Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (21 page)

Back in December 2011 I came across a bizarre
Washington Post
piece on the Eisenhower Memorial, a sculpture designed by Frank Gehry. The article, a review by Philip Kennicott, was titled “Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial Reinvigorates the Genre.” I have not seen the memorial, but my commentary is more about the commentary than about the work of art. Yep, I’m doing a commentary on a commentary. When this book comes out, I’ll do a commentary on this commentary, on that commentary … too.

The article reveals that the sculpture is really more about the artist than about a great warrior who became president. According to the reviewer, the success of the work was how it “inverts several of the sacred hierarchies of the classical memorial, emphasizing ideas of domesticity and interiority rather than masculine power and external display.” Yeesh. That’s like a car accident involving two thesauruses. Is “interiority” even a word? Did the alphabet have diarrhea?

You see where this is going. Masculine power gets the short end of the stick, which is not surprising in the modern era when sticks are always getting shortened and androgyny is cool. These days any semblance of manhood is considered masked bullying that must be undone through a relentless “It Gets Better” campaign. It’s scary that even in the realm of war masculinity must be removed. I mean, you’d think war is where raw masculinity is necessary—and where it is focused and honed into awesome brute force. This is not the stuff of group hugs and “you fall and I will catch you” exercises you find at IRS retreats. If brute force is frowned upon in the military, we are all dead. In war, brute force is sort of the point, isn’t it?

Thank God for Gehry, “an architect of flamboyant gestures,” that he could honor a two-term president and one of America’s greatest heroes through the cool, contemporary art of feminization.
It’s really a shame Dwight wasn’t around to experience the hip metrosexuality. And to learn he embodied “interiority.”

This is how the
Washington Post
describes Gehry’s accomplishment:

Uh yeah, you’re right, champ. The memorial is about feminizing Eisenhower and obliterating the bravery of battle. It’s about replacing fearlessness with feelings, bravery with therapy. If Dwight were alive today, he would either kill himself in disgust or try out for
Hairspray
(an evolution in sensitivity that I’m sure would’ve carried the day at Normandy).

The real bummer is that heroism is somehow viewed as a negative masculine behavior and that feminization is viewed as the remedy. This goes hand in hand with the view of the military by academics and media types: that the values that make a military man a military man are no longer necessary. And never were. Never mind that it’s this old-fashioned morality and hard-ass character that ensured our survival. They aren’t cool. The world has changed, and so have we. And so, one must go back in time, through memorialization, to change society’s memory of those war heroes, stripping them of the core manliness that
helped make them great. It’s why the left can’t stand Allen West. He embodies precisely the kind of manhood that scares the crap out of them. He’s never joining
Hairspray
. Which is why, if he’s not elected president by 2040, I’m moving to Venus. Or at least to the bunker I constructed under my bed.

Kennicott describes the work of art:

Heck, why not just have Eisenhower in a dress picking daisies?

Kennicott goes on to describe using outdoor tapestries, which he says “subverts the idea of indoors and out, domestic and public, eliding boundaries between feminine and masculine space.” Wow. “Eliding.” How could this statue
not
be great?

Do you think a sculptor would ever downplay an enemy’s masculinity? Do you think they’d ever consider a thoughtful piece on the feminine charms of bin Laden? No, because our enemies’ manhood does not trouble them the way ours does. Ever notice how Che Guevara is portrayed? Manly.

Coolness is about subverting things that work, like our military. While subversion pulls the rug out from under goodness, no one really depends on the subverter for anything substantial. We depend on men to fight wars. We don’t really depend on those who interpret warriors’ masculinity for anything nearly as meaningful. While the warriors make the average citizen safer, the cool subverter just entertains grad students with disdain masked
as cleverness. It’s his stand-up routine, minus the jokes. In times of crisis, the subverter is the one cowering in the corner, hoarding crackers and wet wipes.

In my secret fantasies I always want to apply the idea of “subversion” to the lives of those who champion said subversion. Like, wouldn’t it be great to “subvert” the artist’s morning commute to work by stealing his bicycle? Wouldn’t it be awesome to “subvert” his breakfast with Ex-Lax? How about “subverting” his marriage by banging his wife? Nope, for them subversion only applies to other people’s traditional practices and desires. Subvert a subverter and you can bet they will collapse like a house of tarot cards. I’ve seen it happen—challenge an “open-minded” type with a really,
really
outrageous suggestion, and they suddenly experience a change of heart. “No, I don’t want my teenage daughters to go hot-tubbing with you.” Really? Oh, evolve! And bring us a six-pack of Zima. (They still make Zima, right?)

It makes you wonder what an Obama statue will be like in sixty years. Will anyone have the guts to subvert his “achievements”? Does his masculinity require a feminized makeover? Will he be shown brooding in a sarong, sneaking a joint in the backyard? Will they avoid the bin Laden killing, in favor of him doing something more humanizing, like body surfing? He played a lot of golf; they could have fun with that. Replace the clubs with long-stem roses. “The flowers represent tolerance and social justice, married to the feminization of golf, a previously masculine affair populated by white racists.” That was pretty easy, and I wrote it while delousing my pet tapir.

To some, if I say our society has become more emasculated, that is seen as progress. Or cool. But it took blood and guts to get where we are, not self-esteem courses, crying circles, and hot yoga. And yes, you can find yoga in the military (it’s great for
your back, apparently). Fact is, all of this points to one sad and scary thing: What was once considered cool was the military. Fighting for and defending your country was lauded, not mocked. But now patriotism is seen as a bizarre leftover novelty from a bygone era—like tiki bars and ulcers. Yet the veterans I meet seem so much more interesting than the dopes who mock them. A veteran garners strange new respect, the kind afforded to mystical beings returning from the dark side. Sadly, it used to be cool to export freedom worldwide; now it’s way cooler to import its opposite to our shores.

