Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (3 page)

Embracing amnesty and open borders
. Sure, other countries have borders (the ones most people are fleeing from), but discussing the possibility of an American border is smeared as racist—the ultimate in uncool. Am I a bigot for buying locks for my apartment door? No, but I’m probably racist for writing that. Amnesty is cool because it’s so damn benevolent. “Hey you guys—why don’t you just stay here, and not worry about citizenship!” Cool people love to make friends, and they will make eleven million of them.
Note:
To be cool, it’s way cooler to have more brown friends than white. No one ever brings up amnesty when discussing immigrants from Eastern Europe or Ireland; they don’t need more white friends. I wonder how the cool would feel if the new arrivals were looking to crash on their couch on the Lower East Side? As long as it’s Arizona’s problem, it’s not theirs.

Anything old is uncool
. You can thank the media, of course, which seeks to portray anything traditional as dorky and outmoded. The stuff that worked before (in the good old days) apparently is stupid because it worked so well that it afforded us the luxury to trash it. It’s great that Mommy and Daddy did all that uncool work, so you could sit in your air-conditioned classroom and shit all over them, to the approving eye of your ponytailed professor. He’s just such a rebel. He writes letters to
Mother Jones
! (However, despite a distaste for tradition, the hip will pay thousands for a table made from salvaged, vintage “repurposed” snowshoes.)

Hero worship of celebrities based on fake edginess
. It pays to remind the worldwide media that Johnny Depp is not really a pirate, despite the jewelry and mascara he wears around the
house. He’s a walking thrift-store lamp. Doesn’t anyone remember when he was just a twerp trashing hotel rooms? This worship of the play-actor further diminishes real work at the expense of the fake and affords a respectability to their political leanings that is wholly undeserved. Speaking of, I really hate …

Destruction masked as achievement
. Do moronic rock stars ever think of the maid when they trash their twenty-fifth hotel room? No rock video ever shows the poor minimumwage worker (likely someone’s mother) cleaning up that mess in slow motion; yet that’s how all pop star destruction is depicted. As long as it’s in slow motion, anything is cool. When Justin Bieber peed in that bucket and then swore at a picture of Bill Clinton as he exited a New York club, who did he apologize to? Not the poor cleaner who uses that bucket to mop floors. But to Clinton. Clinton’s advice in response: Choose your friends wisely. (Spoken like a man with unsavory secrets.) It would have been nice if Bill said, “Treat people who aren’t as lucky as you with respect,” but then that would be against character. And would have creeped out the strippers.

Victimhood
. I often refer to the elevation of the David and Goliath myth as a universal storyboard dictating that it is always moral for the smaller party to win a battle over the bigger, even if that smaller and weaker party is evil. If America was a tooth, the cool would root for the cavity. A criminal is just a victim of your own success. And this must be rectified, by punishing you, either by taking your money through taxes or freeing the criminal so he can violate you one more time. Mumia Abu-Jamal—the cop-killing hero—must be innocent. He’s got dreads! That’s an even smaller minority than “black
males on death row.” If he were also transgendered, he could be the coolest person in America!

Code words
. Language that aptly describes things is uncool. However, euphemisms created to avoid hurting the feelings of our adversaries are not. Cool is removing judgment from your lexicon. Hence, Fort Hood terror is “workplace violence.” Which I guess makes Hurricane Sandy a “weather tantrum.” Code words are now being employed to erase the meaning of welfare, unemployment, loafing. Stress is now a word used to describe everything that was previously known before as “life.” Saying “that’s life” is uncool. Say “that’s stress” and you’re an expert. Referring to someone who is in this country illegally as an “illegal” is totally uncool—and on some campuses, “illegal”! In the same vein, calling someone a “drug dealer” is bad too. From now on they’ll be known as “unlicensed pharmacists” or “pharmaceutical entrepreneurs.” Shoplifters are “nonspending customers.” Abortion is “women’s health,” and raising taxes is “revenue growth.” All of this is a clue: Because the cool cannot call something what it is, they must resort to this Orwell-speak to fool us into believing they’re not morally bankrupt. When you think about it, “cool” is just a cooler word for “liar.”

Talking about your identity
. If someone cool happens also to be gay, bisexual, transgendered, Raëlian, or Eskimo, you and I will hear about it. If you are less proud of
what
you do than
who
you do, then you’re considered cool. We’ve moved so far from a color-blind society that even the color-blind have their own society. If you need to tell me you’re gay, I’m thinking you’re not really gay. You’re just boring. Right now, as I write this, the media is reporting that a gay man is trying to make the NFL as a field goal kicker. Remove “gay” from
the equation, and the reporter has to find another story. That story, however, will
never
be “Gay man doesn’t give a shit about being gay.”