Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (9 page)

So, why is craziness considered cool? Well, we like misfits. The idea of being an outsider creates a sense of depth that did not exist before. I love watching interviews of celebrities who say they were “outcasts” as teens, or “geeky” or even “ugly.” It’s almost certain that now, of course, they’re tall, gorgeous, and successful. They want you to think they aren’t just another pretty face—behind that pretty face is a sad clown, crying. Or perhaps self-mutilating or bulimic. All of which they’ll be “raising awareness” about as soon as possible. I have a hard time believing that all of these irresistible beauties were repulsive shut-ins up until age nineteen. Especially since many are twenty-one now.

This is pretty harmless, if you stay far away from the harmful. The glorification of the unstable has given us a fair share of unnecessary exposure to really rotten people. As cool as you think unorthodox types are, there’s nothing pleasant about the Manson Family. We can continue to elevate social deviance to a stature above your boring parents and your stupid siblings—but your boring parents and stupid siblings won’t gut a pregnant woman in her home and then write mocking messages in her blood on the wall. Your boring family is almost always the victim in these horrible events.

The infatuation with the eccentric (a nice word for “batshit crazy”) originates from a kernel of cool philosophy: Anything
that rebels against structure has to be good. In fact, it has to be better! The white picket fence is just a symbol of oppression (it’s white, after all); the man who tears down that fence is the hero. When a drifter convinces you to join his revolutionary group in the California desert, you can bet what’s next isn’t opening a frozen yogurt stand. More likely, it will be forced sodomy. But no matter. Cool makes evil just a part of the romantic resistance, and if you reject it, well, then, you’re “the man” too. How many people lost their lives buying into an alternative lifestyle that defined itself against the repressive nature of contemporary society? (If you only count Jonestown, it’s 918 members.)

Cool suspends critical thinking, the thought processes that can discern between good and evil—letting the harmful in. Being a dangerous asshole has somehow become an aggrieved group. I’m only surprised they don’t qualify for subsidized housing. Oops, they do. See our prison system. According to the cool, those are no longer criminals—they’re just victims of an unjust society railing against suffocating traditional norms. They are often “political prisoners.” If you just got to know them better, you’d see that you’re the problem. And when they rape you, it’s probably your fault.

(If you get the chance, see a wicked little movie called
The Paperboy
, which details an infatuation between a flighty woman and a ruthless killer. She works tirelessly to free him from prison, and when she does, he ultimately, and brutally, kills her. That’s the way it goes. Cool is nothing more than an avenue for the evil to trick the good into letting the evil in. This weird, messy little film should have won Best Picture on morality alone.)

What about actual crazy people? Does this romanticism of their predicament help? Hardly. As Heath and Potter point out, referencing the 1967 book
The Politics of Experience
, by R. D. Laing,
the author maintained that schizophrenics weren’t really ill but on “a journey of discovery.” Discovery of what? The land of hallucinations and random violence? Translation: It’s society’s pressures they’re reacting against, and their perceived illness is their way of breaking free from these evil structures that we’ve imposed against these deeper, more nuanced thinkers. We aren’t cool enough to see how the illness isn’t really an illness at all. It’s just an alternative lifestyle—one that achieves more than our boring lives because it refuses to subscribe to our nine-to-five dreariness.

Never mind if the poor families dealing with the schizophrenic are going through an unmitigated hell trying to provide some peace for themselves and their tortured family member. What’s important to the cool is that the sick person is the hero, and the people trying to help are the evil oppressors. “Madness itself becomes widely regarded as a form of subversion,” write Heath and Potter. And subversion is always cool—regardless of the pain and suffering it causes others, or even the subverter himself. By this logic, Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy were just Elvis without the guitar.

