by Greg Gutfeld
Social consciousness has become a gimmick to excuse reprehensible behavior. In fact, put “social” before any word, and it becomes “important” and “compassionate.” At its worst, social consciousness masks evil—it’s flimflam for the foul, a condemnation condom. Social consciousness won Al Sharpton invites to the White House, despite the cad’s ruining countless lives since his garish orgy of racial exploitation that began with the Tawana Brawley case in 1987.
How do you know that social consciousness is thoroughly worthless? When it’s so easy that everyone else is doing it. When it’s integrated into sappy TV sitcoms, and when corporations desperate for approval from people who hate them flaunt it on their websites or on Twitter. When superficial and dumb-as-dirt celebs get involved. Social consciousness becomes the dumping ground for reflexive, attention-seeking acts of meaningless symbolism—a phony exercise meant to shroud the shallowness of those employing it. It’s a sham’s best friend. It makes you miss the cool of old: the aimless biker with a nonfilter cig hanging from his lips. Yeah, he smelled bad. But at least he won’t block your path to work to get you to sign a petition to save the paramecium. And, for the record, paramecia are assholes.
On the ladder of cool, however, social consciousness maintains the top spot. At the bottom, hanging on to the lowest rung of uncool, resides its opposite: the boring capitalist. Meaning, the person who is greedy and always out for himself. The person making a buck is inferior to the person who gives a fuck. Never mind that the greedy dude is usually making a buck to support a family, and often a community. And, oh yeah, a country.
Of course, it’s the boring capitalist who often bankrolls the people who hate him. If it weren’t for the person bringing in the money, nothing else would work. For a community to grow to a size that sustains those who don’t contribute to the growth of said community (whom I call leeches but society has chosen to call grad students), you need an immensely powerful creature to build a structure that allows those loafers to exist. But even a whale can only support so many parasites.
Without a “capitalist consciousness,” there is no “social consciousness.” A poor society cannot help the poor. This is why no one should listen to Al Sharpton. If it weren’t for people Al Sharpton hates, there would be no Sharptons. This is troubling to me. Why is the average businessman boring but the radical type deemed cool? I came up with some possibilities:
Businessmen are boring on purpose. The suit and tie and drab hair are meant to hide the inherent riskiness of capitalism. That’s the irony: The real daredevils are those who play with their own money. Those who start businesses, who risk it all, and often who lose it all, over and over. Someone has to provide the funds for the safety nets the cool demand—and the providers are the uncool capitalists who took risks with their capital and are now taxed to the hilt. The vast majority of people supporting our national dependency are businessmen—large and small, male and female—who put their asses on the line every damn day. They are the truly cool, even if they look like dorks drinking Scotch and doing karaoke poorly in a Midtown bar (it’s always to Taylor Dayne). The real risk-takers build products and then brands, while those railing against them are as safe as soy milk.
It’s easier to understand caring than it is to understand business. Ask any television news producer what makes more immediate, arresting television: a young, earnest protester railing against corporations, or a corporate employee defending his company? Perhaps if the producer took a course in “how money works,” he might see the merits in the latter. But he didn’t get into journalism to do math. He got into journalism to tell a story. (And generally, to speak truth to power, which really translates as “The speaker is a dick.”) In that story, it’s the emotional subject that trumps the uncool reality of life. Plus, you might score with the protester, who wants to get famous and get access to your minibar. The participants satisfy each other’s needs while obliterating any sense of truth.
Business is anti-charismatic. Banks are meant to be dull. There should be no flash accompanying your cash. Which is why we don’t want Mickey Rourke to be our financial adviser; he’d put all our money in Eastern European brothels and expensive tequila that plays Pac-Man with your liver. We just want to drink with him. So attributes like “charm” and “sexiness” and “romance” never evolved in the business world. Meanwhile, the young men who lack the cash to get girls into bed have instead built an arsenal of anti-authoritarian lies to get laid. (I did this for a while myself, but it didn’t work. I just can’t grow dreadlocks.) How else could a piece of trash like Bill Ayers get laid? As a terrorist, this loser couldn’t even do that right.
Guilt for being successful. Once you’re successful, there are others who are envious of your achievements, who blame you for their lack of accomplishment. (I’ve been on both sides of this, often on the same night.) Sadly, it works. Most of us are decent people, and we want to be liked and/or left alone. So when the cool anticapitalists—feeling no guilt because they’ve apparently never made a profit anywhere—choose to focus their “for the greater good” mentality on the benign capitalist, the benign capitalist capitulates. When these people claim that others “deserve” your income, your savings, your material goods, rather than fight the arguments, corporations and their captains give in; it’s just better to throw money at angry fools than to argue with them. You can’t win when you’re a suit, and they are hirsute. Seriously—since when did lumberjack beards reflect actual achievement … on Brooklyn waiters?
Young people don’t know where money comes from. To them, it comes from Dad’s bank account. Press them further, and you might as well ask them how to build a Hadron Collider. Sadly, no one bothers to educate the cool kids about money. Have you ever read an article about a penniless rocker who calls his mom to borrow cash so he can put money in his van’s gas tank? No, you just read about his “dark soul.” For some reason, the “cool” exist without the machinations of money; stuff just appears when they need it, like Easter eggs in April or Democratic voters in Ohio. It’s far easier for them to understand “divestment on campus” than “investment in stocks.” This is why students are often the best targets for the aggressive beggar. I see it in Manhattan every day. A seasoned panhandler need only play cool, and by proxy can make the backpacked undergrad feel cool too, and that quickly separates the kid from his dad’s dollars. The panhandler walks away with money for dope, and the young dope walks away feeling good about himself, without ever wondering how that money made it into his pocket in the first place. That’s the essence of modern capitalism for the cool: “I give you something, yet I have no idea where that something came from.” It’s an economy based on the tooth fairy.
It’s this misguided view of charity that has replaced real charity. As our government pretends to offer handouts, it’s really just spreading the wealth around, without wondering where that wealth has come from. In the end, redistribution kills ambition, saps the energy that fuels the American dream, and makes all of us poorer each passing day. Our consciousness may be raised, but our options for wealth and success dwindle. (Which is why I really need you to buy two copies of this book. My hormone treatments aren’t covered by Obamacare.)
YOU PRAY, THEY DECAY
Let me ask you this: If you were to designate who was cooler, who would it be? Phil Lynott or Mitt Romney? It’s pretty easy. Lynott—hands down.
Lynott was the lead singer who fronted the great Irish band Thin Lizzy, known for chord-crunching nuggets like “The Boys Are Back in Town” and “Jailbreak.” If you don’t have their great live album, you’re probably an awful person. Anyway, Lynott died of a drug overdose in January 1986. He was a great-looking, talented, black Irish—but also a junkie. A dead junkie, now.
Back in September 2012, a couple of months before the last presidential election, both Lynott’s widow and mom raised objections to Romney’s use of “The Boys Are Back in Town” during his campaign. They were opposed because Mitt opposed gay marriage, and they assumed Phi
lip would have been pissed about it, if he hadn’t overdosed twenty-five years prior.
They have every right to object. If it were me, and my music were being used during the campaign of someone I disagreed with, I’d say something too. The only candidate I’d allow to play my music would be Bigfoot and, unless we’re talking about foraging for squirrels, he’s notoriously apolitical.
But viewed through the prism of cool versus uncool, another layer to the story begins to appear. A rocker’s family objects to an uncool politician, one demeaned by our media to be a religious freak (because just being religious makes you a freak). Who wouldn’t agree with the family? Me? I think it’s cooler to live a semi-healthy life, one long enough to provide goods and services to the loved ones around you. That’s cooler than dying from an overdose, whether you’re gay, straight, or whatever Andy Dick is.
