Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (5 page)

Sexton explains that Artists Against Fracking (can we really call Sean Lennon an artist? What the hell has he painted lately? His toenails?) was created to lobby New York governor Andrew Cuomo to stop fracking in his state. They chose Dimock for their sorry publicity stunt because some families there had complained that their water was contaminated by fracking. Maybe it was. But, as Sexton points out, “The EPA tested wells in Dimock last year and in July issued a report stating that the water was safe to drink.” This is Obama’s EPA, mind you—an entity just left of the 1950s Politburo. But facts like that don’t matter when you
feel
. And it’s just not cool to change your mind—even if admitting you’re wrong could possibly benefit an entire country.

While this tour got press, as did Matt Damon’s miserable failure of another anti-fracking movie called
Promised Land
, something else didn’t garner nearly as much attention—a leaked four-year study on the safety of fracking that made its way into the
New York Times
, and its blockbuster conclusion: Fracking is safe. It will not cause water contamination, which means Rosario will have to come up with some new claim—perhaps that fracking kills bullied, troubled teens by denying them the scenic awe of a local windmill?

Boring alert—here’s a quote from the report, via the
Times
:

Man, is that boring. And when facts are boring, they’re also uncool. Because you can’t use mundane information to create a movement of angry people. You really can’t get passionate over something so plain, so straightforward, and so damn factual. Matt Damon can’t make a movie out of that. Well, unless he changes the actual facts. (And Saudi oil sheikhs wanted to fund it.) But Hollywood would never do that, would they? I trust Oliver Stone to keep it real.

Fact is, the only industries deemed cool these days are ones that generate disposable pop culture, whether it be music, films, designer jeans, indigenous peoples’ jewelry, deejay booths for infants. Anything that actually helps you get to work on time cannot be championed without instantly becoming uncool. Perhaps this is because so many of these anti-fracking activists never have to go to work on time. Or go to work, period.

But there is an upside to our country’s down market. When people need to watch their money, cool dies and the uncool comes to save the day, which is why I’m optimistic about fracking, and my home business, etching nudes of Lou Dobbs.

You know what I watch on TV?
Shark Tank
. You know why? Because it pits entrepreneurs against wealthy “sharks” in an effort to persuade the sharks to invest in the entrepreneurs’ start-up projects. I enjoy it because products that are cool are shot down quickly, while other, boring ideas get cash behind them. Nobody invests
real
money in a loser project just because it’s cool. In a recent episode, one of the sharks, Daymond John, told someone trying to sell him sunglasses made of wood that “all the cool brands are broke.” The entrepreneur asking for money expressed reticence over entering general retail, of having his fledgling product end up in such horrible places like … God forbid, Costco. Yeah,
Costco—the modern capitalist equivalent of the pyramids, without the slave labor.

“Cool and profit are two different things,” explained John. And it’s something every young kid needs to hear. There’s nothing wrong with making a profit by creating something that people actually need, even if it’s as unglamorous as motor oil. Shit, if I were in my twenties, I’d head to North Dakota, frack the crap out of the place, and save my money for a neon robot dinosaur (it’s been a dream of mine).

But once you start thinking about “cool,” and letting it poison the well, you fail.

The guy making the glasses, as he pleaded for investment, said he would rather be in a boutique than a place where America actually shops. John responded, “Most people would say, ‘I don’t want to ever be in Walmart.’ I’m dying to be in Walmart.” And he rejected the guy. In my book, John was cool before he said that. He just became cooler.

There is nothing uncool about making something and selling it in places where people actually shop. We all can’t be artists brunching in Soho, buying all of our goods at inflated prices from a chap named Sven in thigh-high leather boots, sporting a breast on his head. A truly cool person knows how superficial and fleeting cool really is. He finds something better to do with his time and his money. The great thing about America is that that person is usually rewarded for his hard work, which allows him to hire all of these other, miserable cool people to sell his merchandise. It might be the greatest reward of becoming successful, making an incompetent cool person work late.

For most of us, high school is the first site for the battle between good and evil. Between the stable and the shallow. Between cool and uncool.

I’m not a parent (unless you count the dolls I made from coconut and twine and named after members of One Direction), but I have often witnessed firsthand how cool operates on kids and forces them to do things that purposely mess with their internal instruction manual. Trying to be cool, as a goal, forces you to ignore any lessons ingrained by the people who made you. It takes a special, smart kid to resist and endure the torment that follows when you kick the cool to the curb.

