Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (4 page)

But we know there is nothing cool about dependency. There’s nothing antiseptic about drones. And there’s nothing cool about anti-exceptionalism, increased regulation, government control in all sectors, and a factional country based on race and gender.
We are the rebels
. What’s cool is building businesses, military supremacy (which keeps us free to be cool), unity over division (once called patriotism), individualism, and competition (which is the universal engine for self-improvement). All of this may sound dorky, but it’s as cool as Pegasus making out with a unicorn (i.e., very cool). We need to teach people how to love this country for the reasons that made this country what it is. And those reasons are so cool, it’s no wonder Sean Penn, Michael Moore, and Robert Redford don’t get it. They hate those reasons as much as they hate you for cherishing them.

It shouldn’t be too hard, as an anti-cool campaigner, to win converts with a message like that. But we haven’t. Which means this book must be a wake-up call for the rest of us, the uncool. It’s time for the reign of the new cool. We have the message. We just need the messenger. He doesn’t need a leather jacket. He just needs a thick skin.

Fact is, the desperate desire to be cool has skewed our culture toward nihilism, carelessness, and ineptitude. It is now cool
to be an idiot. A jackass. It’s cool to be a failure, as long as your failure is the basis for a reality show. And on the reality show you can do what’s considered ultimately cool: “raise awareness.” How else can you explain the Bravo network? It’s a machine devoted entirely to the adult tantrum.

In the rest of this book, I will explore how cool has undermined all the best things about America. I will present a case as to why the desire to be hip is destroying the hippest thing we have: our ridiculously cool exceptionalism. I will reveal how the adolescent media and their infantile preoccupations are killing us, figuratively and literally. And then I will nominate the truly cool people on this planet who can defeat these hacks and phonies. They are the real matinee idols of this new movement—people I refer to as Free Radicals. There are more than you think. And far more than the cool want you to know.

You know what defined a cool job in the old days? I don’t. I wasn’t born yet. That’s why it helps to read other people’s books. In Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s fantastic tome
The Rebel Sell
, they mention a study from the 1950s by Vance Packard, which teased out five factors that gave a job prestige. They were: importance of the task performed, the level of authority the job gives you, the know-how required in doing said job, the “dignity of the tasks required,” and, of course, the money made from doing the work. According to Heath and Potter, the results—like my thigh rashes—were “remarkably consistent.” Supreme Court justices were seen as the most prestigious, but also scoring high were exactly what you’d expect if you remember any black-and-white movies: bankers, executives, ministers, and professors. In those movies, they were usually played by Fred MacMurray or Robert Cummings. They had great hair and no visible tattoos. You know they smelled of cigarettes, Brylcreem, and work. They were rarely involved in “raising awareness.”

How things have changed. With the exception of professors,
there’s absolutely
nothing
still considered cool on that list. Ministers? They’re the butt of jokes. Supreme Court justices? Please, the media even hates the black one (in fact, they
especially
hate the black one). Executives are just cogs in a machine, and as for bankers—even bankers hate bankers. My God, I’m a right-wing libertarian, and I hate my bank. Yes, as H and P point out, the prestige of all these jobs is “steadily waning,” as the new, cooler occupations are picking up the slack. It’s the “cool, bohemian creative types” that now get the chicks, and get movies made about them. Cinematic action is steadily being eliminated by slight men pressing “send.”

It really is invigorating.

I’m not kidding. I was biting my nails during
The Social Network
, and I’m not even sure why. I mean, it was a movie about
rich kids suing over who invented a social networking site
. This was not
Dirty Harry
. Christ, it wasn’t even
Hello, Larry
. It was
Goodfellas
for zeta males.

I don’t begrudge the founders of Facebook. Anyone who creates something that millions—or billions—crave is genuinely cool in my book. It is why, however, I don’t think Apple is cooler than McDonald’s. Both make something that is a pure popular product. A Big Mac and an iPod are pretty much the same thing—except one has a slightly metallic aftertaste (I blame the lettuce).

