Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You by Greg Gutfeld Read Free Book Online Page A

then asked to rank how desirable these qualities might be in someone. (This would have been more fun if they were all naked, but that’s why I’m not a professor.)
    First of all, I have a problem with the group under scrutiny. Ifyou really want to know what makes something or someone truly cool, the last thing you should do is ask a college kid. Ramen noodles? They’re experts. Anything else? Zilch.
    Whatever college kids find cool has trickled down from somewhere else. Usually a professor, a pop singer, or a drug dealer named Magic Carl. They tend to accept their mentor’s idea of cool, without much thought. How else can you explain the popularity of poorly shot foreign movies, pointless causes, action figure collectibles, solemn but incoherent Asian tattoos, and unreadable books by Howard Zinn?
    Anyway, I’d redo the whole study and ask people in their eighties. Or hell, nineties. You ask them what’s cool, and they’ll answer plainly: “Killing the Nazis.” And they’d be right. It beats, “Getting signatures to support the rain forest.”
    Dr. Dar-Nimrod and Mr. Hansen’s amazing work (which will be the name of the movie), published in the
Journal of Individual Differences
(you can find it behind
Cosmopolitan
at the supermarket checkout), included something Dar-Nimrod calls “cachet cool”—the steps required to create a really cool dude or dudette. Some of the findings were obvious: stuff like friendliness, competence, attractiveness (called the Gutfeld Variable) were seen as cool traits. Yes, this is about as surprising as girls hating spiders: We love hot, nice people. Especially if they smell good and actually talk to you while you perform your rigorous research. (It’s the first time the author of the study talked to a girl in months!)
    The cool attribute that strikes me as most important, however, is “social consciousness.” According to the researchers, you are cool if you volunteer for socially responsible activities, which can mean anything from recycling crap to gathering signatures for something earnest (saving whales, slugs, or CNN’s ratings). As someone who gathered signatures for the Nuclear Freeze maybethree decades ago, I get what this is about. People think you’re deep and it opens doors. But it’s 100 percent bullpoop. Because it’s just too easy. Far easier than saying, “I fought for my country,” which, apparently, isn’t deep at all, despite the limbs lost.
    Dar-Nimrod explains that these traits are more dominant than the clichéd cool of yore: The guy in sunglasses who smokes cigarettes is no more. Being “pro-social” is now replacing “risky behavior” in the realm of cool. Thrill seeking is now trumped by “feel seeking.” (I invented that term just now—further proof that wine from a screw-top bottle helps my writing.) Forget Lee Marvin; it’s now a callow lad in a PETA shirt who makes impressionable women swoon. That said: I wonder if the fact that a guy named “Nimrod” was doing research could really explain these findings?
    Either way, I’m of the belief that pro-social behavior is just as deadly as smoking a Lucky Strike while pulling a wheelie on a Harley over a pile of undetonated land mines.
    First off, let’s strip away the illusion of what “social consciousness” really means. It’s a euphemism for “liberal.” When they’re talking about social causes, you know they aren’t referring to pro-life marches or NRA picnics. It’s about gathering support for stuff like Greenpeace or Planned Parenthood. In our contemporary culture, caring about the unborn is about as uncool as soiling yourself in church. (I mean, seriously, what are you doing in church?)
    On
The Five
I brought this up in a short monologue, pointing out the major flaw of these cool conclusions. Coolness—real coolness—is based on the prioritization of caring. Let me paraphrase myself, from whenever I said it: “The truly cool person reserveseffort for people closest to them.