It’s dangerous to treat mental illness as a lifestyle rather than actually
treating
the mental illness. When the cool focus on guns as the impetus of violent acts, they avoid dealing with people who need help, who get those guns. We are a vast, rich country, with resources to care for those in need, but for reasons beyond comprehension we see treatment as an attack on individual liberty. We can no longer give people help, for it infringes on their freedom to be who they are, even if who they are might be a risk to others. So as talking heads rail against assault rifles to help their meager ratings, they avoid facing the uncool reality all around us: We fear to help the unstable few because it’s cooler to let them roam free. Which is about the craziest thing you can do. The
message delivered by Big Media every day, in a thousand different ways, is that it is better to be dead than intolerant. Lucky for them, messengers themselves are rarely being shot at or stabbed by madmen without provocation. Harvey Weinstein rarely takes the subway, I hear. He discovered there’s no dining car.

Award shows are funerals for the living. If you do not believe in God (and I veer in and out of that group depending on my success in finding a parking spot), then what replaces heaven? Fame. Fame is as close as you get to achieving immortality. Lots of people knowing you is the next best thing to a deity knowing you. Roughly one hundred years ago, the kind of fame we see now never existed. Sure, there was local fame, where the people in your village knew who you were because you happened to be really good at skinning an elk or cobbling a shoe. And there was the “legend” kind of fame—more like infamy—where the likes of Jesse James were known through gossip and pamphlets. But the kind of fame where a man born in Malibu is recognized by strangers in Tokyo—that never existed. Jesse James could still get a drink in solitude, provided he didn’t wear a name tag that read
I’M JESSE JAMES
. (And, really, most fame occurs after death. Which is pointless, if you want to get laid now. No wonder the promise of “seventy-two virgins” is so necessary.)

But thanks to the invention of modern entertainment in the
form of motion pictures, we’ve created a new kind of sensation: the recognition by millions of
you
. (And it is
you
. You control their fame. If you just turned away from their needy grab for attention, it would be a different world.) Fame didn’t figure into our evolutionary adaptations. I compare it to flying. People designate weirdos like me who hate commuting by plane as having a fear of flying. But “fear of flying” is nothing more than your evolutionary sense telling you, “This isn’t where you, as a human, are supposed to be.” (It’s much the same feeling one gets in certain areas of New Jersey.)

Recognition by hordes of strangers is not meant to be, and when a person feels it, it’s the same disorientation you would feel skydiving. Except it’s way cooler. And for those rare few who experience it (I reckon there are approximately 74,500 famous people on earth—I’ve actually counted all of them, including Dana Perino, who counts as one-half), it diminishes the idea of an afterlife. The idea of an afterlife helped to cope with hell on earth. But if life on earth is heaven for the famous, then heaven evaporates. Heaven can’t compete with the immediacy of instantaneous gratification. Fame is now the reason for life. And this mortal immortality, if you weren’t a decent person before, will turn you into an asshole. Or worse, Barbra Streisand. We are now surrounded, outmanned, and outgunned by a generation of phonies, grasping for acceptance through appearance and behavior that have no productive impact on the world. It is all sound and fury, signifying nobodies. The key, of course, is to look good doing it.

Awards shows are those necessary oases that remind the chosen few that they are, indeed, famous. And cool. (As for my own fame, it is both late in arriving and appreciated. Fame
at middle age is like discovering a whole new set of relatives you never knew but who know you. And they really like buying you drinks and asking you about Bob Beckel.)

The truly cool are people who work their butts off, heads down, unencumbered by desires for acceptance. Their success is based on achievement, not by external accolades. They know what they do is—if not great—at the very least their best, and reflects productive work. (If you’ve ever run into a military vet, you know
exactly
what I mean.) These are the people sitting in coach on a discount airline, trying to make it to their kid’s soccer game before leaving again Sunday night on a business trip because the tickets are cheaper then. There are rare instances when this behavior results in fame: See the Clydesdale horses. And war. It is why, when I think of awards shows, I reverse Woody Allen’s words, and say, “Maybe ninety percent of life is
not
showing up.”