But here’s the catch. We live in a time when some products are cool while others aren’t. And this cool bigotry masks a different kind of disdain—one directed at the nonintellectual, the guy who doesn’t watch
Girls
, shop at Whole Foods, or read
Dwell
on the bidet. This average dude is not interested in the healing powers of crystals or windmills, or solar power. He’s just fine with natural gas. His own, and North Dakota’s.

This product bigotry creates the cool job elitism. Everyone wants to work for Twitter, but no one wants to work for Exxon. Try finding a job right now at Twitter. Impossible. But they’re hiring in North Dakota. (Can a healthy unemployed individual fresh out of school frack? Or is that the modern equivalent of going to work for a fascist death squad—that eats kittens?)

Thanks to the rising cool status of certain jobs and the decline of others, people have stopped contemplating doing the dirty work, the work that keeps the lights on. Can you imagine a young college graduate announcing to his friends he is going to work for an oil company? Nope, he’s joining an improv group instead. As I write this, the Labor Department reports that only 47 percent of Americans have a full-time job. That’s because it’s hard to get full-time work as a maker of artisanal tricycles. Or worse, edible artisanal tricycles.

In February 2013 it was revealed that Facebook paid no income taxes for 2012. As reported by CNN, among other places, the social network was due a tax refund of almost 430 million bucks. Now, this is a company that made one billion before taxes (which buys approximately 50 million hoodies for Mark Zuckerberg). But they were able to secure the refund because of a tax deduction from stock options issued to Facebook employees.

I won’t pretend to understand how this works (as an English major, I have no discernible skills other than spelling
discernible
correctly), but I know this: that because this company happened to be Facebook, the story was a one-day affair. It came and went like an ice cream headache, leaving neither a bruise nor a hickey on the Zuckerberg Empire. If this company were something
that actually made something in a factory or field
, it would be roundly condemned by every single media hack on the planet.

Case in point, we have a strident administration that rails
against oil companies constantly (while taking credit for its record-breaking output), and the rich in general, over their perceived failure to pay their “fair share.” Both entities are evil, for they make stuff people want, and because of this, they make a mountain of money. And from that mountain of money, the government takes a hefty slice. Which bureaucrats then spend on extremely important stuff—like a study into why lesbians tend to be overweight. (I could have answered that question: It’s called pastry.) At one point, back in February, on Al Sharpton’s show (I believe it’s on MSNBC, a network for grad students suffering from shingles), President Obama made a petulant observation that what unites the Republican Party is protecting the rich from having their taxes raised. Well, then … what about your friends at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, Mr. President? Don’t they have to pay their fair share? If Obama got any more adolescent, I’d have to ground him for a week and take away his Twitter privileges. No more selfies at memorial services for world leaders.

And so, fossil fuels, a boring, banal, greasy, dirty evil thing that is used by everyone (especially the poor, minorities, and women), are trashed daily by our commander in chief. Meanwhile a social networking tool—built by a social networking tool—that monopolizes the time of schoolgirls and the fat pervs who befriend them gets off scot-free.

Why is this important? Because one item produces energy while the other steals it. Without oil, we’d be nowhere. With Facebook, we are nowhere. Facebook has become the anti-oil, the anti-energy phantom that steals time and effort from everyone under the false pretense that you are actually
doing
something when you’re only friending an ex or “liking” a picture of the ex’s hideous children. And make no mistake, if those weren’t your kids, you’d think they were ugly too. (This is based on my
own research finding that everyone thinks their own children are 450 percent better-looking than they really are. This illusion of attractiveness was created by nature to keep parents from strangling offspring when the brats wake you up at 3:00 a.m. screaming like feces-spraying gremlins. I know, I’m sure that when I have kids I will think they are adorable too … before I leave them in the forest chained to a tree.)

We live in a time when the industry we need most is vilified and the one company that distracts us from reality gets a pass because it’s coming from somewhere cool: Silicon Valley. A place where silicon people live.

Seriously, remember that old James Dean flick
Giant
? Guys working in oil fields, to me, seemed pretty damn cool. Now they’re seen as the problem. Instead we look to pale, skinny men in hoodies and say, “Yes, that’s cooler.” I get the change in culture; I just don’t have to like it. (Note: I own two hoodies.)

