Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (2 page)

Left and right. Good and evil. Republican, Democrat. Most people see the world split into two chunks. It’s all we can handle. Two things. If you add a third, it gets weird. If you add a fourth, it becomes an orgy. And orgies are messy, from what Bob Beckel tells me.

In the last four years, these divisions have become more prevalent. Feminists versus religious institutions; black conservatives versus white liberals; gays versus churches (never the mosques); taxpayers versus redistributionists; public breast-feeders versus
people who’d rather not see your breasts (unless there’s a vacancy); clams versus oysters.

I believe this duality is unavoidable, but one division is wider and more pernicious. And it dwarfs the other divisions and wreaks more havoc than all of them combined.

That duopoly is the cool versus the uncool. And it’s the coolopoly, the monopoly of cool, that seeks domination. Pick a political, cultural, or moral universe, and in each one it’s the cool who seek to punish, mock, or thwart the uncool. They do this freely and without much resistance, for exacting cool revenge is so common that the uncool let it happen without a fight—a sort of cultural Stockholm syndrome. Even as the cool put out ads condemning bullying, they spend the rest of their time turning persecution into an art form. The cool are just bullies with stylists and publicists.

From here on in, when I say “cool,” I am referring to those people who, generally liberal, pretend that the predictable, acceptable choices they make are actual risks. They pat themselves on the back for making decisions that are cheered on by a media and pop culture who already agree with them. It’s the engine driving so much pointless activism. The cool think, “If I embrace marching against war and capitalism, then I will be embraced by the famous people who also march against war and capitalism. Maybe I’ll meet John Krasinski!” Their “rebellion” is a way to be liked and a way to be accepted by people they admire. And so the phony cool assume the mantle of edginess and contemporary cachet while mocking the dreary lives of the worker bee, the businessman, the religious family structure, the nonartistic clerk with a job he cannot brag about, the housewife, the occupant of a neighborhood considered drab, the man who enlists, the woman who rejects feminist fads, and me.

And if you’re reading this book, most likely, you.

This bigotry toward the bland is neither harmless nor slight, but results in actual suffering, and even death. The desire to be cool overwhelms the most basic elements of logical thinking—sending morality from a vertical plane to horizontal. Instead of good triumphing over evil, they now exist side by side in a relativistic universe judged solely on the merits of being cool. In a world structured by phonies in Hollywood and elsewhere, good and evil take a backseat to Bonnie and Clyde. Being hip not only excuses the heinous—being heinous makes you hip. An ugly terrorist is a terrorist. A boyish one? Cool. Put him on the cover of
Rolling Stone
. He looks like a long-lost, slightly dazed Jonas Brother. He could be Jann Wenner’s new intern. An intern with privileges.

We live in a time when a man who spent years as a prisoner of war after heroically defending his country is beaten handily in a presidential campaign by a young inexperienced senator who previously was known for organizing communities for purposes no one seems to remember. I mean, on the ladder of achievement, community organizing ranks slightly below selling celebrity toenails on eBay. But not anymore.

Was that simply an ideological and political battle, or was it something else? Perhaps Obama was a better candidate, but why, really? Only in the modern era can a bona fide war hero be depicted as a doddering old coot. And unless you’re Keith Richards, you cannot be cool once you’re over fifty-five. Once you qualify for the cover of the AARP magazine, you’re toast. Might as well just get the Shirley Temple box set and a Hoveround. I have both, which is why the ladies love me.

In the McCain-Obama election, as in the one that followed, the variable that swayed the electorate was something new entirely. And that something new was the heightened culmination and
demonstration of coolness. For many, voting for Obama was your entry to the cool club—a rejection of the same old faces and same old pasts. I mean, McCain probably didn’t even have an Apple ID! It was better to elect someone whose face was not only new, but whose past was almost undefinable. Plus, he was young and black. I get it. If I were black, maybe I would have voted for him too. But I’d like to think qualifications also mattered.

In fact, in any place where something isn’t cool, you will see these three words strung together: “old white men.” Whether it’s a clunky news editorial on gun control or a withering analysis of a Republican debate, the media will dismiss it with that handy cliché—they’re just “old white men.”

But the haters of the old white male forget that it was a hardy group of old white men who created this country … as well as a lot of amazing products that saved the lives of a whole bunch of other men (and women, black, white, and pastel). Sure, they were okay with a lot of other really crappy stuff (i.e., slavery), but compared with the rest of the awful, pitiless world, they were—literally—revolutionaries.

