Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (13 page)

Whenever this preindustrial utopia is being discussed, real progress is always a marker for evil American domination. We have all the good stuff, and since we are evil, so is all of that good stuff we’ve made. I always wonder, if a twenty-three-year-old protester seeking the simple life suddenly finds out she has breast cancer, would she reject all that medical technology that a simple life cannot offer? If she sticks to her principles, she’s in the morgue by twenty-four. There are no atheists in foxholes—and few Luddites in the dorms, when it comes right down to it. You can’t play five seasons of
Breaking Bad
on a bong.

Let’s examine who is behind the divestment movement. The major dude, Bill McKibben, is also behind the blocking of the Keystone Pipeline. When you see the same old faces attach themselves to a cause, you realize that safety, global warming, and toxic ponds have nothing to do with the greater aim. At its root, it’s a strident ideology meant to dismantle an uncool world—one dominated by earth-raping monsters run by evil corporations (while also making tons of cash for Al Gore). And it’s not that they want to return to a communal lifestyle; they just want
you
to. Communal
in the end means coercive. Their desire to change your way of life is independent of the result. They really don’t
care
if it works. What they want is what they condemn: power. Like Obamacare, their power is about limiting your options, because your deprivation is their victory. At least a greedy CEO’s hunger for power might actually benefit a company and its shareholders. For these
eco-maniacs
, it’s about subtraction: Your sacrifice enhances their power. It’s the basis of all fascism, and ultimately ends in misery. Their real aim is scoring major cool points: The greenies gain a victory against the evil industrial complex that poisons hairless minority orphans. That’s sure to get a movie made about them by Matt Damon, a movie no one sees outside Matt Damon’s immediate family.

Despite the lack of practicality, the media finds the idea of foraging for vegetables on rooftop gardens to be delightfully cool. Reporters gladly type out pieces on such movements on their Macs, ignoring the fact that the people they pay tribute to are hypocrites. They want the iPod but not the power that makes it work. How does that work? Oh right, it doesn’t.

Cool is the Trojan horse for coercion—it tricks you into giving up things you take for granted in exchange for the pleasure of feeling important. And whatever you give up is replaced by nothing nearly as efficient or affordable. It’s a key lesson I’ve learned from the divestment movement: that the apostles of climate change were operating a ruse. This was never about a few degrees Celsius (a slight increase actually helps the earth; the warmer the planet, the less people die from the cold). It was about forcing the industrialized West to adhere to their preindustrial utopia. I say the “West” because I know these activists are smart enough to realize no one in China or Russia or India would fall for this shit. Your average Russian diplomat would throw you out a window
during your presentation on algae. (Right after serving your eyeballs on a bed of caviar.)

Remember how the goal of your typical radical Islamist was to use terror as a means to return our sinful existence back to when Mohammed walked the earth? No technology; no television; no temptation. The only difference between them and these divestment dupes is that the radical Islamists cut to the chase by being horrifically violent. They learned to fly airplanes, instead of make flyers. The divesters want the same thing; they just aren’t bloodthirsty. But they have a common enemy: America. They just can’t get their act together between poetry readings.

In a way, I’d support the divestment, if only to watch one college—just one—actually give up reliance on oil completely. As I write this in January 2014, we are experiencing the coldest winter in decades. Do you really think these divestment dipshits are keeping warm with a solar panel and a copy of
Das Kapital
? Anyway, it’d be so worth it to watch students and their idiot professors freeze their commie asses off. They can burn this book to keep warm. Actually, they can burn thousands of this book. Contact me, guys. I’ll give you a slight discount.

The quickest way for a commie asshole to gain weepy fans is to die. This is something I’m willing to accept, as long as it happens regularly.

