Confirmed: The Death of the Cool
While some would argue that it was Marlon Brando who created the notion of “cool” in the 1950s, back in the 1990s, the late Michael Kelly wrote that in his opinion it was Frank Sinatra who defined the term in that mid-century decade — and it was very much a mixed blessing, as Kelly wrote:
The new cool man that Sinatra defined was a very different creature. Cool said the old values were for suckers. Cool was looking out for number one always. Cool didn’t get mad; it got even. Cool didn’t go to war: Saps went to war, and anyway, cool had no beliefs it was willing to die for. Cool never, ever, got in a fight it might lose; cool had friends who could take care of that sort of thing. Cool was a cad and boastful about it; in cool’s philosophy, the lady was always a tramp, and to be treated accordingly. Cool was not on the side of the law; cool made its own laws. Cool was not knowing but still essentially idealistic; cool was nihilistic. Cool was not virtuous; it reveled in vice. Before cool, being good was still hip; after cool, only being bad was.
But all poses have to seem dated eventually, even cool. Back in September, Roger L. Simon wrote its obituary, in a post titled “The Death of the Cool,” appropriately enough. As Roger noted, growing up in the ’50s, he listened to plenty of Miles Davis’ first album The Birth of the Cool and read plenty of beatnik poetry and hipster authors. “Whatever our politics, play or otherwise, we were big time cultural rebels,” Roger wrote. “Thought we were anyway. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.”
Turn off the sepia-toned ’50s nostalgia and smash-cut to the present-day:
All of that is so over. Just as it reached its apogee, with Stevie Wonder boogieing in the White House and the values of the Sixties spread through the upper echelons of our government, filled with more czars than the Hermitage ever dreamed of with a president who palled around with Bill Ayers, for crissakes, cool is now dead.
Maybe not officially dead (how could that be?) but dead enough. In fact, not only is it dead, it’s decomposed.
Cool depended on liberalism. In fact, it was an offshoot of it, suckling on the mother’s milk of Keynesian economics. As long as there was plenty of deficit spending to go around, we could all be cool. Life would be one long evening at Max’s Kansas City.
Of course, it’s not. In today’s pay-as-you-go world, being cool is a luxury few can afford. This accounts for the extreme discomfort we may be seeing in our media and, to a lesser extent — they still have more money — Hollywood. Our media, our journos, depend on being thought cool and, consequently and perhaps more importantly, thinking of themselves as cool. When they suspect they are not, they begin to behave like worker bees when the queen is killed. They tend to run around and act out. After a while, they seem lost. Their numbers dwindle.
This is just because cool depended on a hive mind in the first place. It was little more than fad. We are well rid of it.
And in part because cool is gone, the remaining liberals are the new reactionaries. They are the ones trapped in the past, the enemies of the future.
Angela Rye, executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus, inadvertently confirms Roger’s thesis today, in a Washington Examiner article currently receiving a Drudge-lanche via the headline, “CBC: ‘Cool’ is racist term for Obama…”
She said that “a lot” of conservative opposition is racially-charged, citing the use of the word “cool” in an attack ad launched by Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS superPAC.
“There’s an ad, talking about [how] the president is too cool, [asking] is he too cool? And there’s this music that reminds me of, you know, some of the blaxploitation films from the 70s playing in the background, him with his sunglasses,” Rye said. “And to me it was just very racially-charged. They weren’t asking if Bush was too cool, but, yet, people say that that’s the number one person they’d love to have a beer with. So, if that’s not cool I dont know what is.
She added that “even ‘cool,’ the term ‘cool,’ could in some ways be deemed racial [in this instance].”
Gosh, I’ll never listen to my copies of Miles’ Birth of the Cool, or its bookend at the conclusion of the ’50s, Gil Evans’ Out of the Cool, the same way again.
And who knew Arthur Fonzarelli, Brando, and Sinatra were all such self-hating frickin’ racists, anyhow?
Incidentally, if we can’t call the president “cool” (and as Roger noted back in September, who would these days?), can we call him “pissy”? That’s good enough for a quote in the Washington Post, as Paul Mirengoff writes at Power Line.
Related: Speaking of outdated archetypes, Greg Gutfeld “rips ‘relic of a dying era’ Howard Dean over Netroots Nation remarks.” Dean’s whole speech sounded like he thought Jonah Goldberg’s The Tyranny of Cliches was a how-to guide for public speaking.
