Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (12 page)

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:

(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 peers 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.

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.

If you’re a college student who cannot see how the work of the uncool (the corporate shill, the businessman, the accountant)
allows you to do all your cool stuff, then it’s easy to condemn them. It’s how you can hate coal, how you can hate natural gas while ignoring their roles in perpetuating your lifestyle. Every anti-corporate renegade with a Prius ignores the evil corporation that built the thing. The ugly stooges on evil corporate boards somehow have nothing to do with how you were able to fly to Cabo for spring break or heat your dorm room during an especially rough Boston winter. Your efforts of investigation cease at your dad’s checkbook.

Campuses are rife with this apocalyptic ignorance: the idea that once you’ve gotten to where you are, it’s time to pull the rug out from under the rest of the world.

I write specifically of the left-wing campaign to have college endowments divest their holdings in fossil-fuel companies because they have concluded that fossil fuels are evil. Fossil fuels are like the combustible versions of evil white men—they must be slain, despite everything they’ve made available to you. I have no idea why so many young people have a beef with petrified dinosaurs (the ultimate renewable vitamin). If I didn’t know any better, I’d think it’s an unnatural attachment to Dino from
The Flintstones
.

So far this divestment movement has spread to over 250 college campuses and they involve all the annoying players—the naive, the hipster, the nonhygienic (yes, I know that’s redundant)—all joining sit-ins and building takeovers. If there ever is a time to sympathize with the lowly security guard making fourteen bucks an hour, it’s during these exercises in petulance. Try watching a middle-aged black guy getting “informed” about the ways of the world from a dreadlocked twenty-two-year-old Caucasian grad student, egged on by a gray-ponytailed professor, and you marvel at his ability to refrain from strangling the
student with his utility belt. The Stations of the Cross for the modern security guard can be found on every college campus: the trust fund kid, the weepy coed mad at Mom, the eternal grad student who smears the military while dressing in camo, head to toe. At least your average shoplifter at Walgreens isn’t pretending to be anything else but your average shoplifter. The guard is just a man doing his job, trying to put food on the table for his family, yet he is less cool than the sniveling, soft-bellied student tempting him to break out the Mace, in an effort to ruin his life via YouTube. How many men and women have lost their jobs because they did what the rest of us would do: beat the crap—and there’s a lot of crap to beat—out of these mindless, self-absorbed tools?

There are also hunger strikes. Hunger strikes are noble and sometimes necessary. If you’re a political prisoner in China or North Korea (where the entire country is on a hunger strike, not by choice), I get it. For you, it’s life or death. But at Harvard, it’s about a press clipping and maybe getting a better grade or a higher class of hand job. So when an undergrad adopts a hunger strike in order to get someone to divest from oil, I say, let the twerp starve. Most of them are overfed, pudgy masses of soft tissue—it wouldn’t hurt if these sad sacks lost a few pounds. They might even understand the plight of the average Venezuelan, who operates under conditions American activists see as utopian, when they’re really nightmarish. How about the next time one of our coeds feels a hunger strike coming on, we exchange her with someone who’s genuinely starving? In, say, North Korea or Saharan Africa? Might as well make it easy for them.

This divestment argument—once valuable when dealing with South Africa in the 1980s—has been co-opted by the bored and uninformed. If they were informed, and really cared, they’d
fight against the injustices in countries where we buy our oil, like Saudi Arabia. They don’t because in order to divest from those horrible places, we’d have to invest here and embrace fracking. It’s weird how protesters were up in arms about apartheid decades ago but now are okay with far worse: executions of homosexuals, the stoning of rape victims, or even our casual drone program that includes American citizens as targets. Yeah—about that—the lesson here is that only a progressive could get away with that. An administration that had wanted to give protective criminal rights to enemy combatants from other countries now claims, as I write this, to conduct summary executions against Americans—radicals, no less!—utilizing drones without affording them anything remotely resembling due process. Their due process is disintegration into dust. (I don’t pretend to care about them—Anwar al-Awlaki got what he deserved. But the hypocrisy is so breathtaking, you’d need a Buick-sized inhaler to handle it.)

And if these modern divesters were really informed, they’d see that oil, for lack of a better fuel, is the only thing we’ve got going. I know, I know—solar, wind, algae—that’s the future. Sure. It was the future fifty years ago too. When is this future? Keep repeating that to yourself as you tap on your iPad, comfy in your heated local Starbucks. But if you took one moment to look around the world and see what the poor souls in other countries are heating their hovels with, you’d understand why coal is a lifesaver. For every life saved through carbon reduction, there are hundreds of poor souls dying from burning crap that’s far more heinous than a Dave Matthews mix tape. (The fumes from burning them account for a million hospitalizations.)

But divestment, as always, is part of a larger, mustier idea, an old chestnut on our leafy, intellectually corrupt campuses: the dismantling of junk that works. I am willing to forgive students
for not seeing this bigger picture—they’re dupes in the game. And this kind of protest, really, is just something to do on campus before they get that summer internship at their daddy’s law firm. The real villains are the folks running this game, and the Marxist professors that push it along. If only this were simply an attack on oil companies, but, as Stanley Kurtz points out in his great three-part series in
National Review
, the ideology behind it is built around returning America to a rural, foraging, agrarian, decentralized system of scavenging—with gardens on rooftops and huggable animals safe from the jowls of hungry stockbrokers. Which is when, I suspect, many of the rest of us will start dining on hipsters (they’re not bad with mint jelly).