And so I offer one objection. The fact is the Romney family would have gotten way more love from our shallow society if they were champions of a liberal, ephemeral social consciousness instead of real, actual charity.
My friend Walter Kirn, a tremendous writer, and also a Mormon, will help me explain what most people don’t know about that dorky, uncool religion. “Mormonism is the greatest example I know of an organization whose charitable work is neither denigrating to the recipient nor unduly guilt-inducing for the giver.” He cites an example that I never heard of, because the media ignores it: Deseret Industries, a division of welfare services of the Mormon Church. “Deseret Industries is a kind of in-house Goodwill store–network that performs all the functions of Goodwill—job training, low-cost used goods—with none of the fanfare.” (I know—imagine that—an honest-to-God charity the networks never bothered to trumpet. If Mitt were a liberal, and the charity focused on sex workers with webbed feet, we’d be organizing Live Aid II).
That’s the key. Real charity has no fanfare. Social consciousness, however, is often nothing but that. It’s fanfare designed to create fans for those publicly displaying their concern. Says Kirn of the side of Mormonism none of us heard about because no one in the media wanted to: “Combined with various schemes that can and do distribute foodstuffs and other household staples, the church offers members a comprehensive in-house welfare system that is underwritten by the ten percent tithing done by all faithful members.” Ten percent—on top of what Mormons pay in normal taxes. Those evil, greedy religious nuts strike again!
I can’t think of a more uncool word than “tithing.” It’s like the opposite of “social consciousness.” But, in reality, why isn’t tithing cool? John Lennon did it. It’s charity, pure and simple. And it’s charity that works.
And let’s remember how this tithing is possible. Someone has to make money to make money for tithing available. Yep, it’s the boring businessmen like Mitt Romney who supply the green to make that real, comprehensive charity possible. “This tithing obligation,” says Kirn, “also supports a global missionary program, a worldwide temple-building program. Talk about efficiency. And the wonder of it is that by pooling their resources and doing so cheerfully and voluntarily, church members receive a sense of security, pride, and usefulness that causes them to give even more for specific projects as they come up.” Amazing, right? This is how government is supposed to work. Instead, we get Obama phones, ACORN, and California.
Talk about uncool. Far better for those who ridicule people like Romney to embrace superficial “caring” than to admit that good men in suits with boring personalities are better at it than you. Better not to know the facts beyond the frosting. Fake caring is that frosting—no cake, just a sweet momentary sugar rush that makes you feel good without accomplishing anything but an ego thrill. It’s way more exciting than tithing, so why bother with the real thing?
I bother, because we’re now watching a false morality replacing a real one. I’m not a religious person. I’m half atheist, half agnostic (and all sexy). Meaning, in the daytime, I don’t believe in God. But at night, alone with my thoughts, facing that gaping, terrifying maw without a rail to hold on to, I drift toward something less certain than nothing. Especially in a contract year.
My point: As nonreligious as I may seem, even I know that as our culture wanders further from a desire for universal truth, we find ourselves slogging through an amoral outhouse, following false gods because we’ve mistaken their cool for character. So, by all means, laugh at the uncool who make things work, and champion those who traffic in self-absorption masked as selflessness. It might make you cooler, but it won’t make the world better. And if there’s anything we’ve learned, you can’t get any more uncool than God. In the high school that is America, God is, like, such a nerd.
What a silly, uncool idea that is. I get atheism. But that’s not what gets me. There are plenty of atheists who find better uses of their time than denigrating the religious. My targets are those who trash religion to elevate their coolness. For them, bragging that they’re a “lapsed Catholic” in order to nervously score cool points in a public setting just shows me how desperate they are for approval. (I’ve witnessed this more times than I can remember—i.e., at least three times.) The only thing you’re “lapsed” in is your ability to discern a level of interest in your stupid, predictable asides about how dumb your religious family is. You’ve “lapsed” in an ability to put your family before feeling cool.
