by Greg Gutfeld
Athletes get addicted to their cool image and, once they retire, often make desperate attempts to “keep cool.” For example, if you’re Dennis Rodman, a man facing a life of aging irrelevance, you go to North Korea. Back in February 2013, the former US basketball star and tongue-studded buffoon visited NK with the Harlem Globetrotters on Vice magazine’s dime, hanging out with leader Kim Jong-un. This is what happens, I guess, when the past seems better than the future.
Mind you, this visit took place right after NK released an alarming video threatening to bomb the United States, featuring footage of our president in flames. That’s kind of uncool, but when you’re being feted by a dictator, why bring up such issues? That’s totally uncool, dude. Let’s party. Oh yeah, the country had just conducted an underground nuclear test weeks before too, but I’m sure that was only for fun. And Rodman probably thinks “underground test” is a strip club move done for men in sweatpants.
Rodman spoke to the media about Kim (a creepy tyrant who’s become a bedsore on the earth’s ass) at the Sunan Airport as he left:
The most was that one thing, you know what, it was amazing how he was so honest. And one thing that, guess what, his grandfather, and his father were great leaders. And he’s such a proud man.
He’s proud, his country likes him, and I like him, love him, love him, guess what, yes, yes, I love him, the guy’s awesome.
Translation: Come on, guys, he’s cool. He’s the president (or something like a president) of a giant country! That’s cool! And it’s cool that I get to hang with him (unlike you). Further translation: “I can’t rebound anymore, so I need to do something to stay famous. I’d eat a live ferret for another fifteen minutes of attention. And to be honest, I’m kind of hungry.”
After the idiocy broke, Rodman faced a barrage of criticism. He appeared on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos to try to justify his bizarre lovefest with a petulant, diminutive monster (Kim, not Stephanopoulos). He wore sunglasses and dressed in a garish jacket and baseball cap. (Cool rule number one: Play by your own rules! Screw those stiffs in suits!) When George asked Dennis why he’d travel to a place with such a horrible record on human rights, bringing up its death camps, Rodman replied that “we do the same things here.” Which qualifies him as a Huffpo columnist, right there.
Does this stuff sound familiar? The celebrity naivety? The relativism? The “we are no better than they are” line? Dennis Rodman is a Lillian Hellman who could rebound (except Rodman’s prettier). He’s Jane Fonda with a jump shot. He’s Sean Penn with a nose ring and a catalog of sorry tattoos. He’s no rebel. He’s just another celebrity who, addicted to cool, is willingly duped into any kind of phony propaganda. Just make this guy feel special, and he will say anything about you (provided you pay his way and make sure he flies first-class). He will love you. He will defend you. He will think you’re cool. I’d tell Rodman that he’s a poor man’s Walter Duranty, but he’d only say, “Inka dinka doo.” Which, by the way, he often does say, when he’s not saying “awesome.”
Of course Rodman probably saw very little of North Korea, but he might have read a little history. He was, like so many apologists, up on his relativistic game—responding to the death camp accusation with an accusation of American guilt. When all else fails, pull that “we’re just as bad” card, because it’s the coolest thing to say when you have nothing else to say. I call these morons “dictatortots,” for they act like children in the face of seductive, coercive power. They just don’t know any better. But they know one thing: It’s cool to be liked; it’s cool to get attention, even if it’s from someone who leaves a trail of starved bodies in his wake.
Today, Rodman is just another example of the sad kind of “thinking” that now comes from our athletes. I get it coming from professors, grad students, and bad actresses. Athletes, who spend their lives working hard and understanding the nature of achievement, should know better. But as we move farther and farther away from the real meaning of sportsmanship, this is what you get: Rodman indulging a maniac, while denigrating the country that made him rich. If Kim is so great, and “we’re no better,” why isn’t he hanging around strip clubs in Pyongyang instead of Miami? Maybe because in North Korea, the models aren’t anorexic by choice.
Recently I asked a pal of mine who played pro baseball, Rico Brogna, about the difference between great athletes and their lesser peers. “The best performers realize the value of being rewarded for their hard work and don’t take it for granted. Players want to play, simply stated … they don’t want to do any other outside crap, they just want to work out and play their sport.” Those athletes seem to be as rare as a Tim Tebow touchdown.
Locker rooms are now full of stunted adolescents chasing fame and wealth, when—as Rico says—they should be keeping their eye on the ball. Because the game is no longer enough, athletes spend more time cultivating a shallow persona to elevate their cool profile. And this explains the tacky clothes, the awful cars, the horrendous jewelry, and all the perpetual rap sheets. In an effort to create an identity, so many athletes have adopted the same identity: the bejeweled, club-happy, limousine-loving lout, more enthralled by attention than achievement. You can’t blame all of them. They became rich before they became men. And generally, because they never become the latter, they lose the former too.
But if you want to look for real character, and real grace in sports, I have one suggestion: the NCAA girls’ bowling finals. I’m watching it now on television, and I’m entranced by these glorious teams of girls in skirts and shirts … bowling. Mind you, none of these girls have swimmer bodies. They don’t have gymnast bodies. They don’t have masculine frames that suggest months of steroid abuse. Most of them are of average build—a few are chubby, others are just big-boned. In a word, they are normal. Delightfully normal. And so uncool. Some could kick my ass (a man can fantasize). I just love how much fun they’re having and how unassuming their fun truly is.
As I watch the girls (it’s Vanderbilt vs. Nebraska—two states I’ve never visited), I’m thinking: Why do they seem so cool to me? It leads me to think: Where did they learn to bowl? A bowling alley, I know—but who taught them? I may be wrong, but I conclude that these girls have awesome relationships with their parents and especially their dads. Bowling is family activity. It’s something you do on a weekend or on your birthday with your folks. And chances are it was the dad who got you into bowling—it’s the thing you can do with a girl that doesn’t involve dolls and their ridiculously complex dollhouses. I notice there are men in the crowd, with painted faces, cheering them on. I’d paint my face for them too. These women may never make the money that Rodman did, and squandered on booze and drugs, but something tells me they don’t need to. Whatever they have already is more than enough: a sense of grace, modesty, and character you can only find in a place where you wear other people’s shoes.
SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT
What is the South?
Ask any mediocre comedian, and within seconds he’ll fart an incest joke. It’s the stinky, default punch line for hacks until they find themselves headlining somewhere scary in Alabama. Then it’s nervous jokes about city folk.
And if you ask anyone in media about the South, they might start humming the theme to Deliverance, following up with a line about “squealing like a pig.” It’s the go-to laugh-getter for lazy minds with high school intellects. (Me included.)
To them, the South is just the opposite of the cool and the hip. Unless, of course, the cool and the hip adopt the Southern routine ironically. You’ve seen it: shootin’ pool; drinkin’ cheap beer; growin’ a beard; wearin’ sleeveless T-shirts in Bushwick, Williamsburg, or any other hip enclave outside Manhattan; droppin’ your gs in bestselling books by sexy talk show hosts.
When people rag on the South, they’re using it as a proxy for everything else that we’ve come to define as uncool: family, church, tradition, fattening food, guns, outdoor dogs, sweet tea, and Walmart as a shopping destination and meeting place for
families and friends.
And what is the South known for, in a good way? Manners. Is it any wonder, as the South goes, so goes the way we treat one another generally? In the South, people still call you sir or ma’am, and it’s not just when highway cops ask you to slowly exit your car (I was only adjusting my zipper). But there’s nothing cool about “please” or “thank you.” If anything, manners are now employed only by the scarred, depraved villains in movies, as an ironic precursor to violent flourishes that pass as edgy comedy. The meaning: Anyone who happens to be polite is probably also a predator or a pervert or both.
Family values, holding hands, and saying grace at dinner—you can call that backward-ass, but Duck Dynasty is on to something. (Its phenomenal ratings can attest to that, as well as the public’s visceral, angry reaction to Phil Robertson’s temporary suspension.) The South has got some great employment stats, and primarily Republican governors attracting new businesses and new citizens. It’s working. Which is maybe why the cool need to ridicule it so much.
In the South, in any restaurant, you might see a family praying before their meal. This is about as anathema to the New York hipster as watching FNC with an armed pro-lifer. All at once it’s laid out: an intact family, platters of fattening foods, affordable clothing worn without the requisite sense of irony, and religion. God, how uncool is that! Why can’t they all just go away and let us live our lives without them reminding us of all the things we’ve happily rejected in favor of ironic sideburns?
Living in the South, unless it’s Austin, is the equivalent of attending Scarlet Letter U, for Uncool.
A California real estate firm called Movoto proved how acceptable it is to defecate all over a large swath of the country. They ran an article listing the most “redneck” cities in the country. They made their choices based on a very specific criterion: a list of attributes you could probably guess without reading the next sentence. But here it is: “Redneck” was defined by the number of Walmarts, the number of NASCAR tracks, and the number of people who didn’t finish high school. Also included: how many taxidermists, gun stores, and country music stations. Yep, if you’re a typical Southerner, right now you’re cleaning your Gatling to the sound of Larry Gatlin under the frozen stare of a stuffed deer. You’re probably also chewing tobacco and spitting it on the floor, next to your inbred cousin who’s having sex with a chicken.
Anyway, Atlanta won the prize as most redneck, but the runners-up included Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Nashville, and Tulsa.
Before I go on, you gotta ask yourself: What kind of real estate firm would go to the trouble of denigrating markets where there is viable real estate? It’s as if they were saying, “This market is too uncool for us. We only sell refurbished Victorians in the Haight.” Problem is, that’s not just bad business, it’s bigoted business. It’s like a barber banning the high and tight—not the best way to build a customer base.
I called the real estate company and asked their publicity guy why they chose to do this article. He said they thought it would be funny and might generate some buzz. Which it did. I crapped all over the firm on The Five.
I asked the guy if they thought “redneck” was pejorative, and he said no. Then I asked him why adjacent to the article, the website featured that scene from Deliverance—the odd-looking kid with the banjo. Was that supposed to be a positive representation of the South?
The poor guy stuttered a bit and conceded that, no, comparing places to a crazy, violent hillbilly culture isn’t exactly a valentine.
And then I asked him if they would consider doing the equivalent for blacks. Would his company ever do the country’s most “hip-hop” or “gangsta” cities to live in? You see, I was trying to drum up a similar but politically more tenuous version of their white stereotype. Obviously new to the public relations game, the chap said, honestly, that they had considered doing that. But changed their minds, because it would be seen as, well, unseemly.
I gently eased the poor guy into observing his company’s own hypocrisy. I have to say, even I felt bad for him. But then I thought: Screw him. It’s okay to call a Walmart shopper a redneck, but you can’t call a fan of sagging pants gangsta? How are these two things different?
They are because you can get away with the former and you’ll lose your job at a dinky real estate website if you attempt the latter.
But it seems to me that a lot of the most uncool stuff happening around our country isn’t occurring anywhere in the South. Let’s pick two recent examples: the Ariel Castro sex dungeon in Cleveland and the Kermit Gosnell abortion house of horrors in Philly.
Both are not in the South. Both are in actual “cities”—places where people have full sets of teeth and pedigree dogs you carry when you’re shopping.
I didn’t pick those two horrible events out of thin air. I picked them because both abysmal stories unfolded in cities leisurely. These crimes occurred unabated for, like, ever.
How does that happen? Seriously, do you think you could run a rape dungeon in the South for a decade? I doubt it. People tend to visit their neighbors, hang around, and know the turf. I would expect in the South, as well, they’d pretty much glom on fast if an abortionist was murdering living, breathing kids. Southern hospitality means looking out for one another. Sure, they know when to mind their own business. But they also have a tight-knit community, often centered on a church. Some might call it nosy, but that nosiness can be lifesaving.
As once-vaunted cities decay and rust (the list is longer than my bar bill), and their once-bustling populations exit to safer places, we are left with urban dead zones—vast spaces where the people who live there keep to themselves. These are cities predicated on not making eye contact. Ever. We create invisibility for criminality by averting our own gazes.
An entire season’s plot of the HBO show The Wire was devoted to how gangs could dump bodies in abandoned houses in Baltimore, simply because no one noticed. Right now, Detroit is considering using goats and sheep to eat the overgrown grass swamping the desolate and deserted streets, avenues once populated by families. It’s not a city; it’s a postapocalyptic petting zoo. It’s not the South that’s uncool; it’s the tragic urban wastelands created by decades of liberal cronyism and corruption. Japan didn’t kill Detroit. Try Kwame Kilpatrick. The left has destroyed more cities than Godzilla.
On to Cleveland: How could Ariel Castro get away with his house of horrors for so long? Or his neighbor, too, who—months later—got charged with 4 counts of aggravated murder, 173 counts of rape, and 115 counts of kidnapping? Elias Acevedo Sr., who lived doors down from Castro, is accused of abusing three women for years. What the hell is wrong with this place? Ingrained in the city life is this: If you see something, don’t say anything. The South was built on manners. In the North, it’s built on mayhem. In Chicago, Detroit, and other cities, the populations are sitting ducks for predators who prowl unabated because the neighborly concern of the South does not exist.
There is nothing sadder or more sickening than the Kermit Gosnell story. If you read it as fiction—an abortion doctor snapping the spines of weeping babies—you’d think it’s the plot for a Texas Chain Saw Massacre sequel. But it’s not Texas. It’s Philadelphia. There was no one there watching, worrying, or acting on a concern for others in that story.
This, in part, explains why suddenly the South seems so damn appealing, if still uncool. The South, in my mind, is the new black.
The neighbors there may have a funny drawl, but they won’t turn away when you scream for help. If that’s uncool, sign me up.
THE REBELS OF ROMANCE
As the sibling of three sisters, I’m an expert on bad boyfriends. I saw every kind. Druggies. Jocks. Tennis players. Ruby Tuesday waiters. But growing up, girls are always told by their dads, brothers, and uncles to steer clear of the riffraff. The bad guys traffic in cool, mimicking the bad-boy persona glamorized in movies. Shorthand: a walking sulk. Your father, if he was smart, terrorized them with a glance.
&nbs
p; Here’s what dads know: Cool is alluring when you’re young, but it’s not the best choice for marriage. When a man or woman settles down, they are instinctively programmed to seek out the mate that provides for them over the long term.
Yes, I know “provides” is some sexist code word for “misogynistic lady-hating bastard,” but that’s only because feminists made it so. Providing for someone is a sacrifice, and it’s mutually selfish. That’s the pact. You’re a team and you provide for each other. And then, later, provide for a family. True, it sets limits to other behaviors: You can’t stay out all night doing lines of coke anymore (well, unless you’ve got a nanny who wipes down the mirror). Overall, though, the “settling down” thing is a good thing. It creates a long-term solution for something that requires a long-term solution: the mailing of your genes into the future, safely. It’s actually kind of cool. And it’s also pretty hard. Sometimes I think the reason why it’s denigrated so much is not that it’s dorky but that it’s difficult. You can never be perfect at it, so why bother with it at all? You’ll argue with your wife, your kids will annoy you, and it’s just easier to wake up in the morning with a hangover and a hooker than with a three-year-old bouncing on your bed demanding pancakes shaped like unicorn heads. (Some things you never grow out of.) Although I know a lot of cool dads who manage to be married and still have fun (or perhaps they’re just good actors). It takes the concentration, compartmentalization, and endurance of a pro athlete.
But our culture paints a picture of the stable earner husband as sooo boring (uncool). For a woman to link up with him is emotionally more devastating than the physical consequences reaped from hooking up with a freethinking activist with substance abuse problems. Face it, the paragons of pop culture (editors, artists, directors, reflexologists) really think you’d be better off marrying a goateed gun-running meth-head than the goofy husband parodied in every sitcom or crime drama. In Dick Wolf’s world of Law & Order, it was almost certain that the well-to-do husband was a murderous pedophile, played by Rob Lowe’s less successful brother. The fact that I can’t remember his name tells you I’m drunk.