Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You Read Free

like a Beastie Boy, your faded tattoos stretching over mottled fat like Satan’s Saran Wrap, as you try to convince yourself that the worn-out chick with the gray Volvo eyed you up a second time. To actually give a damn about manners and elegance makes you a target of mockery.
    The aim of being cool, really, is to say, “I am not like them. I am not a dork. I’m relevant.”
    Which is why everything done these days springs from a fear of dorkiness despite the fact that it’s the uncool dorks who make the trains run on time. There’s nothing more boring than a train schedule, but without it how would the hip find the right subway tothat Williamsburg flea market where they can spend one hundred bucks on a T-shirt from a late-seventies Cheap Trick tour? (I was there—a stoner threw up on my shoes.) Without the uncool, the cool wouldn’t exist. Why is that? Because cool contributes nothing to “how things work.” Oh, something that appears cool can work (see everything made by Apple). But making such products does not rely on its makers being or appearing cool, but thinking and working hard. Behind that cool is a ton of very old-fashioned hard work performed by anonymous badasses. But they hide it—like the ugly coal plants that ultimately fuel every electric car.
    The definition of cool: popularity without achievement. It’s how President Obama got the youth vote. Ask any kid who voted for him, “Why did you do it?” and the convoluted, wide-eyed answer will ultimately translate into: “He’s cool and that other guy wasn’t.” (Now they’re paying the brunt of Obamacare. Suckers.) The media pushed this to the hilt, and much of the public bought it. Hope and change is cool because it sounds cool, even if it’s undefined. An activist government is cool too, because giving stuff away is cool—especially when it’s other people’s stuff—and therefore perceived as philanthropic. But philanthropy without feeling the pain in your own wallet is super-easy to do, and about as cool as giving away your roommate’s food while he’s at work trying to pay for that food.
    So what is perceived as cool in today’s world, when it’s really the opposite?
    Bureaucrats spawned in teachers’ lounges, chiseling away at your income through punitive taxation designed purely to redistribute wealth . They care, you don’t. You must be evil.
    Dependency as an acceptable lifestyle, independent of achievement . To the cool there is no shame in letting someone else pay your way, even if you could probably pay it yourself.The government is your new boyfriend, with money (not his—mine and yours) and an apartment in DC. Embrace him. He absorbs the risk and distributes income so you can pursue whatever else strikes your fancy. In the old days feminists would mock women who depended so much on a man. Today if the man is the government, not so much. A man who opens the door for you is a Neanderthal; a bureaucrat who pays for your pills? A hero.
    Ridiculing women, minorities, and gays who reject this culture of dependency and victimization . They heroically say no to the worst kind of hood—victimhood. The lie here is that the cool defines itself as being outside the rigid structures of society, yet condemns those who really achieve that position in life. It’s how Ben Carson can be roundly ridiculed, despite immense, earned success. And is there a truer rebel alive than Mia Love? Not to the media who ridiculed her.
    Fake work that doesn’t require building, moving, or doing things . Anthony Weiner, a man whose only talent is aiming his camera at his dick, can embarrass himself and his family, yet happily return to run for elected office. He does so for two reasons: He doesn’t believe he should have to actually “work” like the rest of us and he thinks the constituents agree. His return to the public eye (much like Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford) says a lot about a culture that has lost the ability to define real work. No