man-made medicine helped him lead a normal life, with a great family and a great future. The earth screwed him, man saved him.

So where does all this obsession with nature and organic products take you? Well, if you’re a celebrity, you’ll invariably write a book about it, one with elitist, quirky recipes that no one can follow. (See the bizarre transformation of Gwyneth Paltrow’s career into a twig-eating Martha Stewart. How did a blond Olive Oyl who looks like she lives on twenty-five calories a day get to write a cookbook? Mario Batali looks like he could use her to pick his teeth.) But for everyone else, following the organic trail makes them gullible, and vulnerable to idiotic ideas. And ultimately it can kill them (starting with their relationships first).

The only way a freakish health practice can take hold is if someone famous deems it cool. Look at the hysteria, driven by assorted Hollywood wackjobs, regarding vaccines. Once Jenny McCarthy opened her gob about an unsubstantiated link between autism and vaccines, her cool cachet went up. Previously a pinup drifting in and out of medium-profile relationships, she found her cool calling demonizing a practice that has saved the
lives of millions. And because of this hysteria over a life-saving medical treatment, parents have avoided vaccinating their kids, putting them at risk for previously controlled illnesses. Here is where cool kills, but the cool never know, because their depth of research stops at googling their own names. Which leads me to a tweet I came across back in January 2013, from someone you’ve probably never heard of.

That was a tweet by a pretty cool cucumber who goes by the name of Gonjasufi. I bought his debut album,
A Sufi and a Killer
, maybe three years ago, and he ain’t lying. He is a Sufi, I guess, and judging by this tweet, he’s okay with killing.

I follow Gonjasufi not for medical advice, but because I really like his music. He’s a freakish rapping wackadoodle, a human who sounds like the offspring of a frog and Larry King. He’s also a yoga teacher, which rounds out his cool pedigree nicely. He’d be the main cartoon if PBS ran Saturday morning cartoons.

It’s my fault, I guess, for following a freak when it comes to vaccinations, but I felt, that day in January 2013, that I had to respond. I replied to his tweet with: