Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (27 page)

So, why the heroic stance against the Boy Scouts, but not the
gay-haters in Dubai? The answer is simple: No one cares about Dubai. Most think it’s a cologne. So a band can get away with the hypocrisy and still make the big bucks.

Crapping on the Boy Scouts is just way easier, and cooler. It’s the in thing to do these days, along with dog tattoos, drinking coconut water, and drinking coconut water with your tattooed dog. The Boy Scouts must be evil. They’re just so … Caucasian.

For the boycotter, what happens in America is always worse than what happens anywhere else. And if you’re a pop star, you have to play the game. The pressure to conform to the rising tide of indignation against the Boy Scouts requires an artist to act the part. But anywhere else where “cultures are different”? They can get around it. The Emirates’ prejudice is just a cultural quirk. (Castration of gays? A bit of delightful color. Unless, of course, it’s you that Achmed is coming for with a rusty scalpel.)

But seriously, Train: If you’re going to drop the Scouts, you have to drop the burka crowd too. It only makes sense, right? At least the Boy Scouts do great stuff for boys, here in America. They don’t spend their lives buying seven-figure cars and filling them with trucked-in models who mistakenly thought they won a beauty pageant.

Train isn’t the only band that plays it both ways. But in the modern and healthy era of gay rights, all is forgiven if you go after the easy targets, like the Boy Scouts. And Boy Scouts should never be easy targets, except for Girl Scouts.

Which leads me to gays in general. And in particular, gay marriage. Lots of straights loudly embrace this issue because it functions as a “stamp of cool.” If you’re for gay marriage, then you’re forgiven for everything else. It’s the code word you need to enter the tree house of tolerance. Most of these straights would never be so forthcoming on other issues. But on this one they
will become politically outspoken, because it’s cool and you’re in no position to lose anything. You could be a human trafficker who uses nuns for target practice, but be a vocal gay marriage supporter and you will never brunch alone.

It’s the right position, in my opinion. And I’m not saying it to be cool. After you read the following paragraphs, you’ll agree. My support for gay marriage is about as uncool as it can get.

I’m for gay marriage because I’m a pig. And a conservative. As a conservative, I support marriage over promiscuity. If you accept homosexuality as a biological fact, then the next step is wondering how, in this new world, one can lead a healthy life if you’re a dude who likes sleeping with other dudes. My theory is: A dude is a dude, gay or straight—and as dudes, we are pigs. Left to our devices, we’d stick our penises in pottery if it had the right curves. (I can confirm this.) We’d rut with a woolly mammoth if we were drunk on triple mai tais and found one of these hairy hunks defrosting in the Antarctic. When I was a kid I was hopelessly attracted to the bendy legs of living room sofas. It’s why I was no longer allowed in Pier 1 Imports. (Isn’t it time they lifted that ban? There have been no issues for at least six months.)

What marriage does for straight men—narrowing choice and creating a structure that encourages and preserves a healthy, prosperous life—should be available to men who prefer other men. And if two ladies want to get hitched, go for it. Maybe because I’m more worried about straight marriage than gay marriage. As divorce rates rise, and illegitimacy rates skyrocket, it’s pretty clear the disintegration of marriage is not a promising path for all involved. Why ban something for others that keeps the rest of us from destroying ourselves?

And I’m also for gay marriage because I’m a libertarian. Who the hell am I to tell you who to wed? It’s hard enough to figure
out how men and women can live together without expressing opinions on two very happy men trying to make a go of it. There are no experts in the mess of human relations. Look at Dr. Phil. He’s an expert. If that’s a paragon of advice, then we’re all screwed. I wouldn’t ask him how to floss.

But just because you’re cool for being pro–gay marriage, does it make everyone who disagrees with you uncool? I don’t know. I’d say a lot of them are uncool, but a lot of them are cooler than you.