I have, throughout most of my life, veered toward the opposite of what’s considered cool. A look at my yearbook photos reveals as much. My appearance veered between Greg Brady and a suburban Iggy Pop. When people had long hair, I preferred spiky. When crew cuts were in, I looked like Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo
. When kids embraced disco, I steered toward punk. And when punk became cool, I moved to metal. Now, as I am slightly older and a little less gorgeous, I listen to obscure, noisy electronica and doom metal that, at times, could clear the killing floor in a slaughterhouse. I enjoy stuff that accelerates my own exclusion. But it’s not for effect. I do like the stuff. And I like being alone. (Which is lucky—the rest of humanity seems only too willing to oblige.)

My avoidance of mainstream entertainment isn’t reactionary. I just tend to move away from stuff that bugs me and toward stuff that surprises me. It puts me on the outside of a lot of things, including the hip. It’s how I became a conservative and, ultimately, a libertarian. My politics are simple: Leave me the hell alone, and take your definitions of cool and bullshit exclusionary language with you. My next step, I imagine, is to become a monk. (I actually am kind of serious. I toyed with making fruitcake, and own a number of hooded robes that I stole from hotels.)

Now in middle age, I’ve come to realize that avoiding cool will no longer suffice. For it has poisoned everything I know to be enjoyable and interesting in life. The concept of cool takes precedence over everything these days—from politics to personality, from food to fashion, from sex to safety, from climate to Colt 45s. Coolness is a replacement for a strong ego and operates as a safe, ambivalent response to evil in the world. The result: We are left with a dreary planet of self-esteem sponges more interested in capturing the approval of phonies than actually doing something real or positive with their lives. It’s an attitudinal apocalypse. It’s killing us, and we don’t seem to mind.

The aftereffects of the cool revolution can be felt everywhere and are reflected in everyday behavior. We used to consider the right thing to do; now we consider the cool thing to do. In fact, the stuff we were once expected to take part in suddenly becomes cheesy, a waste of time. We’ve abandoned veterans’ parades for divestment sit-ins and courtship for hanging out. Pop culture has replaced principle.

Instead of helping your parents through tough times, it’s cooler to adopt a tiger through the World Wildlife Fund. Rather than quietly engage in traditions that keep a family together, it’s just cooler to waste your money on a trip to Burning Man to find
yourself. Rather than empathize with victims of terror, write a poem about the terrorist. Rather than visit an old folks’ home, camp out in a city park and call the most liberating country in the universe a police state.

The end result? At the minimum, wasted lives. At the worst, death and destruction for the greatest nation ever. Cool is a path to nothing at all pleasing or constructive in the long term, a path that has paved over fine traditions—traditions that, in better times, were substantial activities that represented actual caring. When a teen decides to pierce his nipple, it’s not just to make his nipple look like a different, cooler nipple. It’s a middle finger to the people who loved and cared for him. He chose cool over them. I hope his nipple gets gangrene, falls off, and ends up in an omelet eaten by Liev Schreiber in an East Village diner.

Because, when it comes down to it, being cool means not caring. And not caring means inevitable decline. What cool does is tell people that decline is actually kind of awesome (if it’s done with the right amount of ennui—see France), while acting mature and aging gracefully are quaint. And before you know it, you’re that fifty-year-old idiot, sitting in the corner of a local bar, dressed like a Beastie Boy, your faded tattoos stretching over mottled fat like Satan’s Saran Wrap, as you try to convince yourself that the worn-out chick with the gray Volvo eyed you up a second time. To actually give a damn about manners and elegance makes you a target of mockery.

The aim of being cool, really, is to say, “I am not like them. I am not a dork. I’m relevant.”

Which is why everything done these days springs from a fear of dorkiness despite the fact that it’s the uncool dorks who make the trains run on time. There’s nothing more boring than a train schedule, but without it how would the hip find the right subway to
that Williamsburg flea market where they can spend one hundred bucks on a T-shirt from a late-seventies Cheap Trick tour? (I was there—a stoner threw up on my shoes.) Without the uncool, the cool wouldn’t exist. Why is that? Because cool contributes nothing to “how things work.” Oh, something that appears cool can work (see everything made by Apple). But making such products does not rely on its makers being or appearing cool, but thinking and working hard. Behind that cool is a ton of very old-fashioned hard work performed by anonymous badasses. But they hide it—like the ugly coal plants that ultimately fuel every electric car.

The definition of cool: popularity without achievement. It’s how President Obama got the youth vote. Ask any kid who voted for him, “Why did you do it?” and the convoluted, wide-eyed answer will ultimately translate into: “He’s cool and that other guy wasn’t.” (Now they’re paying the brunt of Obamacare. Suckers.) The media pushed this to the hilt, and much of the public bought it. Hope and change is cool because it sounds cool, even if it’s undefined. An activist government is cool too, because giving stuff away is cool—especially when it’s other people’s stuff—and therefore perceived as philanthropic. But philanthropy without feeling the pain in your own wallet is super-easy to do, and about as cool as giving away your roommate’s food while he’s at work trying to pay for that food.

So what is perceived as cool in today’s world, when it’s really the opposite?