Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You

by Greg Gutfeld

  It really is invigorating.

  I’m not kidding. I was biting my nails during The Social Network, and I’m not even sure why. I mean, it was a movie about rich kids suing over who invented a social networking site. This was not Dirty Harry. Christ, it wasn’t even Hello, Larry. It was Goodfellas for zeta males.

  I don’t begrudge the founders of Facebook. Anyone who creates something that millions—or billions—crave is genuinely cool in my book. It is why, however, I don’t think Apple is cooler than McDonald’s. Both make something that is a pure popular product. A Big Mac and an iPod are pretty much the same thing—except one has a slightly metallic aftertaste (I blame the lettuce).

  But here’s the catch. We live in a time when some products are cool while others aren’t. And this cool bigotry masks a different kind of disdain—one directed at the nonintellectual, the guy who doesn’t watch Girls, shop at Whole Foods, or read Dwell on the bidet. This average dude is not interested in the healing powers of crystals or windmills, or solar power. He’s just fine with natural gas. His own, and North Dakota’s.

  This product bigotry creates the cool job elitism. Everyone wants to work for Twitter, but no one wants to work for Exxon. Try finding a job right now at Twitter. Impossible. But they’re hiring in North Dakota. (Can a healthy unemployed individual fresh out of school frack? Or is that the modern equivalent of going to work for a fascist death squad—that eats kittens?)

  Thanks to the rising cool status of certain jobs and the decline of others, people have stopped contemplating doing the dirty work, the work that keeps the lights on. Can you imagine a young college graduate announcing to his friends he is going to work for an oil company? Nope, he’s joining an improv group instead. As I write this, the Labor Department reports that only 47 percent of Americans have a full-time job. That’s because it’s hard to get full-time work as a maker of artisanal tricycles. Or worse, edible artisanal tricycles.

  In February 2013 it was revealed that Facebook paid no income taxes for 2012. As reported by CNN, among other places, the social network was due a tax refund of almost 430 million bucks. Now, this is a company that made one billion before taxes (which buys approximately 50 million hoodies for Mark Zuckerberg). But they were able to secure the refund because of a tax deduction from stock options issued to Facebook employees.

  I won’t pretend to understand how this works (as an English major, I have no discernible skills other than spelling discernible correctly), but I know this: that because this company happened to be Facebook, the story was a one-day affair. It came and went like an ice cream headache, leaving neither a bruise nor a hickey on the Zuckerberg Empire. If this company were something that actually made something in a factory or field, it would be roundly condemned by every single media hack on the planet.

  Case in point, we have a strident administration that rails against oil companies constantly (while taking credit for its record-breaking output), and the rich in general, over their perceived failure to pay their “fair share.” Both entities are evil, for they make stuff people want, and because of this, they make a mountain of money. And from that mountain of money, the government takes a hefty slice. Which bureaucrats then spend on extremely important stuff—like a study into why lesbians tend to be overweight. (I could have answered that question: It’s called pastry.) At one point, back in February, on Al Sharpton’s show (I believe it’s on MSNBC, a network for grad students suffering from shingles), President Obama made a petulant observation that what unites the Republican Party is protecting the rich from having their taxes raised. Well, then … what about your friends at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, Mr. President? Don’t they have to pay their fair share? If Obama got any more adolescent, I’d have to ground him for a week and take away his Twitter privileges. No more selfies at memorial services for world leaders.

  And so, fossil fuels, a boring, banal, greasy, dirty evil thing that is used by everyone (especially the poor, minorities, and women), are trashed daily by our commander in chief. Meanwhile a social networking tool—built by a social networking tool—that monopolizes the time of schoolgirls and the fat pervs who befriend them gets off scot-free.

  Why is this important? Because one item produces energy while the other steals it. Without oil, we’d be nowhere. With Facebook, we are nowhere. Facebook has become the anti-oil, the anti-energy phantom that steals time and effort from everyone under the false pretense that you are actually doing something when you’re only friending an ex or “liking” a picture of the ex’s hideous children. And make no mistake, if those weren’t your kids, you’d think they were ugly too. (This is based on my own research finding that everyone thinks their own children are 450 percent better-looking than they really are. This illusion of attractiveness was created by nature to keep parents from strangling offspring when the brats wake you up at 3:00 a.m. screaming like feces-spraying gremlins. I know, I’m sure that when I have kids I will think they are adorable too … before I leave them in the forest chained to a tree.)

  We live in a time when the industry we need most is vilified and the one company that distracts us from reality gets a pass because it’s coming from somewhere cool: Silicon Valley. A place where silicon people live.