But it’s no surprise that when someone truly awful dies, the cool break out in reverence. Which is what happened when Hugo Chávez croaked. On that day in March 2013, we saw a parade of misty-eyed celebrities and solemn left-wing hacks paying tribute to a dead guy. Out of the woodwork came a parade of Hugoslavians, tyrant-lovers who could overlook the heathen’s badness for the sake of coolness. See, someone can be truly evil. But if that person runs a country and
you know that person
well, it makes you kinda cool. It’s better to know Darth Vader than Doris Day. It’s pretty cool to brag that you just shared a burrito with a murderous despot, as opposed to a biscuit with Billy Graham.

And so when Chávez bit the dust, who did we see? Sean Penn. Oliver Stone. Jimmy Carter. Joe Kennedy. All decorating the corpse with wreaths of blithering blather. And no one blathers
blitheringly like that quartet. That’s the worst set of four since the last Who reunion.

As
USA Today
, a paper one finds sadly staring at you from your hotel room doormat, reports, an emotionally upset Sean Penn mourned the death of the fifty-eight-year-old socialist creep. Sean wrote in a statement sent to the
Hollywood Reporter
: “Today the people of the United States lost a friend it never knew it had. And poor people around the world lost a champion.” He added: “I lost a friend I was blessed to have.” Penn needs to tell you that he knew the guy. A world leader. That’s cool. I guess playing Jeff Spicoli and marrying Madonna wasn’t enough (one made your career, the other ruined your urinary tract). Yeah, this is the same chap who told Piers Morgan that Ted Cruz should be institutionalized. Talk about the pot calling the kettle batshit crazy. If Penn got any nuttier, he’d be a Snickers bar.

Of course it would be uncool to point out to Penn that Chávez was no champion of the poor. Under his rule people became far poorer in Venezuela. And in the midst of an oil boom, Chávez engineered a murder boom. The murder rate in his country tripled during Chávez’s tyrannical tenure, hitting a high of 67 per 100,000 residents in 2011, compared with a murder rate of less than 5 per 100,000 in the United States (and that includes Baltimore). And about 10 or 20 less than the last Penn movie.

Penn was joined, per usual, by director Oliver Stone, who said, solemnly, somewhere: “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place.” He added: “Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chávez will live forever in history.

“My friend, rest finally in a peace long earned.” This is from an
adult
, mind you.

And no list of apologists for evil is complete without Michael
Moore. This nugget comes from the
Michigan Live
website, which reports Moore praising Chávez in a feeble collection of Twitter messages, on the night the Venezuelan viper expired.

Save the balance, Mike. You need all you can get just walking across the street.

When you desire to be the coolest person in the room, you also become a willing dupe. The great writer Michael Moynihan calls it the “free breakfast” theory of tyrant love. All an evil scumbag has to do is offer something seemingly free, and somehow celebrities forgive all the other awful things they did. You raped my sister but bought the city a pig? It’s a push.

For Chávez to obscure his attack on the poor, he had to brand himself as the champion of the poor. Which is why he scored an amazing amount of free press, delivering free heating oil to America’s poor. “Even if it was political opportunism, as conservative critics insisted, it got home-heating fuel to hundreds of thousands of yanquis during the past four winters, when the price was often
skyrocketing,”
Time
magazine’s Tim Padgett reports. (By the way, how is “yanquis” not racist? I’m
enraged
!) Too bad Chávez couldn’t lend a hand to his own people—but they were far less important than the accolades to be gotten from the American media.

Meanwhile, the
Huffington Post
—the beehive for boneheads—writes: “Hugo Chávez was a man of many talents: he played ball, sang songs, pulled out pistols, and got down and groovy—and that is precisely how we’ll remember the Venezuelan leader.”

Precisely
? That he got down and groovy? What is this,
Soul Train
for psychos? Operating in the lurid lexicon of cool, one must forgive tyranny because the guy knew how to party! It makes you wonder how the Huffpo would have covered Hitler’s death if he had only mastered the bongos. If only Stalin did karaoke! If only Pol Pot was a Doors fan. Didn’t Idi Amin love to slam dance?