Fact is, the cool, who are almost entirely liberal by default, are also antireligious to a fault. You cannot be religious and cool. According to the purveyors of cool, God cannot be cool because He replaces badass, existential, beret-wearing, clove-smoking nihilism. And religion competes with the artificial charity of government, which exists to support you in your existentialism. And so liberals, by intent or by accident, have replaced God with government. President Obama is now their supernatural being—a spiritual leader who can do better than simply turn water into wine. He can make trillions of dollars disappear. Then, with a wave of his hand, he can just print more money! The loaves and fishes were amateur hour by comparison.
But you know what else is uncool about church? It’s boring. It’s repetitive. It’s solemn. It’s like a Charlie Rose interview. I hate it. Even more, no matter what charitable efforts you perform, if you’re part of a real church, you can never brag about it (against my nature). There are no special buttons or ribbons. On the other hand, if charity is done as a stand-alone, detached from religion, that’s cool. You always brag about it. I’m beginning to think cool has become a religion for those who find the organized practice so difficult to absorb. I don’t blame them: Religion runs counter to my own internal logic. But my skepticism does not cloud my analysis that going to church might be something slightly more positive than ridiculing those who do. God may not exist, but at least I realize that those who believe in Him (or Her) are often nicer than the people who seek approval through ridicule of faith. It’s no longer about believing in God or not—it’s about having people kneel before you. You’re the false god, and your only commandment is that people like you. And, possibly, find it kind of sexy too, ya know?
TREATING CRAZIES LIKE DAISIES
I know crazy people. I grew up in California. I’ve seen them up close. And it’s never romantic; it’s never pretty; it’s just scary. I once had a girlfriend who worked at Napa State Hospital (or was a patient there—it’s all pretty hazy), the asylum where the Cramps once played. (Look it up—it’s pretty wonderful.) The way she described it was about as romantic as an ice-cold bedpan, which was how she described our relationship, alas. Back on topic, from afar, the insane are often idealized to a point of sacrificing one’s own safety. “Wow, they are such kooky fun.” But would you let one cook for you?
Living in Berkeley, I encountered my share of crazies. They were treated benevolently by students because it was cool to indulge them. It’s not a bad thing, of course, to show compassion. But this was different. Be nice to an insane person in front of your friends, and you’re immediately seen as cooler than your less enlightened pals, as
long as the scraggly behemoth doesn’t jerk off in your eye. At times, students got injured because “out of the goodness of their heart” they tried to engage a “quirky eccentric.” In Berkeley, this trait is known as “understanding.” Elsewhere, it’s called “asking for a poo sandwich.”
I tried once to engage a homeless degenerate, whom I found daily, masturbating in my parking space, behind a dumpster, at school. I tried to reason with him. (I figured we had a lot to talk about.) He only disappeared after I dumped a bucket of warm soapy water on him from the roof, just as he was finishing. I took no pleasure in it, and if I did I would deny it anyway.
I recall such anecdotes because we need an antidote for the cool obsession with sickness. I do not mean your normal-definition sickness—like the flu, bronchitis, or even cancer—but serious mental illness that filmmakers and editors treat as a silent gift or some sort of romantic novelty, when they shouldn’t. Embracing the mentally ill because you view the illness as a daring rebellion against the status quo helps no one and often leads to the emergency room. Or, in Hollywood, to an undeserved Oscar.
I am reminded of this as I stare at a recent cover of Rolling Stone, a magazine about as edgy as a Hula-Hoop. On the cover is Jon Hamm, the star of Mad Men—and get this, he’s wearing sunglasses … and smoking! Yes, when you need cool shorthand for a photo shoot you bring in the heavy artillery of the unimaginitive: shades and cancer sticks. The look on Hamm’s face is one of a man trying so hard to be cool, you might insist it’s a parody. Then you read the caption that accompanies the image—“Don Draper Exposed—How Jon Hamm’s Inner Demons Made Him TV’s Hottest Star.”