  Seriously, remember that old James Dean flick Giant? Guys working in oil fields, to me, seemed pretty damn cool. Now they’re seen as the problem. Instead we look to pale, skinny men in hoodies and say, “Yes, that’s cooler.” I get the change in culture; I just don’t have to like it. (Note: I own two hoodies.)

  And where does that lead us? The vilification of the most uncool thing invented since Satan invented the Republican: fracking. By now, you probably know what it is. To put it simply (it’s the only way I know how), it’s a way to get natural gas and oil out of the ground by blasting shale (rock) with a method of hydraulic fracturing that is so far over my head, it might as well be happening on Neptune. But the real story is this: Certain parts of the United States that an observer might previously have described as “bleak” are experiencing a money-drenching boom so amazing that the only people who could despise it are environmentalists and the infantile celebrities who mimic them. Now we have intellectual giants like Yoko Ono and Rosario Dawson lecturing us on the dangers of fracking as if they’ve spent years studying oil and gas extraction. (At least I admit I’m coming at this issue armed with a limited knowledge of the exact science, but I’ve also read the studies and listened to both sides.) My guess is that neither of them or their like-minded dipsticks have a clue what a positive impact fracking has had on millions of Americans in an otherwise desperate, flat economy. My gut tells me, they don’t care. It’s not about being right, or admitting you were wrong. Let’s be honest: The people fracking most benefits, Yoko and Rosie despise. Why isn’t that a form of bigotry? They’re “frackist,” which is essentially hating the poor and uneducated—or, at least, those less rich and “enlightened” than you. Which essentially includes anyone between the coasts who doesn’t meditate to the music of local Native American artists.

  Why would some of these anti-frackers choose to repeat falsehoods about fracking (like saying it leads to breast cancer) when it’s clear that they know little about the science? Because it’s cool. And it’s easy. You can do it while getting a back rub at the Virgin flight lounge.

  The coolest kid in the anti-fracking movement is a guy named Josh Fox, who made a film called Gasland, a one-sided demagogic attack on fracking. It was later fact-checked by one of the real Free Radicals of our time, Phelim McAleer. McAleer is the guy who made the flick FrackNation, which counters the fearmongering of Gasland. But that’s not what makes it great. What makes it great is how it was made: with a crowd-funded campaign that gathered over two thousand contributors to help pay for it. Those who donated were nobodies whose average offering to the film (according to my good friend Wikipedia) was sixty bucks. How is that not cool? Isn’t that what a grassroots campaign is all about? If only the movie were about Noam Chomsky’s fitness routine.
Then George Clooney would’ve funded the whole thing himself—just to make sure his European neighbors would like him.

  As I write this, experts are saying that fracking will now supply the United States with centuries of domestic energy, making it a possibility that in our lifetime we may free ourselves from a dependency on foreign nutjobs who take our money while funding terrorists who want to kill us (no, not the BBC). Yet we have a legion of cool-driven, egomaniacal freaks who’d rather have us under the thumb of the Saudis than reaping the benefits of homemade fuel.

  Hell, if you’d rather not bomb Syria, and quietly excuse yourself from the riotous table that is the Middle East, isn’t the only appropriate solution to get up, go home, and frack the hell out of each other? You don’t even need a condom!

  John Sexton at Breitbart.com covered a special version of hell: a “celebrity bus tour” organized by Josh Fox through the town of Dimock, Pennsylvania, to raise awareness on the evils of fracking, as part of the Artists Against Fracking campaign. Aboard the bus: Yoko, Sean Lennon, and—making this bus truly talent-free—Susan Sarandon (which sort of makes her the Ringo of this particular tour, but whatever). Their goal was to fight against fracking’s “violence against nature,” as Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma, explained. And he hoped to get the media to buy into their war against usefulness. Gandhi told the friendly Huffington Post that fracking would “destroy us, destroy humanity.” This is the beauty of cool activism—no exaggeration is too overboard because outright lies and panic-stirring rhetoric only reflect the deep passion you have for the world. Did anyone mention to them that the bus they were on wasn’t being fueled by windmills? These people are so stupid that if you told them the bus was powered by unicorn farts and Pegasus feces, they’d buy stock in it (God knows they’re rich enough). When you lack truth, all that’s left is exaggeration. And having Yoko’s phone number on your cell? That’s got to make them feel special. Look what she did for the Beatles.

  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:

  By implementing the proposed mitigation measures the Department expects that human chemical exposures during normal HVHF [fracking] operations will be prevented or reduced below levels of significant health concern.

  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.

  THE PITIFUL PLOY OF THE BAD BOY

  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 f
ind 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:

  Girl gets asked to prom by guy, who may or may not be her boyfriend at the time. He’s probably a year or two older. If the gap is wider, look into it: He may be her teacher.