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Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You

Page 8

by Greg Gutfeld


  His rejection bothered me, and I guess, since I’m writing about it now, it still does. Yeah, I know—when you’re kids you don’t know racism or the reality of life. But we were friends, and suddenly we weren’t. For a forty-five-pound pile of good-natured energy, I was miffed. I was hurt. I drowned my sorrows in Mr. Pibb and Pop Rocks (together they give you x-ray vision).

  I saw James a few years later. We were now officially strangers. On a few occasions, I would say hi, and he looked at me like I was a billboard for discount electrolysis. He walked right by me, cooler things in mind.

  This episode with James was my first glimmer of a separation that became more common as I experienced more of life. If blacks believe we judge by color, why shouldn’t they return the favor?

  George Elliott Clarke, from Duke University, explains that cool, “though an amorphous quality—more mystique than material—is a pervasive element in urban black male culture.”

  He quotes other academics, Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, who say that blacks employ cool “as a tool for hammering masculinity out of the bronze of their daily lives,” or rather a way to “tip society’s imbalanced scales in his favor.” My take: If you are born powerless, you create your own power through a detached, “third rail” cool persona that others dare not touch.

  It also means, quoting Majors and Billson again, that “coolness means poise under pressure and the ability to maintain detachment, even during tense encounters.” I’d like to think that that was behind James’s response when he ran into me, but maybe he just forgot who I was. If I go with the latter, I would have no chapter. SO …

  These academics cite the dunking of basketballs, the end zone dance, and high-five handshakes as the epitome of cool. The “cool aesthetic” puts “importance of personal control over a situation,” to a point that it “involves a willingness to engage in violence.”

  The other key element, which makes me think of my old friend who no longer acknowledged me, is detachment. With James that was the first sign that things changed, his decision to “suppress emotion,” while valuing expressiveness and “verbal dexterity” elsewhere. In that sense, “coolness” means “cold.” All of us do this—toward coworkers, relatives, and exes. But it’s directed at them, not at their skin.

  Coolness is a code that says, at least to me: “Greg, you are not part of my community, and for good reason.” And this creates a force field that prevents dialogue between whites and blacks about the destructive behaviors that affect all of us, even if they harm blacks more. Whites cannot possibly discuss dependency, self-reliance, gangs, or lack of fathers without invading a space they believe they do not belong in.

  How did something that seems positive (a dignified method of elevating you above an unfair surrounding) become purely a defensive reaction, for the sake of, well, being defensive? And what does being cool, ultimately, do to those who adopt the “cool pose”?

  Research suggests it sucks in the long run, that it contributes to the underachievement of black children, boys especially.

  I found a pretty interesting paper in the Journal of Negro Education (not my normal Friday night reading, but there you go). For those of you at home, the title is “Unraveling Underachievement Among African American Boys from an Identification with Academics Perspective,” and the author, from the University of Oklahoma, is Jason W. Osborne. In it, you’ll find out how acting cool ends up being a dead end for so many young, once-promising kids.

  The cool pose often leads to “flamboyant and nonconformist behavior,” which ends up, for its practitioners, as a road to detention, suspension, or expulsion in most schools. Being perceived as cool, for blacks especially, becomes incompatible with being a good student. Reading is for losers. Math is for geeks. Social studies is for both (i.e., me). Being highly motivated to excel in school is denigrated as uncool. To use the academic vernacular: “African American boys adopt a strategy for coping with their membership in a stigmatized group that is oppositional identification with academics,” Osborne writes. In regular language: Book learning is for losers. It’s not laziness. It’s a determined effort not to be perceived as trying. The thing is, this pose is probably just as hard to maintain as working hard at something is. It’s not lazy. Just wasteful.

  The end result: Cool dictates that a large group of kids flunk out because it’s uncool to try. Achieving success means adopting pursuits that are considered “white,” which could lead to rejection by their friends. In short: School doesn’t rate. It’s just a game for whitey. Blacks aren’t buying that road to success. The road is paved with an appeasement to lame authority with no promise of immediate reward. Better to shoot hoops and pursue rap—exhilarating areas far more amenable to black achievement (unless you count the New York Knicks).

