Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (22 page)

Accompanying the death of modesty: the death of character. It’s kinda scary that if you don’t act a certain way, other athletes call you a “cornball” or label you a freak. It’s got to be tough, I admit, for a twenty-two-year-old rookie to know that his unusual political leanings (i.e., he’s not a leftist) leave him open to ridicule. Take Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III, who said the
most uncool thing a black athlete can say: “For me, you don’t ever want to be defined by the color of your skin … you want to be defined by your work ethic, the person that you are, your character, your personality.” That comment resulted in ridicule from a dipshit ESPN analyst, Rob Parker, who wondered if Griffin “was a brother or a cornball brother.” Meaning, Parker questioned his “authenticity” as a cool black dude. Apparently Parker would have preferred Aaron Hernandez, and he’s not even black. But maybe to Parker his litany of violence certainly screams “non-cornball.”

That cool rule—that you are a “cornball” for rejecting high-risk lifestyles—sends a horrible message to kids who aren’t lucky enough to be pro athletes. Reading isn’t a core skill for pro athletes, to be sure, but it is for the 99 percent of student athletes who will need to read a job application one day.

A lot of the cool mystique of professional athletes originates not from the sports world but from the entertainment world. It used to be that being a pro athlete was
enough
. No longer. Simply excelling on the field is not cool anymore. Blame bling fests like
Cribs
. The athlete has learned that the attention-seeking squeakiest wheel doesn’t just get the grease, it gets the groupies and the paychecks. And ultimately divorce, alimony, and rehab.

Athletes get addicted to their cool image and, once they retire, often make desperate attempts to “keep cool.” For example, if you’re Dennis Rodman, a man facing a life of aging irrelevance, you go to North Korea. Back in February 2013, the former US basketball star and tongue-studded buffoon visited NK with the Harlem Globetrotters on
Vice
magazine’s dime, hanging out with leader Kim Jong-un. This is what happens, I guess, when the past seems better than the future.

Mind you, this visit took place right after NK released an alarming video threatening to bomb the United States, featuring
footage of our president in flames. That’s kind of uncool, but when you’re being feted by a dictator, why bring up such issues? That’s totally uncool, dude.
Let’s party
. Oh yeah, the country had just conducted an underground nuclear test weeks before too, but I’m sure that was only for fun. And Rodman probably thinks “underground test” is a strip club move done for men in sweatpants.

Rodman spoke to the media about Kim (a creepy tyrant who’s become a bedsore on the earth’s ass) at the Sunan Airport as he left:

Translation: Come on, guys, he’s cool. He’s the president (or something like a president) of a giant country! That’s cool! And it’s cool that I get to hang with him (unlike you). Further translation: “I can’t rebound anymore, so I need to do
something
to stay famous. I’d eat a live ferret for another fifteen minutes of attention. And to be honest, I’m kind of hungry.”

After the idiocy broke, Rodman faced a barrage of criticism. He appeared on ABC’s
This Week
with George Stephanopoulos to try to justify his bizarre lovefest with a petulant, diminutive monster (Kim, not Stephanopoulos). He wore sunglasses and dressed in a garish jacket and baseball cap. (Cool rule number one: Play by your own rules! Screw those stiffs in suits!) When
George asked Dennis why he’d travel to a place with such a horrible record on human rights, bringing up its death camps, Rodman replied that “we do the same things here.” Which qualifies him as a Huffpo columnist, right there.

Does this stuff sound familiar? The celebrity naivety? The relativism? The “we are no better than they are” line? Dennis Rodman is a Lillian Hellman who could rebound (except Rodman’s prettier). He’s Jane Fonda with a jump shot. He’s Sean Penn with a nose ring and a catalog of sorry tattoos. He’s no rebel. He’s just another celebrity who, addicted to cool, is willingly duped into any kind of phony propaganda. Just make this guy feel special, and he will say anything about you (provided you pay his way and make sure he flies first-class). He will love you. He will defend you. He will think you’re cool. I’d tell Rodman that he’s a poor man’s Walter Duranty, but he’d only say, “Inka dinka doo.” Which, by the way, he often does say, when he’s not saying “awesome.”

