Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You (15 page)

Christ, this reads like the notes left from classmates in your freshman yearbook: “Jasmine, like U were so cool!!! XOXOXOX! Super meeting ya & can’t wait till we hook up over Summer! Let’s chill!”

When you run through those attributes, the article becomes more than a fantasy confessional. It was a pathetic plea for easy compassion from people who had little connection to the actual tragedy.

In sum, the writer devoted thousands upon thousands of words on a mass murderer. Because, in the hearts and minds of editors, he’s just more interesting than his victims. What can you say about the victims, other than, “It’s horrible they are dead”?
But with the killer, you can go on, for, like, ever. More words have been devoted to the John Wayne Gacys of the world than the victims of such monsters. They’re cooler, editorially speaking. No wonder the networks are flooded with shows about brooding, complicated serial killers. They’re so … deep.

Which is why this article will generate more marriage proposals from women than a seventy-five-year-old chain-smoker winning the lottery.

I wonder if she would have described the bomber in similar terms if he had been a member of the Tea Party. (The profound idiot David Sirota actually pleaded for the bomber to be a white right-winger. I felt bad for his therapist when it didn’t happen.)

If Tsarnaev had been a Tea Partier, you can bet Cher’s tapeworm that the story would have been treated differently. Instead of being about the bomber, it would have been about how this right-wing bomber represents a greater, more destructive movement growing within America. But because he’s actually an Islamist, he’s treated like an anomaly, a mysterious aberration one must analyze with thought and feeling. If he had been a Tea Partier, though, he would have been a symbol of so many like him that lurk in every Walmart aisle. He would represent the Republican Party, the viewers of Fox News, or anyone who didn’t vote for Barack Obama. He would be me, after four drinks.

Some people admired the detail (which passes for journalism these days at
Rolling Stone
) found in the piece, and I don’t deny its meticulous devotion to adjectives. But it camouflaged the real point of the article: how modern corrosive pop culture can soften evil through the easy prism of cool. Good versus evil becomes irrelevant as long as you master the look of cool. If you’re cute and dangerous, those evil deeds you perform become secondary. Blown limbs are no match for blown hair. Too bad Nidal Hasan
didn’t look like Russell Brand. Jann would have done a centerfold. Even more, if you’re a mediocre musician with no buzz but great cheekbones, maybe terror beats giving guitar lessons to middle-aged accountants in your rented basement apartment.

This kind of thinking survives as long as the cool’s own, comfy survival is not under threat. If the
Rolling Stone
offices had been the target of bombing, would they have put such an adoring photo on their cover? If a majority of their staff had lost their arms and legs, would they still have had the heart to do such a thing? Something tells me the cover would have been a graphic depiction of their blown-out, blood-spattered offices. But since they were not targeted, they embraced the lilting, longing look of the perpetrator and his troubling dissatisfaction with life in America. You could never do that if your underlings—those employees required to put out the rag—were currently being fitted for prosthetics.

Lucky for editors of pop culture rags, terrorists never target their admirers. They know better. Even evil knows the negative value of bad PR.

And it is that knowledge that allows evil, in all its forms, to persist. Cool, by definition, exists as opposition to the boring, an antidote to the traditional things we’ve been instructed by the superficial coolies are laughable. It’s something
Rolling Stone
has trafficked in for decades. It’s better to be bad and cool than good and uncool.

And in the case of the Boston Bomber, they revealed such ideology for all to see. It diminishes the impact of suffering of others, in the service of succulent novelty. The cool does not provide an excuse for evil; it gives it a bistro to relax and execute its plans.

When you have enablers of evil like
RS
willingly playing the
dupe, you realize how far the cool have come in pushing for our own, inevitable demise.

Rolling Stone
has shown us that the philosophy of cool is no longer cool. We have found them out. We’re on to their game and are tired of a scam that sees suffering as a collateral prop for a vacuous ideology. We are no longer suckers for a nice picture. And we have better things to do with our money than spend it on a rag that seeks to explain away evil.

Me, I’m getting a subscription to
Cat Fancy
. When was the last time a cat blew up anything?