  What is a “cool pose”? Hell, how do I know? I’m about as cool as Jell-O. A cool pose for me happens when I’m alone, flexing in my bedroom while listening to Mannheim Steamroller. But Harvard professor Orlando Patterson, in a New York Times piece from 2006, describes the modern version in this paragraph:

  For these young men, it was almost like a drug, hanging out on the street after school, shopping and dressing sharply, sexual conquests, party drugs, hip-hop music and culture, the fact that almost all the superstar athletes and a great many of the nation’s best entertainers were black.

  Hell, even I admit that sounds pretty fun.

  Returning to the denigration of scholastic achievements, he notes “that young black men and women tend to have the highest levels of self-esteem of all ethnic groups, and that their self-image is independent of how badly they were doing in school.” In other words: they’re failing but still feel cool.

  There it is again, the bane of all existence: self-esteem. What I would give for a nation with low self-esteem. (I think it’s called China.) Nothing bad ever comes from feeling bad, trust me. If I didn’t feel bad, I’d get nowhere. The last time I felt really good and was completely stress-free, I was drunk. If I got drunk every day, though, I couldn’t afford to get drunk. Feeling bad enables me to do the work that allows me, financially, to get drunk so that, periodically, I feel good. (That’s pretty much a blueprint for life.) In the end the self-esteem movement only benefits the “experts” in self-esteem. They get book deals, TV spots, and academic grants. The rest of us get a generation of sullen blamers. It’s beneath a lot of kids of every color to work at McDonald’s, yet they wonder why no one wants to hire them for anything else.

  Patterson calls this cool adaptation “the Dionysian trap for young black men.” But I might add that it’s a trap for all men. It just hurts black men more because they’re afforded fewer options for escape when it doesn’t go well. A typical white kid can stop acting cool, and do something else, because he has the options to do it. And both end up working for the Asian kid who dropped the pose first.

  And so cool culture has enlisted a generation of young men who need that decaying culture the least. It’s a quickie feel-good antidote to a longer, harder path toward pride and self-respect; it cuts them off from the dedicated work that results in long-lasting achievement. Worse, it’s so damn attractive that its destructive nature is clouded over by its appeal. And let’s face it: It’s fun. How do you fight that? Only one way—stigmatize it.

  Because cool, for everyone, is a bad thing. It’s a value-removal machine, a champion of reverse achievement. But, judging from recent history, for kids enduring the hell of inner cities, cool is worse. It’s another version of crack. Offering immediate appeal and pleasure, it is a gateway drug to nowhere, a one-way ticket to the fruitless decades that follow. This is true not just for blacks but for everyone. What of white kids who start wearing their pants low and then end up having to drop their pants for real in prison? Every day I pray for the return of the belt.

  We’ve come to a point where teens mock avenues that lead to achievement while they pursue roads to ruin. Evil finds the path of least resistance, and that path is almost always labeled “co
ol.” Cool encourages the abandonment of effort that wins respect, degrees, and jobs. Cool allows evil in all its shapes and forms to take you to places you never thought you’d go. Or would want to go. If life offered mulligans, I’d bet every single person who opted for “cool” as a teen would jump at the chance to opt out of the lifestyle that swallowed a decade of their life, or more.

  I wonder where the hell my old friend James is now. Unfortunately, statistics say that it’s six times more likely that he’ll be in prison than I will. That ain’t cool.

  KILLER COOL

  If you’re looking for the worst person in the room, find the guy wearing the “Free Mumia” button, as a show of support for a cop killer. Odds are he never wears that piece of flair around cops. That sort of brave political stand is better suited to a Bad Religion concert than a funeral for a fallen officer.

