Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (18 page)

According to the figures, that’s five and a half bodies, or more precisely, fifteen of me.

They also note, in boring language that no greenie would ever concern himself with because it involves money, statistics, and budgets: “Using standard estimates of the statistical value of life, we show that the health costs associated with the San Francisco ban swamp any budgetary savings from reduced litter.”

Meaning, not only is the ban deadly, it’s also economically
a big, fat, pointless wash. In scientific terms, this ban is, like, “stoop-id.” Of course. Budgets and human life don’t rate when up against cool cloth sacks. What’s a life if you don’t take home your soy milk in an old fertilizer sack? To eco-maniacs, it just feels good to be acknowledged for doing the right thing, even if the right thing is the deadly thing. It’s just another element to being cool: Cloth makes you Fonzie, plastic makes you Potsie. (And paper makes you Al, but at this point the analogy breaks down.)

Which is why, when faced with facts that undermine the cool factor, the cool combat the truth with propaganda and outright lies. Take Rachel Carson’s seminal (i.e., full of noxious baloney) environmental screed,
Silent Spring
, which greenies hail as their bible. Carson proves Gutfeld rule number thirty-four: If there is anything truly harmful to the environment, it’s books on the environment.
Silent Spring
achieved something hardcore greenies always wanted: thinning the herd without getting blamed for it.

Carson—a biologist who had worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service—wrote a book damning an insecticide used to wipe out bad stuff like malaria, typhus, and the bedbug. But DDT’s real benefit was to kill mosquitoes, which helped put an end to malaria in many places throughout the world. But according to Carson, DDT would kill birds and cause cancer in humans. Most of the claims focused on data showing the thinning of eggshells in some feathered friends. In 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency banned the stuff, thanks to Carson’s book, and most other countries fell in line. Including countries, sadly, that really needed the chemical the most (i.e., in Africa).

Look, I’m no expert in chemistry (which I suspect you knew), but I can smell exaggeration a mile away, and it was clear that Rachel had gone overboard on DDT. Yes, DDT is a poison. That’s why it’s great—it kills things that might
kill us
. But as for this
chilling proof concerning its deadliness to humans or fowl, the evidence is strictly for the birds. No one bothered to check, however, because it wouldn’t have been cool to disagree with Carson. In a cocktail party where you wish to impress people, it’s easier to go off on a phony tangent about the brilliance of
Silent Spring
and the evil of “man-made chemicals.” That’s way cooler than saying, “You know what? DDT is good shit. There’s some in this drink, in fact.”

People—millions perhaps—died because one idea sounded cooler than the facts. While DDT was in use, malaria went the way of the dodo, disappearing in the United States and elsewhere. It’s as extinct as Hollywood patriotism. And without DDT? Without it, malaria returned like a long-lost Baldwin brother. The World Health Organization claims up to one hundred million lives might have been saved by this evil, vicious pesticide. (That has to be the worst comeback since Marion Barry.) Some blame malaria’s revival on climate change, but that’s just a cool way of avoiding the truth and perpetuating more death. You retain your cool credentials by avoiding the DDT question, while amping them up by bringing another “hot button” issue into the mix. If you could only say, “Reusable cloth sacks used for shopping, by reducing our dependence on oil used to make plastic bags, will help curb carbon emissions, which in turn will reduce malaria, and will in turn save millions of lives.” Yeah, it’s total BS, but you sound really cool saying it. I think I deserve a Nobel Prize (I’ll take Obama’s) just for coming up with it.

So here are the noncool facts: Malaria infects something like millions of people a year, primarily in Africa. Up to three million die. Right now, you hear a bit about celebrities backing mosquito nets to help stop this “greenie genocide.” The nets help, no doubt, but they ain’t DDT. From 2000 to 2008, nets are said to have
saved 250,000 babies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Quite an achievement. But only if you ignore the millions who have died since Carson’s book and the DDT ban it caused. I’m glad the babies lived, but I wish there could have been more. Maybe we should be netting a few of the celebrities instead.

An itchier consequence of a world without DDT? You now have an old friend to share a new bed with: the bedbug. There’s nothing more uncool than spending the night with someone you just met in a Lower East Side bar, only to wake up looking like you slept on a rack of ferrite beads. Bedbugs have been around forever (since the time of the early colonists, or when Harry Reid entered Congress) and were common pests on the old sailing ships way back when. They were pretty much everywhere, often considered the top pest, in line with cockroaches and Girl Scouts. What got rid of them? Hint: It rhymes with DDT. Because it is DDT.

