Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (6 page)

But, still, cool kids try to make this big lie stick. Their strategy: convince you that if you don’t hang with the cool kids, and do what the cool kids do, then you will never be cool.

If you need evidence, go to any city run by a liberal mayor and look around. It’s full of people who said yes, to anything and everything. Pensions, programs, boondoggles—all costing billions—to feed the egos and the pockets of the powerful and corrupt. Oakland, Chicago, Detroit, DC, Smurf Village—these are cities built on “yes.” Which is why they have nothing left but one big “NO.” And that “no” is the answer to the question, “Should I think of moving there?”

God, what I would give for a society to relearn the pleasures of saying no. Not just to premature sex and smoking dope and wearing saggy pants, but
to everything
. My gut tells me that the countries that will own our asses in the next century are those who say no, calmly and regularly (e.g., China and Gabon). If I had my druthers, I’d create a robot that simply says “NO,” and run it for president. There is nothing in the Constitution that says you can’t have a robot as president. If that were the case, we’d never have elected Calvin Coolidge (the greatest robot president we’ve ever had).

The point of cool is to erase your ability to say no. Saying yes buys you cool cachet, but it always ruins your life later. And it does, trust me. There are things I said yes to when I was younger that I regret. That stint stripping in Prague did me no favors. There are old men with photos.

And of course, cocaine. (Let me save you time if you’re
contemplating that experience: Drink thirty cups of coffee and find someone else who has done the same, and start talking inanely. It’s sort of like how Jim Carrey is without drugs. If “cool” has a mascot, it’d be an eight ball.)

The best way a young girl can respond to the aggressive pressure of boys during this period of her life is to say this: “Your intense desire to have me is proof to me that there will be many, many more boys just like you who want my company. I thank you for that information, but I’m going to wait for the next bus to come along. Whatever is on it will be better than you. And I’m including the homeless guy without pants.” By saying no, she wins.

Mind you, it’s not the boys’ fault. During that age, they are senseless beasts, ruled by their precocious, mindless weenies. But it’s the deal their stupid weenies make with their brains that gave birth to cool. This is my theory, anyway. There is no other reason for popping your collar or wearing sunglasses at night or wasting hours in the gym staring at your abs. Cool was created to subject the most mediocre of minds to the most tedious of penises. You want proof? Jon Bon Jovi. Is there a more tedious penis that ever lived? Imagine getting up every morning, asking yourself: “What clothing would a man half my age wear? And why am I slowly turning into Jane Fonda?”

’Tis true: The reason for “cool” is to feed that organ primarily responsible for planet earth. Think about it. If we were governed solely by our brains, we’d never actually procreate. Who in their right mind would want to create the screaming, pooping mess we have come to call an “infant”? If it weren’t for the urge for sex, who would actually agree to such a horrible deal? Imagine there is no sex, and it really is a stork who arrives and says, “Here’s a thing you have to take care of for twenty years, and it will hate you for fifteen years of it.” No thanks, says the brain.

That’s why the penis created cool—to get women past their common sense, the incredible fortress of reason called the brain. Women didn’t invent cool, they didn’t have to. They were born cool. They don’t need men; they just need dolls and Easy-Bake Ovens. And later
Project Runway
, capri pants, and overpriced sushi. Cool is an evolutionary tool to unzip women’s jeans and to further men’s genes.

Of course, the cool kids have no idea that what they’re engaging in is really just another biological trick. They actually think they’re being cool, and being rewarded for it, when in fact they’re just mindless fleshy masses attached to a throbbing node, which is making all their dumb decisions for them. Acting cool is actually just well-worn circuitry employed by millions of men since the beginning of time. If cavemen could have formed rock bands and invented leather jackets, they would have. But they were too stupid and dying at nineteen. Like many rockers do.

Initially cool was a disguise by the weaker male to get good girls to mate with weak or inferior men. Then cool, destructive behaviors like drug use, “not caring,” or “hanging out” became mistaken for actual talent or character. Thanks to pop culture, which celebrates “dangerous” behavior in music and movies, the cool have reached a measure of stardom usually relegated to actual achievers. Hence acting. The whole point of being a movie star is to extend the cool prestige of high school to your entire life. And to bang girls who, when you’re fifty, are pretty much still in high school (a shout-out to Woody Allen).