The first step in dismantling America’s greatness is dismantling the idea that America was and is great to begin with. Just referring to yourself as “an American” has become silly, an act relegated to trailer parks and country music stars.

No matter what America does in regard to foreign policy, it is “warlike.” We are now governed by people who believe that simply protecting ourselves is an aggressive move against a gentler world. In the land of cool, we are Goliath, and the people who want to kill us are David. The cool must do everything possible to emasculate the evil giant, even if it means our eventual demise.

A recent example: The House Democrats have introduced legislation to create something called “the Department of Peacebuilding”—a federal-level agency designed to scale back our military, as well as deal with other vile crap, like (you guessed it) bullying. The implication is that our military is just a macro version of the football jock lurking outside homeroom, waiting to dunk your head in a men’s room urinal, an act I often looked forward to.

Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who represents Oakland (a notoriously peaceful place, of course), had this to say:

Yeah, “a culture of violence.” This coming from a woman who in the early days worked with the Black Panthers and later was a fan of Occupy Wall Street (something she lauded, as it left a trail of tears—and feces—throughout her city).

But let’s address the name first, “The Department of Peacebuilding.” The title brings to mind an ancient Gutfeld rule: Anything that a third-grader could come up with will inevitably kill you. “Department of Peacebuilding”? What’s next? “The Organization of Soft Hugs and Butterfly Kisses”? “The Association of Group Sharing and Therapeutic Massage”? This crap is worse than weapons of mass destruction. For no matter how cool it is to be for peace, you can’t keep the peace without a piece. These idiots wish to disarm us in order to appease our enemies. Unarmed, we are that much more pleasing to the people who want us dead. Barbara Lee is just making it easier for those who hate us to meet their goal, which is our annihilation. It’s the first initiative she’s championed that has any chance of success, actually. Incompetence, minus competition, always succeeds. Then destroys.

But we know that keeping the peace can only happen through our awesome ability to make war. It’s not a cool thing to say. In fact, it’s anti-cool to admit that without our military, we’d all be speaking Esperanto (which is the official language of Vermont,
I’m told). It’s amazing that after beating Hitler, among other thugs, we still elect morons who don’t get it. Why is that?

Because peace sells to kids, who see pacifism as a cooler alternative to evil warmongering soldiers. To the cool, the world would be a better place if America just stopped trying to defend America. Giving peace a chance, to them, means we’d all get along, rather than get run over by heathens. For younger people, bored by history and unencumbered by truth, how could this be wrong? It would be hilarious, if it weren’t so damn dangerous.

It’s not like we don’t have evidence of the perniciousness of this stupid behavior. Whenever a Western peace group goes abroad, two things happen. They become propaganda tools for the enemy—or worse, hostages that we have to pay millions to get back.

Pacifists may be cool, but they are leeches. For them to exist you need nonpacifists willing to die. There’s another Gutfeld rule: The number of pacifists increases in direct proportion to their distance from the danger (or their proximity to the faculty lounge—same thing really). It’s an ideology better suited as artwork taped to a parent’s refrigerator, but instead it’s born from the academic media complex that firmly believes America is at fault. Anti-Americanism gives you cool cred (especially when you’re a celebrity on foreign soil), as it helps you ignore the real evil simmering around the world. It’s why every college student comes home for the holidays with dumb ideas about the world. Everything that has brought them to their fortunate spot in life becomes detached from the very entity that allowed their comfy lifestyle to happen—
the big fucking army that protects us
.

Remember that Barbara Lee voted against the authorization of force following the attacks on 9/11. She was the only person in both Houses to do so, making me think that she would have tried to combat Hitler with a Whitman’s Sampler. She believes
that surrender beats security, proving that peaceniks cause more war because they lure the bad guys into thinking we are just as dumb as the pacifists. And ultimately, pushovers. I would tell her to go to hell if she didn’t already live in Oakland.

But when you eliminate patriotism because it’s uncool, what do you replace it with? If we are not Americans, then what are we? Well, we are increasingly becoming things that have nothing to do with character. Patriotism is now replaced with pigment. Exceptionalism is now supplanted by orientation. We no longer take pride in a national identity but instead proclaim attributes that aren’t really attributes at all—descriptors that require no achievement. It’s now cool to be somebody and, like socialism, eliminate the forward pull of a meritocracy. You’re great because you’re black; you’re great because you’re a lesbian; you’re great because you’re Eskimo, dyslexic, androgynous, Hispanic, Celtic Wicca. But get this—ultimately there will be people better than you are at a job, and not beholden to these ideas. And in a few years, they’re all going to be laughing at us in Mandarin, Hindi, or Brazilian Portuguese. Why do I doubt that the BRIC economies are starting up any Institutes of Peace Studies? The best competitive investment they could make would be to fund ours. They’ll be laughing themselves silly while we contemplate our “interiority.”

How has cool ruined sports (that is, everything that isn’t soccer)? Well, think about what’s missing in sports these days: modesty. It’s gone. Modesty, after all, isn’t cool. Cool is about attention-seeking, and gratification from the masses. Modesty can’t compete. Which is why it’s no wonder that so many millions took to Tim Tebow like the second coming of Christ. It’s a testament to the times that a mediocre athlete who innocently proclaims there’s something greater than himself is seen as oddly refreshing. We live in an age when blending in and being accepted require ambivalence, tacky but expensive jewelry, garish tattoos, two illegitimate kids, and a first-name-basis relationship with the local strippers.