  When I wrote this book, a homicidal maniac named Christopher Dorner was on the loose, somewhere in the mountains of Southern California. The former LA cop, Navy reservist, and murderer who was charged with killing three police officers and leaving three others wounded, posted a rambling “manifesto” elaborating on his murderous plans of revenge against a society that shortchanged him, a manifesto that also contained rantings about his favorite news personalities, politicians, and musicians. (I mean, couldn’t he have just started a blog?) So, what do you do when a cop killer is also a cop? If you’re a prick, you root for him!

  I read his manifesto, fourteen pages that re-created the experience of sitting next to a caffeinated goofball on a bus who just saw an Oliver Stone movie for the first time (which is not much different from sitting next to Oliver Stone, actually). The diary was at times coherent, other times bitter, and the sum total of the mess was an angry guy with a score to settle, and perhaps suffering from an undefined mental illness. Sort of like an MSNBC anchor. In fact, exactly like an MSNBC anchor.

  Nearly all of the asides in his screed, with few exceptions, were about news personalities. He adores Piers Morgan, making him the only person on the planet who adores Piers Morgan (aside from Piers Morgan). From his writing, it appeared that this nutcase had been stuck in a local airport where the televisions are all tuned in to CNN. I mean, when you are about to die, who thanks Soledad O’Brien and David Gergen? (Certainly not Jeff Zucker.) The guy actually wrote:

  Jeffrey Toobin and David Gergen, you are political geniuses and modern scholars. Hopefully Toobin is nominated for the Supreme Court and implements some damn common sense and reasoning instead of partisan bickering. But in true Toobin fashion, we all know he would not accept the nomination.

  (Note: Representative of this guy’s psychosis is that he actually thought there was a “true Toobin fashion,” a reality break on par with admiring David Gergen, who may be Bigfoot after a good shave.) This drivel is toxic. Seriously, if this guy doesn’t shoot you, he could bore you to death. Too bad he didn’t read the thing out loud to himself first. He would have dropped dead.

  Now this troubled vet is roaming in the woods, well armed and dangerous. Given his circumstances, I’m waiting for the White House, in the spirit of Benghazi, to arrest the producers of First Blood. After all, the guy who made the anti-Islam video blamed for the death of Americans in Benghazi landed in jail. You can just as easily blame Sly Stallone for this, as well as everything else that’s occurred since Cobra.

  Meanwhile nearly all the media covering the Dorner story avoids stuff in the manifesto containing pro-liberal sentiment. This is the same media that, when the Gabby Giffords shooting took place, immediately pointed fingers at Sarah Palin because of a graphic design element (a crosshair) on her website. You can bet if Dorner’s manifesto had lauded the Tea Party, Piers Morgan would have been screeching at the top of his limey, affected lungs. Instead, the murderer lauds Piers, and he remains strangely silent, which in and of itself is kind of a relief. He’s no Benny Hill. Point is: Dorner happened to like the right people.

  More important, the psycho was a suspect in the murders of three people, including a police officer and the daughter of Dorner’s former lawyer. You’d think every person on the planet would find this unacceptable, but you’d be wrong. Nope, this thug had a group of fanatical supporters all over the Web, populating Twitter with hashtags like #GodornerGo and #Weareall-ChrisDorner. Why the love? Rebellion is sexy. The idea that a man is on the run, battling this vastly bigger police force, seems cool. And for idiots living in an idiot culture, the actual victims of this coolness are quickly forgotten. No one really talks about all the innocents Che Guevara killed. Then they’d have to stop wearing that stupid fucking shirt. (But Che did us all two favors: One, he reminded us that anyone wearing a beret should be ridiculed; and two, he helped us quickly identify some of the true assholes among us. They’re wearing Che shirts.)

  Note: Perhaps the Twitter “We are all Chris Dorner” nonsense is actually accurate. Because if you’re a jackass who falls for this shallow romance of evil, it does make you the same as the killer you adore. Well, maybe they aren’t all Chris Dorner—they actually might be worse. They are Chris Dorner’s admirers. Their own cheap, deluded values are actually vicarious. How many do you think were wearing Che T-shirts? And berets?

  It is worth noting that when it came to killers like Tookie Williams and Mumia Abu-Jamal, it took some time for leftists to lionize the thugs. Now it happens in real time, before the guy’s even apprehended, or even dead (which must be the “progress” part of “progressive”). Why wait until they get to death row, when you can be the first on your block to proclaim the innocence of a murderer? Now you can beat everyone in expressing your cool cred by proclaiming the innocence of a killer while he’s actually still doing the killing. It’s like watching Dexter without paying for Showtime!

  About these morons who cheerlead death and murderers: It’s really never about the killer. It’s about them. It’s about attaching themselves to a cause that separates them from others—that elevates them above the plebes who don’t see the coolness of rooting for a thug.

  As an experiment, I recently did a Web search for Daniel Faulkner. Who’s that?

  No one special. Just the police officer who Mumia Abu-Jamal shot and killed in Philadelphia in 1981. I googled Daniel Faulkner, and I got 193,000 hits. Then I googled Mumia, and I got more than 1.2 million hits. In mathematical terms, that’s, like, a lot more.

  Is it no wonder people flock to the thugs and ignore the real villains? It’s easy when the skewed priorities of our cool culture shine the light primarily on the thug and not the victim. If you were some dumb kid doing a report for school on the Mumia/Faulkner case, how could you not come away with a sense that the killer was far more important than the innocent victim he killed? The victims are the first to be forgotten; the villain is the first to get a movie and a care package from Ed Asner.

  Despite all the Google hits for Mumia, it would take less than an hour of searching to find out that Mumia killed a cop. But when you have the Beastie Boys behind you, all is forgiven. Ed Asner and even that former French PM François Mitterrand have his back too. Yeah, that assjacket Frenchie actually visited Mumia in jail. Imagine if George Bush flew to France to visit one of their more reprehensible criminals. (I was trying to think of an example, but could only think of Gérard Depardieu—who won’t even live in France, even though French is the only language he speaks well, usually while drunk.)

  What makes this hero worship more ridiculous is the new documentary on Mumia—which is about as balanced as a three-legged camel (my nickname), a vile valentine to a thug who masked murder as martyrdom. It’s out now, to the gratifying pointless eyes of white leftists everywhere, who hope that the dangerous sheen of a murderer elevates their vapid lives. Mumia is global warming in a prison jumpsuit—cocktail conversation for cowards who want so badly to be cool.

  This is why the Mumias and the Dorners get the love from the cool-craving chuckleheads in the media and elsewhere. It’s not really about the killers, it’s about impressing their peer
s with their shallow attempt at depth—depth defined by identifying with the bad guy and making the bad guy good. When you do this in movies, it’s essentially harmless, because the victims are fiction. But in real life, every time you elevate a fiend, you denigrate his victims; you piss on the graves of the innocents and mock the unending daily horror of the families who must relive their loss every day.

  Perhaps we should start a special bus tour, in which we take these gutless gawkers of gore to the victims’ families’ homes, where they can explain how sensitive Dorner really was. And if anyone accepts the invitation, pick them up, then drive the damn thing off the cliff. That would be totally uncool and wrong, I suppose. Maybe if I drive the bus, Hollywood will make a movie about me.

  THE COOL’S WAR ON WARMTH

  For cool to exist, it must ignore all the boring stuff that made cool possible. We forget all the hard work that made our leisure time possible. We forget that our ability to go places, buy things, and listen to cool stuff is predicated on a population’s ability to produce, to create, and to sell cool stuff. To gain that ability takes years of studying and hours spent not doing ecstasy at clubs or sucking on bongs in a basement, but alone, thinking, building, and working. Sometimes it’s boring, sometimes fruitless. And other times it’s ugly and dangerous, like war. We forget that without war we’d probably be nowhere. Without war—or the threat of it—the coolest among us would be hitched like Clydesdales to wagons pulling Vladimir Putin and the Ayatollah.

  The beauty of progress is that it makes it easier for you to carve out a space to be nonproductive. Typically people fill that vacant leisure time with bad ideas that undermine any possibility for improvement.

 

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