And where does that lead us? The vilification of the most uncool thing invented since Satan invented the Republican: fracking. By now, you probably know what it is. To put it simply (it’s the only way I know how), it’s a way to get natural gas and oil out of the ground by blasting shale (rock) with a method of hydraulic fracturing that is so far over my head, it might as well be happening on Neptune. But the real story is this: Certain parts of the United States that an observer might previously have described as “bleak” are experiencing a money-drenching boom so amazing that the only people who could despise it are environmentalists and the infantile celebrities who mimic them. Now we have intellectual giants like Yoko Ono and Rosario Dawson lecturing us on the dangers of fracking as if they’ve spent years studying oil and gas extraction. (At least I admit I’m coming at this issue armed with a limited knowledge of the exact science, but I’ve also read
the studies and listened to both sides.) My guess is that neither of them or their like-minded dipsticks have a clue what a positive impact fracking has had on millions of Americans in an otherwise desperate, flat economy. My gut tells me, they don’t care. It’s not about being right, or admitting you were wrong. Let’s be honest: The people fracking most benefits, Yoko and Rosie despise. Why isn’t that a form of bigotry? They’re “frackist,” which is essentially hating the poor and uneducated—or, at least, those less rich and “enlightened” than you. Which essentially includes anyone between the coasts who doesn’t meditate to the music of local Native American artists.

Why would some of these anti-frackers choose to repeat falsehoods about fracking (like saying it leads to breast cancer) when it’s clear that they know little about the science? Because it’s cool. And it’s easy. You can do it while getting a back rub at the Virgin flight lounge.

The coolest kid in the anti-fracking movement is a guy named Josh Fox, who made a film called
Gasland
, a one-sided demagogic attack on fracking. It was later fact-checked by one of the real Free Radicals of our time, Phelim McAleer. McAleer is the guy who made the flick
FrackNation
, which counters the fearmongering of
Gasland
. But that’s not what makes it great. What makes it great is how it was made: with a crowd-funded campaign that gathered over two thousand contributors to help pay for it. Those who donated were nobodies whose average offering to the film (according to my good friend Wikipedia) was sixty bucks. How is that not cool? Isn’t that what a grassroots campaign is all about? If only the movie were about Noam Chomsky’s fitness routine. Then George Clooney would’ve funded the whole thing himself—just to make sure his European neighbors would like him.

As I write this, experts are saying that fracking will now supply
the United States with centuries of domestic energy, making it a possibility that in our lifetime we may free ourselves from a dependency on foreign nutjobs who take our money while funding terrorists who want to kill us (no, not the BBC). Yet we have a legion of cool-driven, egomaniacal freaks who’d rather have us under the thumb of the Saudis than reaping the benefits of homemade fuel.

Hell, if you’d rather not bomb Syria, and quietly excuse yourself from the riotous table that is the Middle East, isn’t the only appropriate solution to get up, go home, and frack the hell out of each other? You don’t even need a condom!

John Sexton at
Breitbart.com
covered a special version of hell: a “celebrity bus tour” organized by Josh Fox through the town of Dimock, Pennsylvania, to raise awareness on the evils of fracking, as part of the Artists Against Fracking campaign. Aboard the bus: Yoko, Sean Lennon, and—making this bus truly talent-free—Susan Sarandon (which sort of makes her the Ringo of this particular tour, but whatever). Their goal was to fight against fracking’s “violence against nature,” as Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma, explained. And he hoped to get the media to buy into their war against usefulness. Gandhi told the friendly
Huffington Post
that fracking would “destroy us, destroy humanity.” This is the beauty of cool activism—no exaggeration is too overboard because outright lies and panic-stirring rhetoric only reflect the deep passion you have for the world. Did anyone mention to them that the bus they were on wasn’t being fueled by windmills? These people are so stupid that if you told them the bus was powered by unicorn farts and Pegasus feces, they’d buy stock in it (God knows they’re rich enough). When you lack truth, all that’s left is exaggeration. And having Yoko’s phone
number on your cell? That’s got to make them feel special. Look what she did for the Beatles.