A certain class of Americans—let's call them the brrr-geoisie—has come to see the air conditioner as a stand-in for everything that's wrong with the country and the world. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, cafés now throw open their windows in the dead of summer. They won't succumb to a culture of gas-guzzling SUVs and soda-swilling layabouts! They'll give us a place to endure the heat, to suffer the heat, to pretend to enjoy the heat, all while we sit in sweaty judgment of our neighbors. I'm working in one of these fresh-air establishments right now, my neck damp, and I'm trying to imagine the alternate universe where this place would apply the same logic in January, and shut down its furnace so we all could work as God intended. But for the brrr-geoisie, the two extremes of temperature reside in different moral categories. If one end of the thermostat corresponds to a basic human need—for warmth on a winter night—the other reveals a shameful self-indulgence. Heat is good, cool is evil. What's behind this double standard? Why can't we learn to stop worrying and love the air conditioner?
The case against cooling, like certain other pillars of hipster sanctimony, stands on a foundation of half-formed ideas and intuitions.These are probably the same jerkoffs who tell anyone who will listen they don't watch tv, which makes them better than you of course.
And of course you know my stance on the issue:
Today is the 110th birthday of air conditioning, which ironically is doing as much to increase global warming as anything else, but I could give a shit, I'd rather the planet burst into the Sun 200 years from now than go one minute not in absolute comfort....nay, extreme comfort.
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