There were others involved in this freakshow tribute, including the embarrassingly self-absorbed British politician George Galloway, who called Chávez a “modern-day Spartacus.” Galloway, mind you, never met an anti-Western tyrant he wouldn’t swap spit with. To him, radical Islam is a justifiable response to our own evil. Make a deal with the devil, and maybe the devil will kill you last.

But the real champion in this Hugoslavian hug? A nobody at
The Nation
, a guy who gives GGs a bad name. His name is Greg Grandin, and this is his take:

Tell that to those who didn’t survive Chávez’s horrible rule. They won’t hear you, because they’re dead. Hmmm … if only Stalin was more efficient, the world would be a better place. (The
population would definitely be more manageable, that’s for sure.) Great job GG; you win the Walter Duranty award for advocacy journalism. It looks just like an Oscar. Only the figure’s head is up his ass.

While it’s unseemly to rag on a dead guy, there’s something equally off-putting about lionizing a bad man. At its heart is a petty, shallow jab at America, the Goliath. And why? After all, Americans aren’t bad people. We’re just good people who do good things really well. And we do screw up now and again, but all in all, we get things right. We’re kinda awesome, history attests.

But American goodness is a boring, uncool concept. Instead, among the cool kids in this vacuous universal high school, the default cliché that infects all thinking comes down to “us evil, them good.” Paying tribute to Hugo Chávez translates into, “You Americans are too big and bad to understand the plight of the common man.” The cool don’t consider that this “common man” was hoarding billions of dollars, allowing criminality across the country, and fostering a murder rate that outstrips countries involved in actual wars. Or that America was built by common men. Successful common men whose only fault was that they weren’t non-Caucasian leftists.

When Oliver Stone and Sean Penn pay homage to a man who considers the United States the cause of all the troubles in the world, their conclusion is simple: We agree with the dead man—America sucks. This cool perspective might help a drug-addled actor score a dopey model at the bar. But it makes everyone else familiar with history throw up.

So the next time you run into a cool person who finds it cool to deify a dead creep, ask ’em this: Should your cool assumptions about the flaws of America excuse your allegiance to a thuggish critic of our country?

Venezuela might have the world’s largest oil deposits, yet most of the country’s citizens are mired in poverty. Chávez died a billionaire. How can you laud this fraud—a one percenter if there ever was one? How can you say he was good for the poor? If he’s good for the poor, so are hepatitis A, B, and C. This is a country so screwed up, they put price controls on toilet paper. This poses quite a risk, since Chávez fans like Penn and Moore are so full of shit. They’re Porta Potties on legs.

Another question to ask: How do you think this cool pose is viewed by folks who escaped the real, authentic horror of dictatorships from hellholes in Africa or the entirety of Cuba?

How do you explain the praise heaped upon a man like Chávez, who controlled the media, banned free expression, and imprisoned those who spoke out against him? Do you think Penn, who loved to visit the despot, thought it was simply too rude to say something when he was there? As an invited VIP guest, he didn’t want to upset a famous friend? Do you think he knew those trips were prepared for him? These primitive attempts at Potemkin villages, where potholes and rocks were painted over to create a joyful facade over the country’s decrepitude? Do you think Penn knows what a Potemkin village is? He probably thinks it’s a retirement community in Florida (where Madonna is living).

Why do we have champions of tolerance asking that we tolerate those who traffic in intolerance? Wouldn’t it make more sense to salute those who challenge a man who attempts to monopolize the media, while nationalizing every industry he can get his grimy paws on? Isn’t that speaking truth to power? If Bush had done what Chávez had done, how quickly would these cool creeps be handcuffing themselves to the White House fence, spray painting their torsos with theater blood, the cocaine still searing the lining of their sinuses?

In truth, these apologists for evil are far from cool. They are losers, shams, frauds. Worst of all, they are predictable. The obvious hole in their respective souls drives them to embrace the world’s worst ghouls. If only to mask an unhappy reality: that they’re all just boring sacks of aging bones and irrelevant beliefs. As we all are. But at least most of us don’t fall in love with dictators.