This is all pretty new, when you think about it. Earthlings have been around for some two hundred thousand years (I don’t have exact numbers due to the vodka) and gay rights didn’t hit the planet until maybe the last forty years. Can you blame everyone for not immediately coming to grips with the biggest shift in biological reconsideration to happen since we lost our tails? Can you blame people who are being asked to suddenly disavow the beliefs that have governed not just their own actions, but their ancestors’, for taking a while to consider their position? It’s easy and cool to call them bigots and close-minded a-holes, but it wins no friends. And it’s wrong. Most of them are decent people contemplating a seismic shift in world belief. Just because you didn’t ascribe to that belief doesn’t mean you can dismiss their concerns so easily.

In my rattled head, what is really cool is being able to understand that a big change is going on and realizing that this shift takes time. If anything, if you’re gay, you should be pretty excited that you’re living in a time where you can witness this shift. I mean, acceptance of homosexuality is perhaps the biggest “gamechanger” since the civil rights movement. And before that, the dawning notion that rape was not a good thing. And before that, the wheel. And fire. And Joan Rivers’s first face-lift.

Sexual behavior, to me, is no cooler than eating. Declaring
your sexual freedom—gay or straight—is akin to declaring your ability to eat forty-five hot dogs in a minute. (On a particular block in Midtown Manhattan, very akin. As in, the same.) Straight men who cannot stop talking about their conquests are no different from a gay activist’s jockstrap dance during a parade. It falls under one heading in my mind: “So what?” Choosing to be defined by who you sleep with seems about as uncool as being defined by your low-carb diet. It’s why I shut up about my bacon and mayonnaise intake (it was hurting the ratings). I dislike gays, straights, blacks, Hispanics, Jews, all people in fact, if their identity means more to them than their achievements.

But forget gays. They should be vocal about gay marriage. (Even if some really don’t want it. That’s part of marriage too—wanting it, and not wanting it, but still having the choice.) I’m more irritated by straights who go out of their way to announce their allegiance to an issue, simply as a way to distance themselves from the Neanderthals who’ve not yet evolved. I’m fairly certain that many of them made their decision based on the need to appeal to the cooler crowd. I’ve seen it myself: The self-satisfaction of a person announcing he is for gay marriage approaches the same sensation experienced when someone says, “I don’t eat veal,” or, “I would never buy anything at Walmart.” It’s an announcement masked as achievement, and it’s as boring as an Oscar acceptance speech. And about as substantial as a campaign promise.

Last week, I was sitting outside at my favorite Italian restaurant on Ninth Avenue. A chap on a date sat next to me and began telling me what he did for “a living.” I put “a living” in quotes because I don’t consider what he did an actual job. He and some other activists had rented or purchased a house across from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, with the express purpose of confronting them over their virulent antigay views.
It’s a funny story, until I asked him how many members are in this crazy church. Maybe fifty, he said. We had this discussion, mind you, a week after the Boston bombing. So I asked, “Would you ever do this to a mosque?” He looked at me silently, but he knew the answer. Of course he’d never confront the homophobia of Islam, because it’s not as cool as doing it to crazy old white folks. Confronting Muslims over their bigotry could be construed as Islamophobia, and really, it’s just safer to stick to the whiteys in Topeka. They won’t chop off your head when they’re offended. I asked the guy how much press he’d received. His eyes lit up. That’s what it was about. I felt sorry for his date. I think she picked up the check.

My advice: Remaining calm and understanding in regard to different views on sexuality may not make you any cooler, but it might make you a tad more compassionate. Primarily toward those folks who, while holding no animosity toward gays, feel threatened by gay marriage.

Recently an ESPN analyst was barbecued on Twitter for speaking his mind about NBA player Jason Collins revealing that he was gay. Chris Broussard said plainly: “If you’re openly living that type of lifestyle, then the Bible says, ‘You know them by their fruits,’ it says that that’s a sin.” And “If you’re openly living in unrepentant sin, whatever it may be, not just homosexuality—adultery, fornication, premarital sex between heterosexuals, whatever it may be—I believe that’s walking in open rebellion to God and Jesus Christ, so I would not characterize that person as a Christian.”

Before you call him a homophobe, recognize that his view, however wrong, is steeped in religious belief. And he lumped straights into the whole sinful mess. You can belittle him all you want, but it won’t help you understand him any better. Had you wanted to. And you should.