The cool hate nothing more than when a genuinely original thinker rejects them. The cool need recruits to survive. Teens that reject them with a smile on their face destroy the most destructive movement in modern civilization. Rejecting cool, these brave kids help build the muscles of their ego and self-esteem that will be invaluable when they hit the real world. And when—inevitably—the real world hits them.

I have a friend who has two kids, both on the front lines of cool. One is seventeen, the other nineteen. Together that’s thirty-six, or around the average age of a miserable divorcée.

Every day, teens weaker than these two succumb to the power of cool. They engage in behavior that they might otherwise find silly and destructive. Cool is a weapon created by creeps to obliterate the morals that good parents instill in their children.

My friend Tom and his wife have done a bang-up job raising their kids, but even I know that that isn’t enough. Good parenting, from my perspective, is like building a three-foot retaining wall against a four-foot wave. The kids have to make up that extra foot. That wave wants to drag them into an undertow where sound judgment is suspended, where the valueless, uncaring, and ultimately nihilistic cool reigns. In other words, where the Kardashians are royalty.

I’m talking about prom night.

Back in April, I was out west, visiting my feisty mother. (She’s eighty-eight and ornery.) Sitting in our backyard, Tom’s daughter, a senior in high school, was asked by her mom about the prom. “I’m not going,” she responded, without any emotion. This came to her dad and mom as a shock, but the daughter, Mary, could have been describing a lost scrunchie. She’d already moved on. Because she’s smart.

But wait: She had a cute boyfriend! She had picked out a dress! She was going to get her nails done! (All twenty-two!) Her mother asks her about her boyfriend, and she says, “He’s not my boyfriend anymore.” Then she started texting (a habit that has now replaced breathing for anyone under twenty-five).

We didn’t press her for details, but I realized that I was witnessing a banal routine that plays out every year around the prom. It goes like this:

Boy applies pressure to girl as the prom approaches. The big day is the big payoff for her—and the boy knows this. She’s been thinking about this since she was in junior high. I know I was. I even made my own dress (out of Fruit Roll-Ups).

Of course, you don’t want to mess up your opportunity to go to the prom, the dude will tell her. He dangles that evening in front of her like a cool carrot thereby getting her to give in to his demands that she drink, do drugs, and whatever else. If she refuses? Then, maybe, he’ll say aloud: The prom isn’t really a good idea after all. And perhaps there are other girls who would really enjoy his company. (He mentions, jokingly,
those are girls who will do things
.)

Thankfully, for this particular girl, this time-tested game plan backfired, and she said, “Get lost,” to the creep. She ended up going to the prom on her own. (I’d go with her, but there’s an
age cap at twenty-one and it would be really awkward considering the outstanding warrant.)

As for the boy, he gets to live with the fact that he blew it. He may never figure that out, but who cares? Maybe he’ll learn that the girl who says no is the girl you want. But if he doesn’t, that’s his loss. And every good girl’s gain.

And this good girl resisted the first sinister strategy of the cool, which is to denigrate you if you refuse to be cool. And then punish you when they find out their cool cunning did not work. The cool must crush your spirit, because you’ve marginalized theirs.

If this were a video game called “Don’t screw up your life,” this girl successfully navigated the first level. If you want to see how the failures end up, look up any ex-girlfriend of a major rock singer. They now look like Willem Dafoe, on a good day. You avoid that reality by not making a habit of saying yes to bad ideas just because they are cool. And to bad boys. Who are generally just losers.

But perhaps unconscious of a greater achievement, she rejected the primary engine of cool that leads many young girls to ruin: a desire for acceptance.

Here’s the sales pitch honed among horny high school boys: “What if the world would end tomorrow?” “Would your self-restraint have made you any happier when you’re dead?” “It’s just uncool to wait—what with a meteor on its way.” “I’m leaving for college, and things are different there, you know?”

This line of reasoning, really, only works on stupid women. But there are millions of stupid women out there—almost as many as stupid men. But stupid women let stupid men sleep with them, which accounts for so many Maroon 5 fans.

Falling for this cool move can actually alter the course of your life, forever. And not for the better, unless “for the better” means
“living above a laundromat in a forgettable town, putting yourself to sleep with
Grey’s Anatomy
reruns and prescription cough syrup.” (That describes two years of my life—and they weren’t the worst years.)