But
Rolling Stone
isn’t the only guilty party that romanticizes evil. Turn the page, and you’ll find enough to fill a marathon. (That’s called a tease, people.)

It is the terror that dares you not to speak its name. Yet radical Islam screams it,
over and over and over again
, often before open firing. It’s just that our media, our academics, our politicians refuse to hear it. To the cowardly cool, terror is just two words: Timothy McVeigh.

Who commits most acts of terror these days? Better not ask that, for you will find the answer to who bombed Boston faster than anyone else (certainly faster than the FBI). And be labeled a bigot faster than Phil Robertson at a GLAAD rally. Better to speculate about everything but the radical Muslim elephant in the room.

When terror struck the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, the cool sentiment from the cool jackasses in the media and beyond spewed forth like raw sewage—linking the attack to anything but the most obvious truths. Their initial response to terror: to go after people you disagree with politically.

We saw that on April 15, when a slew of journalists, among them Chris Matthews and Nicholas Kristof, did exactly that.
(Kristof at least apologized for initially blaming Republicans for the bombing; maybe his bosses at the
New York Times
thought that was too much even for them.) One anchor named after a wild canine initially linked the bombing to Tax Day; a fat celebrity snidely put it on the Tea Party. And there were those who openly prayed that the killers would be white Americans. At a certain point, even if you get paid to pontificate, you might want to just hold your tongue for maybe a day or so. Or better, a decade or two.

The day after the attack, blogger David Sirota wrote a piece for Salon titled “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” At least he was honest.

Sirota claimed that our own racism and Islamophobia would cause us to ignore a bomber’s background if he’s white, thereby reducing our outrage and its violent consequences. But if the bomber turns out to be Muslim (which is what happened), we’d react differently.

So he really wanted those guys (or gals—we can’t be sexist here) to be white Yanks. Which makes you wonder: Did he mean white people, like the white people of Occupy Wall Street? Some are currently on trial in Cincinnati and Cleveland for terrorism, after all. Or what about the retired terrorist Bill Ayers and his horrible wife? They’re white too. They make me ashamed of my race. The human race, as the old saying goes.

Something tells me, though, that that’s not the kind of “white American” Sirota had in mind. He was speaking in code. His “white” really meant conservative. My gut says he had been praying that the bombers were those phantom Tea Party extremists we keep hearing about but never see. How grand his life would have been if he had been right! Instead, he’s been exposed as a fool. And he probably feels worse about that than anything.

Why do the likes of Sirota write such drivel in the first place? Perhaps he had trouble fitting in as a child. Or he was pressured into it by an older brother (both excuses used by the press to defend the acts of one of the bombers). But the real reason is obvious to anyone who’s had to endure the presence of academics and media hacks at social gatherings. It’s cool to have a low view of Americans—not its enemies. You get paid to express such opinions because everyone around you thinks the same way. This is the cool creed: When bad things happen to America, think badly of America. Michael Moore is the king of this. Here’s what Moore tweeted when the bombers were found to be young Chechen radical Islamists:

Yippee, I guess. He will grab any straw but the one in front of him (unless it’s firmly stuck in a milk shake).

Of course the terrorists are white. But if they were white Christian conservative Tea Partiers, Michael Moore would be shouting it from the rooftop, if there was a freight elevator sturdy enough to get him there. But now that we know they are Muslim, we are told not to jump to any conclusions or point out the obvious, predictable trend. That would be wrong, and bigoted. So let’s get this straight: It’s okay to smear a right-winger if you think they did it. And once they are vindicated, it’s still okay to smear a right-winger (because you wanted to think they did it).

This reaction on the left was downright common. They hadn’t been this disappointed since it turned out bin Laden wasn’t a Mormon.

——

Why is it that after every act of terrorism, there seem to be loads of angry leftists angry at people who didn’t bomb anything? Yes, I’m conservative. But why the hell are you yelling at me? Wouldn’t it be nice to see the big names who linked all of this to taxes and Tea Parties and abortion come forward to admit the real motives? Never. It’s just bad taste to talk about such indelicate matters. If only Palin had had a #crosshairs symbol linked to a map of the marathon, this could all be different. And so much simpler for Wolf Blitzer. (I guess it’s tough to be measured when your name sounds like a video game.)