The bugs disappeared in developed countries thanks to the chemical, and you’d only really find them in joints like prisons, hostels, or my office.

But now they’re back. For a long while, New Yorkers were blessed with screaming headlines about bedbugs infiltrating upscale shops and tourist meccas, including the Times Square movie houses. I made the mistake of looking up a website that tracks bedbug infestation, and then entering my zip code. Any place where bedbugs had been found and sprayed was represented by a red dot. My neighborhood was a sea of blood. I’m living in the freakin’ Amazon over here. Maybe this is what the super meant when he said the building allowed animals. (I’ve since moved.)

I still see exterminators around town, some equipped with bug-sniffing dogs (at least that preoccupation keeps the dog from finding my drugs). The bugs infest hotels, including the nice ones where the cups aren’t wrapped in plastic. The upside: I no
longer have to go to movies with my wife. Something I hate and she loves. All I have to say is, “That theater just got nailed for bedbugs,” and we end up drinking instead. Mention bedbugs to a woman, and they go into a skin-inspecting frenzy. Bottom line is that bedbugs are back all over the world, and it’s pretty much due to one major cool achievement: the removal of DDT.

Fact is, DDT was the bouncer that kept so many undesirables at bay. But the cool, too shallow to do the research, rallied against this precious pesticide. The result—more New Yorkers are scratching, and somewhere else far away, people are dying. Not cool.

Why do families exist? It took me forty-eight years of mistakes, idiocy, and regret to figure it out. Humans are not born with installed memories, handed over from those who spawned us. Babies do not come with ready-made software. The brat is, by nature, programmed not just to poop, but to make crappy mistakes. Hence the existence of parents, who are supposed to transmit information culled from their own awful mistakes. Moms can tell a daughter “not to give away the milk for free.” As clichéd and simplistic as it sounds, everyone pretty much gets the message. My girlfriends certainly did. When Mom isn’t there to talk about the cow, culture is let out to pasture, wallowing in poop. And tracking it everywhere. We all need a mom to transmit that “cow” story, more than ever.

Despite thousands of years of evidence that damns the practice, girls still fall for “cool guys.” Mom and Dad exist to inform kids that that choice never ends well. Common truths are common for a reason: They’re true. Bad boys are bad; beauty works temporarily, and as it fades, the bad boy trades you in for a
younger model, if he doesn’t die on a motorcycle on the way to pick up an ounce of weed from his ex-wife who’s now a dealer. This is old news, but since this old news doesn’t come preinstalled in the young, it’s always going to be new to them.

The cool, through media like motion pictures and music, separate children from their best information delivery systems (parents). And when these IDSs try to reason with their newly cool-indoctrinated offspring, their attempts are met with mockery by the world at large, which also embraces the cool’s attack on morality. The scenario creates a breezy nonmorality, which predictably benefits the cool, abortion clinics, and ex-wives who deal weed. A parent who tries to give advice to his child will now be portrayed as an outmoded oaf. It’s why MTV won more minds than Ronald Reagan. It started with matinee idols and led to pop singers, then rock stars, then hip-hop artists with reality shows about lifestyles that contain some style, but no life. Again, see Miley Cyrus’s convulsive tongue. That organ should be the mascot for an insipid, declining morality. Then quarantined. Or examined for scurvy.

I’m aware that it’s hilariously uncool to point out our poisoned culture. To be considered cool, you must agree to ignore the decline or, better, celebrate it. Writers do this all the time, in sitcoms, talk shows, or monthly think pieces, reassessing what naturally should be considered a flaw in our cultural development, as something perfectly acceptable, even morally superior. Just weeks ago, a talk show host, Touré (which is French for “imbecile”), waxed poetic on MSNBC about how a girlfriend’s abortion saved his life or, more important, his career. I suppose we were supposed to applaud the bravery of a man who feels he must go by one name. But I just saw a dweeb, in an effort to gain cool points, by out-feminizing the feminists. If Touré’s parents had acted like Touré, we never would have been graced with
his amazing monologue on the value of abortion. I doubt he’s thought too much about that. Touré doesn’t realize that his greatest argument for abortion is actually his own show. And does he really put an accent over the second syllable of his name? Seriously, he thought about that. How cliché.

