RIP Cool

"What happened to being cool?" - David Bielanko

Here's someone finally asking the same goddam thing:

On the margins of this civilization which Khrushchev envied, a diffuse set of heretics, misfits, pariahs, outcasts and hipsters of all ethnicities invented American Cool. Embryonic in the Jazz Age, clumsily developed by the Beats, accidentally incarnate in Elvis and studiously incarnate in Miles Davis, Cool was everywhere, even official, by the early years of the Sixties. It was an ironic attitude, a nonchalant pose, a controlled pout. Largely but not solely a male attribute, Cool was the armor plate worn by JFK and Steve McQueen, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, Sidney Poitier and Saul Bellow. By the end of the decade it was seethingly and suddenly teenaged. Cool went mad. Waiting for a rain of hydrogen bombs to close the human era, terrified by the Draft, the privileged children of that American super-abundance embraced sex, drugs, rock and rebellion.

There was no Cool left in America by the time the Trump era began, just noise. Part hair shirt, part hollow bombast, every day for four years Americans buried themselves beneath a falling skyscraper of cringe. The rest of the world was collateral damage. This culture had more than a whiff of mental distress about it. Over there: howling patriots, conspiracy lunatics, Nazi bodybuilders, militarized trolls, hustlers and grifters. Over here: brittle liberal worthies, nerds, meritless meritocrats, academic Torquemadas, trust-funded podcasters, pseudoscientific TED speechifiers, hysterical talking heads and way too many lawyers. Not to mention all the creepy racists, the OnlyFans fans, the ‘wine o’clock’ mothers, the whining, weepy- kneeling athletes, the hate-crime fakers, the wannabe Bolsheviks, the acorn-brained influencers, the over-exposed YouTubers, Jerry Falwell Jr’s pool boy, Bret Stephens versus the 1619 Project. It almost sounds dynamic. But two dogs fighting over a pork chop can be dynamic. It almost sounds alive. But dead bodies always release gas.

All that remained was cringe. 

Personally, I blame it all on the moment The Fonz chose coupla nerds for his best friends. 

"Ayyyyyyyyyyy! You guys wanna stay in and knock out some Sudoku? Ayyyyyyyy!"