But for the rest of us, cool has a shelf life. If you’re a quarterback in high school, you’re cool. But ten years later, working as a sullen bouncer at the only nightclub in town, your “cool” is on life support. Which is why so many young girls who never said no end up with losers in pants hanging below their asses and no
known income to speak of. These cads were charming in high school; now they’re as useless as shoulder pads on a snake.

In the end, the winner is the female who says, “I can do better.” The winner has an ego so strong that when the cool try to storm the gates, they drown in a moat of stoicism. While watching some murder trial unfold on Headline News, I asked my wife a simple question. “Would you leave me if you found out that I had killed someone?” I expected her to say, “I would stand by you.” But without pause, she said, “I’d leave you.” Of course, she often says this. But nonetheless, that’s the kind of chick you want. She has no time for mystery, danger, or the trappings of a bad boy. To her, it’s just baggage. And it should be, for all girls. And for all women.

This is not an epiphany. Any old lady born in the 1940s could tell you this. But cool redefined the positive attributes of your average male. A nonproductive commitment-phobic creep now becomes hip and mysteriously remote. The cities are full of women falling for the cool loser: the man trafficking in “edgy” so women cut him slack in his more loathsome behaviors. Christ, I know so many, it’s sad. Please accept my flaws (and pay my rent) because I can play guitar! Badly.

Date an artistic male with issues, and chances are you begin convincing yourself that “this is what I get for becoming involved with a creative mind. This is the trade-off.” But for the guy, being edgy and cool is just another way to have their cake and eat it too. Cheating, drinking, drugging—it’s stuff accountants can’t get away with but rock stars can. I am a writer, TV shouter, and author, but I married a woman who sees none of that. She only sees my behavior. (Which is my tough luck.) And when my behavior is lackluster, I am treated no differently from a man who sells Kenmore washers and dryers. If I get cocky, I get the couch.
Which is why I monitor my behavior. I don’t have an ego. I have a built-in parole officer.

As my friend’s seventeen-year-old daughter demonstrates, learning this lesson requires no age-ripened wisdom. It just takes a moral spine. It’s the ability to get up and walk out, slamming the door permanently, when the cool desperately attempts to override your common sense.

Imagine if all girls called a moratorium on cool. How amazing would it be for women to stop demeaning themselves with morose jerks and actually demand decent guys. Maybe the best tip is this: Treat every day as though you’re preparing for the prom. If it doesn’t meet your expectations, make other plans. I’m free most weekends.

Besides buying this book, what makes a person truly cool? A few decades ago, it might have been a leather jacket, a cigarette, some military service, a motorbike, and a bicep with an anchor tattoo. Perhaps a nickname like “Snake.” But that’s all changed. The dark and dangerous has been replaced by the earnest and annoying.

Probably in an effort to be cool and meet chicks in bars, two researchers decided to undertake a study to figure out what makes someone cool—now. Ilan Dar-Nimrod (I swear, that’s his name), a postdoctoral social psychology researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, and Ian Hansen (I swear, that’s his name), an assistant professor of psychology at York College, decided to survey over 350 college students, asking them to name terms that described their perceptions of cool. They were then asked to rank how desirable these qualities might be in someone. (This would have been more fun if they were all naked, but that’s why I’m not a professor.)

First of all, I have a problem with the group under scrutiny. If
you really want to know what makes something or someone truly cool, the last thing you should do is ask a college kid. Ramen noodles? They’re experts. Anything else? Zilch.

Whatever college kids find cool has trickled down from somewhere else. Usually a professor, a pop singer, or a drug dealer named Magic Carl. They tend to accept their mentor’s idea of cool, without much thought. How else can you explain the popularity of poorly shot foreign movies, pointless causes, action figure collectibles, solemn but incoherent Asian tattoos, and unreadable books by Howard Zinn?