Generally speaking, the black political Left is obsessed with the black political Left and the idea that whites hate them. The white political Left considers it their job as partners to eternally help to explain why third place teams are in fact first place teams – it is the centerpiece of the Dem Party’s platform.
The reason the Left focuses on dog-whistles and code like “cool,” “food stamp President” and racist Hallmark black hole cards is because the Left doesn’t have squat to show racism on the Right aside from racist bumper stickers and the occasional embarrassing email, which the Left then triumphantly holds up like a piece of the true cross. With institutional racism decades in the past, pickings are very slim for the anachronism called “racism still exists,” or the NAACP by some.
Meanwhile, the fact that 100% of mainstream expressions of racialism by way of laws, websites and organizations reside on the Left completely escapes them. The Left then becomes the anti-racist, racists who believe there is a crying need for an Assoc. of Black Scuba Divers while any white group of that nature would be the Nathan Bedford Forrests of the ocean.
The Left cries about white ethnocentrism while their leader holds live NCAA basketball bracket announcements yards from the BB court he built within 30 days of taking office while simultaneously ignoring D-Day 3 years running other than to relegate it to a late Tweet that occupies the same space as “go Lebron.”
Institutional racism isn’t decades in the past. Democrats were always the Party of Racism (Slavery, Jim Crow, etc), and ran all the institutions and still run most of them; don’t you think they would know if they’re still racist? And of course they are. When they cite institutional racism it’s because they know perfectly well they’re racist to the core, and won’t be changing any time soon. So they vote for Obama and point the finger at Republicans to hide their own demons.
The only institution they don’t control completely is the military, and they’re approaching parity even there. All the rest: schools, banks, news & entertainment media, bureaucracies at the federal, state and local level, big city governments; which of these has NOT been run by the Democrats for at least 90% of last 60+ years?
Yep, NONE.
‘the same space as “go Lebron.”’
.. or maybe “go Barrett.”
And what happened to the “cold” northern europeans and “warm” africans?
Someone ask the Fonz if “Racist” has jumped the shark.
everything the left and its shadow army of angry blacks (most recently angered because the nypd insisted on protecting them from criminals with stop and frisk), say or purportedly, think, is a puppet show.
it’s entertaining, sometimes thrilling, engaging with its obsessive accusations, and scary, all at the same time.
since the annunciation of obama, we don’t even have immigrants any longer. just criminal tresspassers who perch illegally in our dumbed down schools, our imploding hospitals, our cheek by jowl jails (when we catch them).
and, somewhere tonight on the television’s 500 channels is some very overpaid black person, once again furrowing their brow and asking cryptically why are there so many “young black men in jail”?
uh. because they’re criminals?
How in the world did you manage to write a piece on cool, and not mention Jimmy Dean?
I didn’t really follow Jimmy Dean’s career until Diamonds Are Forever, and his latter breakfast food business…
I don’t think they got it, Ed.
listen up, kids: JAMES Dean was the “cool” actor who died, far too young, in a car crash. do not ever ever EVER refer to him as “Jimmy” Dean (which happens to be the name of someone who was a celebrity shill for a sausage line) or old people like Ed and myself will get very upset.
I always preferred Bob Evans myself. Or is that Robert Evans?
James Dean played a punk across from Ronald Reagan playing a doctor, when Ronald Reagan delivered the immortal line “Do ya feel lucky, punk?”
One of Ronald Reagan’s personal attributes was his constant search for, and willingness to showcase new talent. James Dean got to show, in a brief piece made for television, a full range: malevolent swagger, concern for the welfare of a friend, vicious threats against an older man, surprise when the threats do not work, fear, and remorse.
Jimmy Dean was white and Southern. Ipso facto, in today’s parlance, it is impossible for him to be “cool”, which is why “cool” is increasingly losing its… well, cool.
Dean was born and raised in Indiana. Indiana isn’t exactly “Southern,” even though the locals do speak with a twang (I married one).
Come on, guys, get the basic facts straight!! JAMES Dean was the young actor, epitome of cool, killed in sports car crash in 1955. JIMMY Dean was the country singer from the deep South, who later had the sausage company. Far from being a celebrity shill, he actively ran the company, which makes pretty good sausage…
My mother-in-law dated Jimmy (the sausage guy) Dean when she was a teen-ager. She says he was a very nice young man.