Yet, in today’s culture, it is necessary to have more and more awards shows. These shows proliferate like rabbits on Cialis, and we watch them hoping for screwups, or at least something that makes us feel better about ourselves. But there are no awards shows for “best soldier” or “best mom”—or hell, “most effective urologist.” Instead, they just get a coffee mug. Why does the army of the phony cool thirst so desperately for moments in which their activity is noted? Shouldn’t what they do for a living be all that they need? It’s the irony of the cool: Their bottomless pit of poor self-esteem demands a fire hose of complimentary speeches and trophies, or else they feel the very essence of this precious coolness fading. That’s the secret Achilles’ heel of the artificial cool: It’s unsustainable without constant ego gratification.
Once you no longer hear someone saying your name, you cease to exist (see
Estevez, Emilio
, or
Bieber, Justin—in six years
).

I hate to break it to you: You don’t exist if this is how you measure existence. If you build your life around moments in which you possess other people’s thoughts, you forget that those moments are temporary and vacuous. In a gawker’s brain, when they see a person they recognize from “the television,” it’s never “My God, I love Adam Levine.” It’s “Look, it’s that tattooed guy from that really shitty band!” Fame is not about liking someone—it’s about recognizing them. There’s a mile-wide difference there. When we see a recognizable face, we believe they are special and they believe they are special too. We think we know them, although to them, you are nothing. Or worse, someone from the Midwest who’s probably not a vegan.

And part of being cool is being able to cultivate that stardom, then spend the rest of your life pretending to reject it. So you grow a beard, dress like a homeless person when shopping, or move to France (which I heartily endorse; please go).

In the world of pop stardom, what is mistaken for rebellion? A mediocre artist who spouts political beliefs that most freshmen in high school could have come up with after huffing Glade. How about railing against the Man, condemning suburbia or the sameness of that dreary suburban life, or ragging on people with boring jobs or nonglamorous lives? That’s been a big, giant, clichéd part of pop culture. I hate it. Generally, what’s derided among the coolerati is a simple lifestyle that 99 percent of history’s humans would’ve killed for—and often did. What is derided is what keeps our horrible society together. You and me—we must mock this.

That’s why I love heavy metal—it’s about creating something majestic and sincere, the opposite of what the hip do with strats and skinny jeans. It is a pretty selfless thing, I think. I don’t
think the Melvins or Devin Townsend or Mike Patton care a single whit if anyone likes them. They work for a living. And they love what they do. The award shows—where none of them ever appear—are for those other artists who question whether they are liked or whether what they do is truly work. In short, so-called cool people need to be told they are cool. The rest just do their thing every day and know it works because it makes sense in their heads—and if they’re lucky, make a living, feed their families, and hope the test comes back negative.

For anyone born in the 1960s, all answers to life’s problems can be found in one place:
The Brady Bunch
. The beauty of this wonderfully silly but often perceptive series is that, although it lasted only four seasons, it tackled every moral issue effectively and only once mentioned the word “sex.” (It was the show when Bobby Sherman nailed Alice in the pantry.) It aired every Friday night, and I never missed an episode. Those were the happiest days of my life. Until I discovered NyQuil.

The lessons of the
Bunch
somehow stick with you forever. One episode still haunts me: season four, episode seventeen, called “Bobby’s Hero.” It aired February 2, 1973—an important time in our popular history, and mine too. I was nine years old, and approximately the same height I am now.

In this episode, Bobby, the youngest of the three Brady boys, becomes enamored of the lore of outlaw Jesse James, so much so that the ruthless killer becomes his hero, with Bobby playacting throughout, mock robbing and shooting his annoying siblings. It was an acting tour de force, as far as tours de force by freckle-faced
freaks go (Danny Bonaduce never even got close). Why Mike Lookinland did not win an Emmy is a stain forever left on the fabric of Hollywood—a place where stains on fabric abound. I blame Cindy, evil spawn-of-Satan that she was.

Bobby’s parents (the adorable Mike and Carol Brady) become concerned over this development and try to figure out a way to turn Bobby’s infatuation off. In effect, they try to sober him to the reality of history. They want, in the words of one of the relatives of James’s victims, to show that Jesse James was little more than a “mean, dirty killer,” who shot his granddad in the back. They want to strip away the cool veneer and reveal the grotesque reality of a common, murderous thug. One far worse than David Cassidy.