Anyway, I’d redo the whole study and ask people in their eighties. Or hell, nineties. You ask them what’s cool, and they’ll answer plainly: “Killing the Nazis.” And they’d be right. It beats, “Getting signatures to support the rain forest.”

Dr. Dar-Nimrod and Mr. Hansen’s amazing work (which will be the name of the movie), published in the
Journal of Individual Differences
(you can find it behind
Cosmopolitan
at the supermarket checkout), included something Dar-Nimrod calls “cachet cool”—the steps required to create a really cool dude or dudette. Some of the findings were obvious: stuff like friendliness, competence, attractiveness (called the Gutfeld Variable) were seen as cool traits. Yes, this is about as surprising as girls hating spiders: We love hot, nice people. Especially if they smell good and actually talk to you while you perform your rigorous research. (It’s the first time the author of the study talked to a girl in months!)

The cool attribute that strikes me as most important, however, is “social consciousness.” According to the researchers, you are cool if you volunteer for socially responsible activities, which can mean anything from recycling crap to gathering signatures for something earnest (saving whales, slugs, or CNN’s ratings). As someone who gathered signatures for the Nuclear Freeze maybe
three decades ago, I get what this is about. People think you’re deep and it opens doors. But it’s 100 percent bullpoop. Because it’s just too easy. Far easier than saying, “I fought for my country,” which, apparently, isn’t deep at all, despite the limbs lost.

Dar-Nimrod explains that these traits are more dominant than the clichéd cool of yore: The guy in sunglasses who smokes cigarettes is no more. Being “pro-social” is now replacing “risky behavior” in the realm of cool. Thrill seeking is now trumped by “feel seeking.” (I invented that term just now—further proof that wine from a screw-top bottle helps my writing.) Forget Lee Marvin; it’s now a callow lad in a PETA shirt who makes impressionable women swoon. That said: I wonder if the fact that a guy named “Nimrod” was doing research could really explain these findings?

Either way, I’m of the belief that pro-social behavior is just as deadly as smoking a Lucky Strike while pulling a wheelie on a Harley over a pile of undetonated land mines.

First off, let’s strip away the illusion of what “social consciousness” really means. It’s a euphemism for “liberal.” When they’re talking about social causes, you know they aren’t referring to pro-life marches or NRA picnics. It’s about gathering support for stuff like Greenpeace or Planned Parenthood. In our contemporary culture, caring about the unborn is about as uncool as soiling yourself in church. (I mean, seriously, what are you doing in church?)

On
The Five
I brought this up in a short monologue, pointing out the major flaw of these cool conclusions. Coolness—real coolness—is based on the prioritization of caring. Let me paraphrase myself, from whenever I said it: “The truly cool person reserves
effort for people closest to them. In turn, they leave everyone else alone, until they have the extra resources to help them. They don’t tell you what soda size to drink or how much to recycle. Social consciousness gets in everyone’s business, while their private lives go to hell.” And how that became cool is beyond my comprehension. Remember Gladys Kravitz? The neighbor from
Bewitched
, who was always in Samantha and Darrin’s business? In the seventies that was annoying; in 2013, it’s lauded. She’s “engaged,” she’s “caring,” she’s also, in any era, a total pain in the ass.

Examples of this type of “Ignore Locally, Annoy Globally” abound, from saps like Jim Carrey to sappier saps like Sean Penn. You know their families dread their presence around the holidays because these thoughtful souls care more about gun control than about self-control. I don’t know this for a fact—about those chaps in particular—but I know it from college years at Berkeley. The more people care about something far, far away, the less they care about their immediate surroundings—or the people they annoy within those surroundings. It’s always the roommate who’s obsessed with saving the orangutans whose personal hygiene is similar to one.

It’s this kind of cool that harms more people in this world than the risky jerks who race through city avenues, high on stimulants, head to toe in red and black leather. Over the long term, symbolic attempts at appearing cool end up replacing honest charity that actually helps people. In most cases, social consciousness, really, is a simplistic strategy to mask a lazy intellect and fulfill a desperate need for attention. It’s what liberals do when they don’t get talk shows or are in a holding pattern waiting for talk shows. (See
Weiner, Anthony
.)