This discussion can’t be considered complete without noting the Jimmy Dean of sausage fame got his start with the huge country/pop hit “Big John” or “Big Bad John.” He later took the proceeds from the song and started the Jimmy Dean Pure Pork Sausage Company.
James Dean, on the other hand, starred in “Rebel without a Cause” and “East of Eden”. If Wikipedia is to be believed, he was so “cool” that he apparently registered as a homosexual to avoid the draft, although he later claimed to not have that particular orientation.
uh, James Dean maybe?
“Jimmy Dean…James Dean.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK6jgzV32bg
+1, Mr. Burton!
“There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.” ~ Booker T. Washington (1856-1915)
– brothers and sisters where I work who have posters of Obama emerging from a limo, wearing sunglasses, and its caption reads:
BARACK OBAMA: BECAUSE JOHN McCAIN COULD NEVER LOOK THIS DAMNED COOL
“Cool”, the anachronism and the people who follow it, are relative. Some may think D’oh-bama looks cool getting out of a limo with his Foster Grants on..but to me, he’s a geek. A goon, even. A loser.
Wealth and position do not “cool” make. But to the left, that’s all that matters. Would Mr Ears sill be cool if he was homeless? Nope, he’d be a sun-dried nutjob, yammering on about getting his fair share while pushing his shopping cart around.
I have met some truly cool homeless people. Down on their luck, but positive, hopeful and also realistic. No anger, just calm acceptance for now as to how things are.
Obama is not cool. He’s a dork.
…plus have you seen him playing golf in cargo shorts with his skinny legs. =:-0 Doh!
Oh whoops. Is that “racially charged”? Cuz, you know, the song by Joe Tex, “…who’ll take the woman with the skinny legs?” Pretty sure he was black.
Oh whoops. “Woman with the skinny legs” genderly charged. Oppresses women. Why it never gets an any airplay on oldies radio stations run by MSM companies.
Politics by Charisma is so third world.
Back in 2008 when cool was still cool, you could call Obama cool, and in fact he was advertised as the cool guy in the race.
Now that cool is no longer cool, but things like nerdy competance and dependability are now cool, it is racist to call Obama cool, or bring up any of his old posters from 2008 bragging about how cool he is.
Come on now people, didn’t any of you get the memo. And by the way, we have never been at war with EastAsia.
I would simply say to them: “Sorry, but with jug-ears that big, only Dumbo could pull off ‘cool.’”
See? Not so hard.
I saw “For Greater Glory” last week. I’d say in our new world that’s shaping up of true combat against the anti-Christ left-liberal socialist/fascist/communist Leviathan state, characters such as “El General” and “El Quatorce” will be the new “cool”. The old “cool” are all suckers, chumps, tools, and slaves that have drunk the government Kool-ade.
So is rap / hip hop cool? I would have to say no, because the talentless rappers try too hard. You never saw Miles Davis or Chuck Berry or Louis Armstrong trying. Although Sammy Davis was known to laugh a little too hard and he was part of the cool gang, but maybe not really totally cool himself. But ss a race, blacks have a long history of cool-osity, not trying too hard, never let ‘em see you sweat … until now. When all they do is rage and play victim and poor little me games with no grammar or syntax or proper punctuation. I’m trying to think of one single cool black American person in today’s headlines. Doubtless there is one that I’m overlooking, but it sure as hell isn’t Colin Powell or Snoop Dog or even Aretha Franklin. They trotted out Muhammid Ali on 9/11 to calm us down, to reassure us that, really, Muslims aren’t all murdering terrorists, but is Mr. Ali even cool any more, as he mumbles and stumbles towards his regal end? And if Jugears was *ever* considered to be cool, watching him flit around the country the last few weeks, tickling the ears of rich gays and lesbians to contribute to his campaign, he ain’t cool no more. Poor schmuck. I hope he dies of embarrassment after the November election, because if you *are* cool, you never ever allow yourself to be embarrassed or to show it when you do take a tumble into your own pool of poop because of your own incompetence and overweening hubris.
He (captain average) is definitely trying too hard. Very not cool.