The same applies to Phil Robertson from
Duck Dynasty
. Fact is, his beliefs on gays do not include anything about taking action. He has views on sin, but his opinions won’t hurt you.

Last, all of this preoccupation with who’s gay and who isn’t (actually, no one cares about who
isn’t
gay) falls under one mistake the cool make: making sexuality important at an age when other things matter more. I get the importance of dealing with sexual confusion and the jerks who bully those who seem different. But making the assertion of one’s sexuality an achievement (one that needs to be reiterated through constant practice) goes absolutely nowhere. Civilization’s recent predicament with modern sexuality—that it is cool to celebrate it without pondering its consequences—has left us with hordes of miserable single people. It has left us with fatherless kids. It has left us with rampant STDs—some extremely distressing strains that continue to morph as we try to screw our way past them. I hope gay marriage helps tamp down these scary stats. But really, it doesn’t matter to me whether you are gay or straight. What’s uncool is assuming we care.

Why would anyone not be a liberal? Think of the rewards! You’re an eternal teenager, always in sync with the cool kids, never a target of scowls, a consistent beneficiary of invites to events involving lamb sliders, crab cake tacos, and desperate come-ons from Adrian Grenier. You secretly feel superior to all those around you who have yet to evolve. You get to pronounce “Pakistan” as “pock-ist-aahn.” You become an international walking guidebook for pretentious pronunciation. But you’re as rebellious as a seat cushion.

The public acquiescence to liberal ideas has flourished for decades, unquestioned and unfettered, solely because of the cool assumption that leftism is rebellious. Given that for the left, dissent is not tolerated, this makes no sense. You can’t be a rebel
and
a sheep. It’s not possible. I remember Andrew Breitbart telling me a story about being at a posh party in Aspen, where he was having a friendly conversation with the wealthy host. They were getting along fine, and the host graciously offered Andrew and his wife an invitation to come stay with them over a weekend, perhaps
to ski. Maybe an hour later, the host’s wife found out Breitbart’s political leanings and confronted Andrew, informing him that the invitation was rescinded. How petty, but also, how predictable. God bless Andrew’s wife, who was no firebrand like AB but had to reap the consequences his beliefs wrought. Their road was bumpier than a Klingon’s forehead.

The problem with this free intellectual ride given to the left—it allows really stupid people to pull it off. There are tons of libs who are smart, but there are far more who are stupid. Yet they realize that simply saying the “right” thing creates an illusion of intelligence. If all you have to really do is denigrate the monolithic evil that is America, or the corrupt machine that is capitalism, or the ruthless single-minded viciousness of our military, you can pretty much turn off your brain. All that stuff has been said before, to be sure, usually by someone considered a great thinker by the intelligentsia. And all of it easily translates into shorthand that helps conquer every kind of cocktail party scenario. Just say, “A little socialism never hurt anybody” on either coast and you’re in the club. Even if you couldn’t spell “socialism” with a dictionary on hand and a crossbow to your head.

You see this a lot with pop stars who inevitably fear that they are as shallow as a tambourine. After spending their younger years consuming and consumed by ego, they suddenly realize that there is a way to rise above the lightweight reputation that comes with being young, rich, and vacuous. So they embrace liberal causes to appear deep. I call it the “Madonna syndrome,” although she wasn’t the first to discover it. But it’s since been adopted by everyone from Lady Gaga to that aging gasbag Jon Bon Jovi. Their discovery of “politics” is a breathless embrace of left-wing clichés, often expressed in cringe-producing interviews and horrendously adolescent tweets. Watching a celebrity talk
politics is like watching a politician sing. There are exceptions. Like Bono, who as he ages seems to salute the machinery of capitalism that made him wealthy. In mixed company no less. But his social conscience couldn’t be better established if he were Bishop Tutu doing an anti-fracking interpretive dance. With Tina Fey. On an Indian reservation.

I’d say look at Cher as an example and her increasingly unhinged attacks on the right, but I would never suggest anyone “look at Cher.” I would say “look at the human being formally known as Cher. She is officially a cyborg.” So read her tweets instead. She’s now prone to intolerant, vicious attacks on those who think differently from her.

This was her recent take on Senator Ted Cruz: