Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You
Page 23
After he left to retrieve the lager, I decided that the only way to salvage this disastrous meeting would be to stand up, turn around, and confront the man behind me. He was ruining me. He knew I was a fraud. An impostor. I waited a few moments, and gathered my courage, and stood up.
When I turned around, I found that he was a mannequin, a large dummy holding drinks. He wasn’t real. He was a fraud. He was the fraud. It reminded me of that feeling you had when you were a kid, at night, in bed, in your dark room, and you swear that you see a monster. You turn on the light, and it’s a jacket on a chair. You turn off the light and then minutes later you once again think it’s a monster.
Relief and embarrassment came in one big wave. I pulled myself together and sat back down. When Arnold returned, he was greeted by a new me. A better me, who knocked the meeting out of the park. Arnold gave me some encouraging advice and sent me on my merry way. I ended up writing the script. It was horrible, but he convinced me to quit my job and write full-time, which I needed to hear from someone other than my boss at work, who was trying to get rid of me.
The lesson: It is a mistake to worry about how others view you. “Other people” are like images created in your mind. It’s only your desire to appease or please or impress them that makes them meaningful. (I refer specifically to peers you wish to impress. Not your family. If they’re impressed, you’ve done your job. And if they’re disgusted, you should listen.)
By pretending that the cool are mannequins, you can disarm the desire for cool and eliminate the need for acceptance. You reclaim your authority. You don’t need their observation or approval. You’re already observed by those who matter: your family, your friends, yourself. Don’t let the cool replace those things. Who needs it? You don’t. Really, you don’t. It won’t help you one bit.
We all have the feeling we are being watched, but by what? Our own conscience? Who knows? But we feel it. What we have to learn is that it is better to imagine being watched by something moral and good than by something whose criteria are amoral. Your ego will be fed, but nothing cool will provide that sustenance.
DANKON!
(That’s Esperanto for “Thanks!”)
The idea for this book grew out of a speech I gave at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. I was supposed to be talking about my previous book, The Joy of Hate but ended up elaborating on the idea of what is cool and what isn’t. I realized that nearly every monologue or segment I’ve done on my two shows, The Five and Red Eye, is concerned with one thing that drives me nuts: Why are good things seen as bad, and why are bad things seen as good?
This book answers that question. Or at least tries to. It’s all about being cool.
You will find within this book, here and there, bits and pieces of that speech, along with other concepts and ideas I’ve hit on before in my shows, blogs, and essays. Some of the chapters started out as monologues, throwaway observations on shows, and drunken rants on street corners, and I’ve expanded on them here, hopefully with a modicum of success. If not, I blame Obama. If he is not impeached by the time this is published, I am leaving the country and moving to Texas.
This is where I thank everyone who helped me, in one way or another, with this book.
First, I thank you for taking the time to read this. It’s not a normal book, and I am not a normal person. And most certainly, none of us reading this are seen as cool by those who feel empowered to define the parameters. But we know better.
Of course, I thank Mary Choteborsky, my editor, for poring over this wine-stained manuscript (at this point, it’s as crispy as the Dead Sea Scrolls), along with the helpful, energetic staff at Crown, who put up with late-night meetings with a writer who demanded alcohol as a prerequisite for showing up.
I must also thank, in no particular order: Paul Mauro and his lovely wife, Joannie; Aric Webb; my agent Jay Mandel; Roger Ailes (he infused me with confidence—as did all the other wonderful folks at Fox News—but more important, Roger first gave me a chance, meaning he recognized early on that I wasn’t normal, and he embraced it); the gang at The Five; Andy Levy, Bill Schulz, and the rest of the miscreants who inhabit Red Eye; Jack Wright, who has to deal with my butt twice a day; and the loyal pals at Breitbart.com. I thank the ghost of Andrew Breitbart, who may or may not be helping me write this very sentence. Also—thanks to Woody Fraser, who saw the potential early on.
I owe a special thanks to Dana Perino. She is a dear friend, and puts up with my inanities daily, and for that she will be rewarded with two sentences here. I will not mention her dog. (Ah shit, I did.)
People who’ve inspired this book include a pile of Free Radicals who seem thoroughly uninterested in how they are perceived by the coolerati and would of course not care if they were thanked by me. They are, in no order: Penn Jillette, Andrew W.K., Skunk Baxter, Joe Escalante, Gary Sinise, King Buzzo, Devin Townsend, Larry Gatlin, Ariel Pink, Gavin McInnes, Ann Coulter, Terry Schappert, Robert Davi, Andrew Elstner, Torche, Tom Fec (a.k.a. Tobacco), Fabio, John Rich, Mike Baker, Jim Norton, Rob Long, Tom Dreeson, Joe DeRosa, Nick DiPaolo, Dirk Benedict, Tom Shillue, Ginger Wildheart, Brandon Belt, Billy Zoom, Gregg Turkington, Tom Hazelmyer, the South. The list continues, perhaps, in the chapter toward the end of the book on Free Radicals, or my definition of truly cool people.
I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the restaurants where I wrote this pile of words. That would be Amarone (a delightful Italian restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen) and the West Side Steak-house (a terrific Midtown joint run by the affable Nick), and now this pretty awesome Austrian joint, Blaue Gans, run by a cool dude named Kurt. It would be safe to say that I wrote most of this while drinking. These places made sure I was fed.
And, of course, I thank my lovely wife, Elena, who saw very little of me on weekends and weeknights. (Something she might not have minded, but she was exceedingly patient with my deadline neurosis. I love her dearly.) My family deserves thanks, as I drifted in and out of conversations with them, always worried about unfinished chapters in between a two-show-a-day grind. They were stuck doing tougher things that I was able to escape. My mom deserves the most thanks, for sticking it out through a tough year and sticking with me.