Funny thing about celebrity and how one gets there. Sometimes it’s through the sheer delight and demand for one’s talent…say….Michael Jackson, Elvis, etc. But then, sometimes they are pushed by agenda-driven marketeers for whatever reason. Think ABBA, and the untalented Milli-Vanilli.
In either case, the crash to obscurity can happen but the former popular entities have legacy talent while the latter just get forgotten.
Obama was pushed to the front. His three marketeers knew he was obscure, unknown and thus the descriptors for him were subject to the best buzz-words money could buy. But the nation isn’t going to buy the “new and improved” Obama over the original. We were told he was the best thing since they put back-flaps on longjohns only to find out he excelled at being below-average in everything, was a child and hated people.
The nation is screaming “We want something else” very loudly and the media pretends not to hear it and so you won’t on the government-approved news outlets. But thanks to the internet, I am confident that our voice will be heard at the polling station this November and make Barry the Wonderful disappear from our TV sets forever. But, the NAACP and other entities will inundate us with him for awhile until they note that every time he’s on their magazine cover or occupying valuable TV time, the ratings go subterranean.
Yeah, kind of like Bounce, the national all-black TV channel that I have deleted from my channel menu. I love that about my TV.
And it’s especially not cool to let people see you panic.
ABBA might not suit your taste, but they were very successful pre-hype, and self-made. If you don’t recognize the talent there, you haven’t really listened to them.
Actually, I enjoyed ABBA in my younger years. I learned that none of them spoke English and learned the songs phonetically, or that may be an urban legend. I haven’t ever bothered to look it up.
My point though, was about how, if I remember correctly, that the group was heavily pushed by recording labels to do things they might not normally have wanted to do which resulted in world fame and some unhappiness for the band-members.
Maybe, though, I should’ve used the Monkees instead. Mike Nesmith is STILL pissed.
I wasn’t trying to denigrate ABBA…just trying to make a point about how popularity, as in Obama’s case, is sometimes the result of marketing rather than actual talent.
Will blacks ever see how they have become the laughing stock of the world? This is the perfect example of the combined IQ of the CBC which hovers around room temp.
This is the level of debate that they have descended to in order to make a political point. Pathetic!
Remember, and FB@1 alluded to it, that it is the white prog who calls the shots and pulls the strings of the CBC and blacks in general. They are the ones who are using blacks to help them destroy America. White progs/marxists hate America and are using race to divide and destroy America.
There are only so many knee-jerk guilty white liberals to go around who will reflexively vote for Obama no matter what come November. It’s the others who are in the middle who have to be either shamed into voting for him again, or scared into voting for the other guy because of the company he keeps. Hence the attempts to find any new angle to deal the race card from, since the old ones aren’t going to play 3 1/2 years into his term.
But it’s hard to see how this one is going to work, because for the guilty white liberals, they’ve spent the past 45 years celebrating African-American ‘cool’, even to the point that cool means flaunting the past standards on education and married family structures (something Bill Cosby has decried and gotten grief for during the past decade for complaining about, both from the black activist left and the guilty white liberals). Even as Obama acted like a miffed Steve Urkel, the GWLs still attempted to maintain the belief in his coolness — if the CBC rules that out of bounds, it’s not those on the right who are going to have trouble disassociating the word with the guy in the White House.
“Flaunting”??
I think you mean “flouting”.
My wife’s uncle wrote the book on cool. He created more wealth and provided more jobs and had more fun doing it than anybody else I’ve ever known. And he did it in a casual, offhand way that made it look soooooo easy. And he never never rubbed anybodies nose in his accomplishments. That’s cool.
My husband’s uncle did the same thing–with a Budweiser in one hand, and a roll of primer cord in the other. Now he’s kicking back in a well-earned retirement. And fishing with primer cord.
I had an uncle just like that. Went from radar tech. on bombers over Germany to an EE degree, worked on damned near every piece of defense tech. we built during the 50s-80s. Whenever I think of him, it’s thin ties, smokey clubs, neat Bourbon, and Jazz.
There’s a pretty well-known 24×7 non-commercial jazz station in the Bay Area, that airs the most sublime music, announced by the most whacked out Sandanistas and other Democrats. Although they exist mostly on the largesse of California taxpayers (and fellow travelers who pledge), they insist on sharing their leftist political agenda on air. It’s useless asking them to stifle their political punditry in the interest of artistic integrity, I’ve tried. This article makes me feel much better about myself now. Thank you.
“Cool” was never really cool, except maybe for a Steve McQueen or such. The vast majority of the ‘cool cats’ were media whores who sought to set themselves above ‘your average bear’ but never really had the chops to pull it off, and that is why cool’s definition was so amorphous. So much so that if it got too cool it shattered, and if it wasn’t cool enough it just melted away. It was the perfect state of mind for a schizophrenic, amd eventually made many ‘shrinks wealthy.
Yes, I too was wondering where is Steve McQueen, who really was the epitome of cool.
And I think that woman from the CBC should check out Obama’s new radio ad for black audiences, it too has a very typical 70s soundtrack, in fact it sounds like some bad knock-off of “Shaft”.
And by bad I mean bad, not good.
1)Hollywood is not cool any longer. It is dying, decrepit, necrotic shell of its former glory. It is hemorrhaging money every time it tries to take yet another anti-America, anti-capitalism, anti-military screed onto the nearly empty screens across this land it truly hates.
It produces scrap, (with or without the s) and heaps it on the junkyard pile of meaningless, drab, predictable and banal pieces, stitched together and trotting out faux celebreactionaries for the few die hard with a revengeance groupies.
Other than 4999393939 award shows and the insiders and free ticket recipients who sleep through them in person, nobody cares enough to even pay attention any longer. The only thing worse than a raging narcissist, is a raging narcissist with no talent making an acceptance speech to an audience that can’t get away.
Hollywood cool is gone. Tinseltown tepid is all there is…and yes, that’s all there is. The town simply doesn’t produce cool any longer. It can’t lead and what it is following…is irrelevancy.
2)If the celebrealities and celebreactionaries (Kardashians vs Sean Penn) aren’t bad enough, we have the JournOlistas, the faux “news” and “information” wing of the permanently uncool set.
Propaganda, lies, distortion and being a political hack has never been cool. It is a job for worms and toadies, lackeys and sniveling creeps. Fanning the flames of fraudulent grievance peddlers and being a traitor to one’s country and the truth at large, takes a type of person who could never be cool.
In order to be cool you have to have honor and a sense of self. The modern journOlista is a pack animal and an omega one at that.
They are desperate and duplicitous. And dying. They are dying as well. Bitterly clinging to their disloyalty house of cards. You can’t be a fraud and be cool.
3)Academia, once the place that cool went to hang out, is so uncool nobody even cites it any longer, ever, as the House of Cool. So busy indoctrinating youth in tired, old, slanders and misinformation, they have been failing to advance our youth in a contest waged in a global economy.
The third leg in a dying wheelbarrow race with the other two “uncool” partners, academia has become a failure farm. It’s stale, out of touch, and so inward facing that it can’t see the world it pretends to know.
In fact, anyone attached to the Unholy Trinity of Uncool can’t be cool by definition.
Sadly, what gets produced by the Unholy Trinity is permanent faux grievance and identity based protest. It tries to keep resurrected the complaints that are nearly a half century old and largely non-existent.
It is a pitiful display of lost grandiosity, straining to be alive and relevant. And here’s the saddest part, it has claimed a large segment of an entire race of people. More than anything, it keeps black people down. In order to feed its own desperate need for relevance, it traps a race of people and keeps them from thriving.
The industrial strength fraud that is the permanent grievance industry causes the single greatest tragedy in this country. It keeps a permanent underclass as pets for its own amusement.
Obama is one of the pet owners.
And, let me tell you…that just ain’t cool.
cfbleachers, you have come out of the bleachers to the batter’s box to putting up Ted Williams’ like numbers. You make a hell of a lot of contact.
If I may say so, that’s cool.
When Hollywood was cool they churned out western morality plays like so much ham and eggs.
Now Hollywood seems focused on churning out anti-morality plays like so much poison.
Their high pay was due to the high productivity, due to technology invented by others. People paid the same price for a movie that they paid for vaudeville, and the manhours to produce 10,000 theatres of movie was much less than the manhours to produce 10,000 theatres of vaudeville.
America has always had cool. Look at the way we idolize outlaws. Ever since the James Gang at least. The 50s version was just the latest incarnation.