So what do the cool kids do when they’re wrong about terror? When an arrest is made and we find out that the scumbags were Muslim radicals? Well, they never admit they’re actually wrong. Instead, they resort to their fanny pack of ready-made justifications. The first one is always relativism: They say Islamic terror is no different from, say, an abortion bomber. Or that Islamic extremism is no different from any other kind of religious extremism. In order to make this equation work, however, you must be really bad at math and history. Or you sat next to me in high school.

Make way for “root causes,” a cool response to evil if there ever was one. “Cool,” after all, is defined as being detached, unconcerned. And if you want to detach yourself from true evil, simply focus on the personal turmoil of the bombers, which allows you to avoid the real turmoil they cause. Somehow the minor psychological pain is easier to stomach than the assorted limbs left strewn along the avenue.

For God’s sake, how many times do I need to be told by a
friend of the terrorists that they were “normal”? I suppose this vindicates abnormal people like me—but interviewing the bomber’s classmates about his habits is like interviewing kittens about yarn. What the hell is normal in college anyway? Smoking weed and running through the halls with your underwear on your head and your ass painted red is normal for most boys in college. What these interviewees really mean is that he didn’t seem like a wild-eyed Islamic fundamentalist. But you won’t get them to say that. They’ve got that house in the Hamptons to pay off.

Bottom line: I hate root causes. And I do not mean the big root cause that every cool gasbag ignores (Islamic supremacy). I mean the root cause baloney like, “Was little Billy not fitting in?” As Melissa Harris-Perry stated on MSNBC, the fact that the two bombers were Muslim wasn’t that important to the case. Really? Then what is important? Their hobbies? Their Netflix queue? Maybe it’s the jock mentality that led them to make these choices, right? Maybe if they boxed less, and hugged more, we’d all be safer!

She’s wrong, of course. The fact that they were inspired by radical Islam is relevant to the legal case. That’s why the little shitbag terrorist faces terrorism, not murder, charges. It goes back to his motive. He and his brother followed Sheik Feiz Mohammed, an Australian Muslim supremacist who posts videos advocating death and rape and loads of other good stuff. Since 2001, there have been 104 criminal cases of domestic jihadism. I’m thinking that this is a pattern even a left-wing automaton like Harris-Perry might find. But if she did, she’d probably be fired by MSNBC. She makes Katy seem like the smart Perry.

On the day following the arrests, the
New York Times
devoted at least five pages to the event, with maybe one sentence on the terrorists’ Muslim ties—pertaining to how the FBI had previously
investigated the older brother. Oddly, they gave about the same amount of coverage to the diversity of restaurants in the Boston area. As my friend Gavin pointed out, “it felt like the writer had a gun to his head when he brought up the ties to terror.” You can feel air thick with secular prayer—the media wanted so badly for this to be anything but Muslim supremacists that now they’re suffering from a truth hangover. All this truth has given them a headache. They were little kids on Christmas morning who didn’t get the present they were dying for. Sorry MSNBC—better luck next terror bombing.

The preoccupation with psychological motives that spur a killer does nothing but benefit the killer, while energizing other losers to do the same thing to achieve attention and immortality. (It also drowns out the compassion necessary for the fiend’s victims.) Now people will wonder if it’s not the monster’s fault but ours because we didn’t help it fit in. That can only create more monsters.

The root-cause theory can be destroyed in one simple sentence: “A lot of people don’t fit in and don’t blow people up.”

We’ve all had bad things happen in our lives. Life is hard for everyone, but we all don’t wage jihad as a response. If all of us have similar problems, then a killer having them too is meaningless. The surviving scumbag kid was impressionable? Aren’t we all? In the 1970s I wore tight white flares and walked like John Travolta. Later I went punk. Then there was the lambada period. We’re all as impressionable as pizza dough.