Writers participate in this sort of high drama and inherently phony crap because it is their exercise in cool, as lame as it may be. Take Julie Drizin, who runs something impressive to people who don’t know better—the Journalism Center on Children and Families at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. (How does that fit on a diploma?) In short, you can bet that whatever she does for a living does less for children than the title does for her. In a column from 2012 in the
American Journalism Review
, she takes credit for having the word “illegitimate” removed from the AP stylebook. Apparently this word really upsets her. She describes it “like fingernails on a blackboard.” (Apparently neither she, nor the
AJR
, is really bothered by clichés.) When she heard an NPR host actually use the dreaded term, she says, “it was like an electric shock through the radio that spurred me to action.” She’s like a bad-language Batman! She quickly e-mailed the editors of
The Associated Press Stylebook
and instructed them to drop the phrase “illegitimate child.” And in their brave, judicious fashion, the AP did.

Why? Drizin explains, “Because it’s patriarchal, judgmental, and out of touch with reality.” And also, she’ll get to write about it, and pat herself on the back. I’m sure there was a sabbatical and a journal article in it. Another major step forward for the West! My God, China must find us hilarious. Or at least illegitimate.

I mean, she wants to ban “illegitimate” but continues to use “patriarchal”? There you have it, people: another blowhard bludgeoning common sense with academic catchphrases that function
like breathing on calcified campuses everywhere. When you hear the word “patriarchal,” you know it’s not a compliment, and it’s always tied to the equally evil phrase “judgmental.” Remember, in a world where dads are constantly portrayed as goofy, bumbling, and secretly abusive, pointing out the sobering truths about unmarried moms is like farting in an elevator (which has cost me at least two promotions).

But while banishing a phrase might elevate the cool factor of the director of an institute, what does it really do for actual children and families the institute is supposed to help? Do we think removing a word from a stylebook is really going to reduce illegitimacy or help families? That by removing the word, you remove the problem? (Yes, I get it—it’s not really a problem! No child is illegitimate—they’re all precious living creatures … unless they’re fetuses.

Maybe we should ban the term “family.” It’s so oppressive!

I argue the opposite: It’s dangerous to remove a word that represents a fact that these children are born out of wedlock. When you start replacing facts with feelings, you disturb the equilibrium between right and wrong, confusing them as one and the same while encouraging more destructive behavior. As a stigma is erased, a behavior becomes more prevalent. (I’d say out-of-wedlock births are the “new normal,” but I hate that phrase almost as much as Julie hates “illegitimate.”) As reported in the Daily Caller and elsewhere, more than 50 percent of all births to American women under thirty are out of wedlock. (Wait, is “wedlock” also a bad word? And what about percentages? Those imply math, which requires values … I’m so confused!) It’s society as envisioned by Murphy Brown.

There is little doubt that having a child out of wedlock is not the greatest reality for the child, compared with being born
to a two-parent household (still better than abortion, though). It increases the chances that the child will live a life marked by poverty, crime, and emotional problems. This is not to say you can’t be poor, thuggish, or psychotic in a two-parent household; I fulfill two of those descriptors and had a decent mom/dad childhood. And of course, you can point to a few people who did okay in a “broken” home, including our own president. But that’s because he had great, caring grandparents who made up for a bad dad. The point is, when you need to bring up exceptions as examples, you’re on the losing side of the debate.

But we all know it’s not cool to point this out. How come? Because for the white, educated folks, it’s not as big a problem as it is for others. More important, even if it’s a problem for minorities, you really can’t say that. It’s just too mean-spirited to make such claims. So while 29 percent of white kids are born to single women, the number jumps to 53 percent for Latinos and 73 percent for blacks. Bottom line: It’s not cool to point out illegitimate children, even if pointing them out is meant to help these children, or rather, everyone. The removal of the word “illegitimate” from the AP stylebook isn’t about the behavior, but their bigotry. It’s actually bigoted on the AP’s part to think certain people cannot handle the truth. Don’t we want men to marry and stick around? Is it wrong to point that out? Is it racist to expect that from
everybody
?