Of course Rodman probably saw very little of North Korea, but he might have read a little history. He was, like so many apologists, up on his relativistic game—responding to the death camp accusation with an accusation of American guilt. When all else fails, pull that “we’re just as bad” card, because it’s the coolest thing to say when you have nothing else to say. I call these morons “dictatortots,” for they act like children in the face of seductive, coercive power. They just don’t know any better. But they know one thing: It’s cool to be liked; it’s cool to get attention, even if it’s from someone who leaves a trail of starved bodies in his wake.

Today, Rodman is just another example of the sad kind of “thinking” that now comes from our athletes. I get it coming from professors, grad students, and bad actresses. Athletes, who spend their lives working hard and understanding the nature of
achievement, should know better. But as we move farther and farther away from the real meaning of sportsmanship, this is what you get: Rodman indulging a maniac, while denigrating the country that made him rich. If Kim is so great, and “we’re no better,” why isn’t he hanging around strip clubs in Pyongyang instead of Miami? Maybe because in North Korea, the models aren’t anorexic by
choice
.

Recently I asked a pal of mine who played pro baseball, Rico Brogna, about the difference between great athletes and their lesser peers. “The best performers realize the value of being rewarded for their hard work and don’t take it for granted. Players want to play, simply stated … they don’t want to do any other outside crap, they just want to work out and play their sport.” Those athletes seem to be as rare as a Tim Tebow touchdown.

Locker rooms are now full of stunted adolescents chasing fame and wealth, when—as Rico says—they should be keeping their eye on the ball. Because the game is no longer enough, athletes spend more time cultivating a shallow persona to elevate their cool profile. And this explains the tacky clothes, the awful cars, the horrendous jewelry, and all the perpetual rap sheets. In an effort to create an identity, so many athletes have adopted the
same
identity: the bejeweled, club-happy, limousine-loving lout, more enthralled by attention than achievement. You can’t blame all of them. They became rich before they became men. And generally, because they never become the latter, they lose the former too.

But if you want to look for real character, and real grace in sports, I have one suggestion: the NCAA girls’ bowling finals. I’m watching it now on television, and I’m entranced by these glorious teams of girls in skirts and shirts … bowling. Mind you, none of these girls have swimmer bodies. They don’t have
gymnast bodies. They don’t have masculine frames that suggest months of steroid abuse. Most of them are of average build—a few are chubby, others are just big-boned. In a word, they are normal. Delightfully normal. And so uncool. Some could kick my ass (a man can fantasize). I just love how much fun they’re having and how unassuming their fun truly is.

As I watch the girls (it’s Vanderbilt vs. Nebraska—two states I’ve never visited), I’m thinking: Why do they seem so cool to me? It leads me to think: Where did they learn to bowl? A bowling alley, I know—but who taught them? I may be wrong, but I conclude that these girls have awesome relationships with their parents and especially their dads. Bowling is family activity. It’s something you do on a weekend or on your birthday with your folks. And chances are it was the dad who got you into bowling—it’s the thing you can do with a girl that doesn’t involve dolls and their ridiculously complex dollhouses. I notice there are men in the crowd, with painted faces, cheering them on. I’d paint my face for them too. These women may never make the money that Rodman did, and squandered on booze and drugs, but something tells me they don’t need to. Whatever they have already is more than enough: a sense of grace, modesty, and character you can only find in a place where you wear other people’s shoes.

What is the South?

Ask any mediocre comedian, and within seconds he’ll fart an incest joke. It’s the stinky, default punch line for hacks until they find themselves headlining somewhere scary in Alabama. Then it’s nervous jokes about city folk.

And if you ask anyone in media about the South, they might start humming the theme to
Deliverance
, following up with a line about “squealing like a pig.” It’s the go-to laugh-getter for lazy minds with high school intellects. (Me included.)

To them, the South is just the opposite of the cool and the hip. Unless, of course, the cool and the hip adopt the Southern routine ironically. You’ve seen it: shootin’ pool; drinkin’ cheap beer; growin’ a beard; wearin’ sleeveless T-shirts in Bushwick, Williamsburg, or any other hip enclave outside Manhattan; droppin’ your
g
s in bestselling books by sexy talk show hosts.