I have been thinking lately that calling a black man “Cool” is PC for liberals who would rather say “I have many black friends” but have termed that phrase as racist. Some of my leftist friends in the early 1990′s watched Arsenio but had no black friends and would call Arsenio cool but Carson old and outdated even though Carson helped launch more careers than any other talk show host. When I would bring over black friends they would treat them as cool all the time even though they had just met!
Anyone who has read “Radical Chic and Mau mauing the Flack Catchers” will understand that cool means to the CBC.
I head a Crosby, Stills, and Nash song yesterday and realized how mass media technology can allow truly pathetic souls to sail the world as millionaires – the poor and pathetic propping up the rich and pathetic five bucks at a time.. Obama is just more of the same.
“Cool” as described in the article never existed in the natural world. It was simply a change in fashion, having no more substance (note I don’t say ‘impact’) in the long run than the shift from wider-brimmed felt fedoras of the ’40s to narrow brim dressier straw hats of the ’50s. That the generation older than myself (I’m X) bought into the fashion as heavily as they did, and then perpetuated and foisted it upon the younger as “the ideal” is yet another indictment in a list of indictments history should levy against them. Stupid, shallow b*stards.
“I Did It My Way” always disgusted me.
Dude. It’s by Paul Anka.
Not cool.
cool was never anything more than the insecure putting on a pair of fashionable sunglasses and hiding behind them.
Sorry to add serious content to this otherwise light-hearted piece, but it must be done:
Love is the act of caring and sacrificing for another.
Cool is the opposite – or indifference. It doesn’t hate – it just doesn’t care. Cool then, is anti-love. Its philosophical name is ‘Nihilism’
It may be ‘cool’ to be Nihilistic, but it has a fatal flaw. Children must be raised with love, or they will grow up with pretty dreary mental conditions. Obama probably has Narcissistic personality disorder – a side effect of growing up with cool parents.
Thus ‘cool’ is self limiting. It can only last one generation – maybe two with enough money and intelligence. Charles Murray has spent a lifetime documenting how ‘cool’ has destroyed the bottom third of our society. Nihilism is a very nasty business, one would say its “The work of the devil” if you believe in such things, which I do.
James: I totally agree with every word you said! Best answer given to this article. Cool is self-centered, self-absorbed and doesn’t like or care about any one else. It only appeals to the immature. Don’t apologize for bringing truth into the situation, because “cool” is very dangerous. It is also sad, that self-absorbed, self-promoting people like James Dean etc., are admired. The real “cool” (heroes) are not seen and heard in the media, they are the self-sacrificing people who live out their days in anonymity.
Obama was never “cool,” he was a rank socialist. Always was, and always will be. Nothing cool or “hip” about that. Just the same old tired socialist policies that are making Europe fall to pieces right now.
To me, cool was conviction and strength. Cool was Ronald Reagan. Cool was the person who got things done in the face of incredible adversity. And cool was being able to say what your core convictions are, not shy away from them, and then when you get elected to office you do what you say you’ll do. THAT was Ronald Reagan, the coolest guy I ever say.
I guess I’d have more respect for Obama if he always said that he WAS a socialist, made no bones about it, and then if the American public was still silly enough to elect him, govern as a socialist. At least he’d be honest about his convictions. But when you have a guy who lied shamelessly during the 2008 election, ran as a centrist, and then came into office and governed like European-style socialist, you can’t have any respect for a liar like that. And few thinking Americans are going to want to see his face again after the November elections.
They weren’t asking if Bush was too cool
Somehow it seems to me that GWB never wanted to be cool, never thought he had to be cool, and would have guffawed in the cool-makers’ faces if approached with that brand. Making the statement shows the writer doesn’t understand coolness, and absolutely did not and does not understand GWB.
They branded Obama as “cool” and now it is coming back to bite them. Bad branding.
We don’t need cool. We need competent. We need courage.
And we sure don’t need this “racist!” crap.
Game over.
GWB was a fighter pilot. Considerations of ‘cool’ are for lesser mortals.
Wasn’t there some line from the movie, ‘White Men Can’t Jump’, where Wesley Snipes character describes the difference between Blacks and Whites, to Woody Harrelson? Something like,…..White guys play to win, Black guys just want to look good trying.
Haven’t seen it in years, and couldn’t find the exact line.
“A white man wants to win first, look good second. A black man wants to look good first, win second.”