When people rag on the South, they’re using it as a proxy for everything else that we’ve come to define as uncool: family,
church, tradition, fattening food, guns, outdoor dogs, sweet tea, and Walmart as a shopping destination and meeting place for families and friends.

And what is the South known for, in a good way? Manners. Is it any wonder, as the South goes, so goes the way we treat one another generally? In the South, people still call you sir or ma’am, and it’s not just when highway cops ask you to slowly exit your car (I was only adjusting my zipper). But there’s nothing cool about “please” or “thank you.” If anything, manners are now employed only by the scarred, depraved villains in movies, as an ironic precursor to violent flourishes that pass as edgy comedy. The meaning: Anyone who happens to be polite is probably also a predator or a pervert or both.

Family values, holding hands, and saying grace at dinner—you can call that backward-ass, but
Duck Dynasty
is on to something. (Its phenomenal ratings can attest to that, as well as the public’s visceral, angry reaction to Phil Robertson’s temporary suspension.) The South has got some great employment stats, and primarily Republican governors attracting new businesses and new citizens. It’s working. Which is maybe why the cool need to ridicule it so much.

In the South, in any restaurant, you might see a family praying before their meal. This is about as anathema to the New York hipster as watching FNC with an armed pro-lifer. All at once it’s laid out: an intact family, platters of fattening foods, affordable clothing worn without the requisite sense of irony, and religion. God, how uncool is that! Why can’t they all just go away and let us live our lives without them reminding us of all the things we’ve happily rejected in favor of ironic sideburns?

Living in the South, unless it’s Austin, is the equivalent of attending Scarlet Letter U, for Uncool.

A California real estate firm called Movoto proved how acceptable it is to defecate all over a large swath of the country. They ran an article listing the most “redneck” cities in the country. They made their choices based on a very specific criterion: a list of attributes you could probably guess without reading the next sentence. But here it is: “Redneck” was defined by the number of Walmarts, the number of NASCAR tracks, and the number of people who didn’t finish high school. Also included: how many taxidermists, gun stores, and country music stations. Yep, if you’re a typical Southerner, right now you’re cleaning your Gatling to the sound of Larry Gatlin under the frozen stare of a stuffed deer. You’re probably also chewing tobacco and spitting it on the floor, next to your inbred cousin who’s having sex with a chicken.

Anyway, Atlanta won the prize as most redneck, but the runners-up included Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Nashville, and Tulsa.

Before I go on, you gotta ask yourself: What kind of real estate firm would go to the trouble of denigrating markets where there is viable real estate? It’s as if they were saying, “This market is too uncool for us. We only sell refurbished Victorians in the Haight.” Problem is, that’s not just bad business, it’s bigoted business. It’s like a barber banning the high and tight—not the best way to build a customer base.

I called the real estate company and asked their publicity guy why they chose to do this article. He said they thought it would be funny and might generate some buzz. Which it did. I crapped all over the firm on
The Five
.

I asked the guy if they thought “redneck” was pejorative, and he said no. Then I asked him why adjacent to the article, the
website featured
that
scene from
Deliverance
—the odd-looking kid with the banjo. Was that supposed to be a
positive
representation of the South?

The poor guy stuttered a bit and conceded that, no, comparing places to a crazy, violent hillbilly culture isn’t exactly a valentine.

And then I asked him if they would consider doing the equivalent for blacks. Would his company ever do the country’s most “hip-hop” or “gangsta” cities to live in? You see, I was trying to drum up a similar but politically more tenuous version of their white stereotype. Obviously new to the public relations game, the chap said, honestly, that they had considered doing that. But changed their minds, because it would be seen as, well, unseemly.

I gently eased the poor guy into observing his company’s own hypocrisy. I have to say, even I felt bad for him. But then I thought: Screw him. It’s okay to call a Walmart shopper a redneck, but you can’t call a fan of sagging pants gangsta? How are these two things different?