Billy Hoyle, “White Men Can’t Jump” http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/White_Men_Can%27t_Jump
Well, then, I suppose Obama’s supporters are racists, too. You see, a large number of my friends are liberal classmates from a liberal Ivy League university. And I can’t tell you how often they’ve posted on Facebook a link to the latest media ass-kissing story, preceded by their own comment: “He’s so cool!!”
To his supporters, “cool” is all there is. They seem to give no thought to the substance of what he does.
I have for some time characterized our celebrity in chief as having the manner and delivery of a Las Vegas lounge singer.
It struck me as apt, although I wasn’t directly aware of what I was responding to. Now I know. Thanks Mr. Driscoll.
And just BTW there IS a racial connection there — although not what the idiot leftists imagine it to be. Part, an important part, of the whole “cool” scene was blackness. To be black was to be outside the norm, and to be outside the norm was to be cool. There was — and anybody who lived through the time knows — a whole “black” style of coolness, and black hipsters reveled in it.
And it lives on to this day. Remember that absurd photo of the young Obama in the fedora? There you go.
Even the moron Biden aspires to be cool, hip, aware, urban colloquial.
The left is going to hate this.
To a large part of the left — not all mind you, earnest communists and ecological vegan maniacs are anything but cool — but to a large part, to be cool is to be left and to be left is to be cool.
About time all of that faded away.
High passions are completely uncool. But critically necessary to a truly human life.
I think you left out Humphrey Bogart as a transition figure, at least along the Hollywood / “movie star” (including Sinatra) axis. He was cool no matter how you slice it, but notwithstanding the putative definition above, he persona was, ultimate, a “good guy” one. And if I may, can’t you then connect one dot further back to Clark Gable? Gable was cool.
Hemingway was cool, too. And is cool really so modern? Cool is mainly about being detached and “above it all.” Weren’t the wits at around the Algonquin Round Table cool? I think it has more to do with being urban than anything else in the ponderous, and arguably overly-political, definition above.
William F. Buckley was cool. Word.
Don’t underestimate the power of ‘cool’. In fact, I’d wager that it is the number one driving force of the majority of the young, irrational and uninformed voting populace.
In today’s America, one whose culture has been methodically destroyed – bit by bit – over the decades, cool is the cure for all that ails the masses of betas (if even that) who crave an identity of intellectual and moral superiority, worldliness, kindness, and compassion; an identity assumed by simply signing up for whatever progressive cause they care to identify themselves with; and the best part is, they need not bother with all the hard work that such virtuous attributes would otherwise require.
It’s a social brand of sorts, the equivalent of donning a Nike t-shirt….which says ‘sports enthusiast,’ ‘active.’ Or a woman wearing Prada (sophisticated, high class), or a guy driving a Porsche. They’re all cues for assumption based on the brand’s construct – the carefully crafted image it is to convey.
I believe that the real key to winning these uninformed, ‘cool’ votes is to dismantle today’s notion of cool (a big chunk of the left) and redefine what it is to be cool.
The dismantling of the current definition is simple…all us 50+ conservative need do is to adopt the current coolness and make it our own. For instance; set a date, and from that date on, let’s all wear our pants half way down our butts and study up on street speak…on meeting one another, rather than say “Good afternoon, how are you?” we should be going “Yo, peepz – waz shakin’?” etc. Of course it’s ridiculous, but what better way to make something ‘uncool’ than to have it adopted by us older folks.
It would be ridiculous, but bet it would work…
Sorry Angela, the cuts at Dubya were no less “racially charged”, a beer guzzling redneck fratrat who had elitist ties to the New England upper crust 1%. We have different cultures in our blessed nation and observations will be made.
Get over it. “Cool” is not necessarily a put-down, unless you have a complex. And you do, frankly, as does your ilk, black, white and in-between, on the “racially charged” left.
I still like Miles and Bach and Lynyrd Skynyrd. But “coolly” and incompetently fiddling while the USA economy burns baby burns won’t cut it.
We gave him a chance and he blew. It. What’s he blow again? Not leadership that’s for sure.
Out damn spot. That is a Shakespeare reference. Hope it’s not too euro-centric for ya, Angela.
The epitome of cool was Dean Martin. No one else comes close.
Amen on Dino…especially when one learns a bit about the personal side of his life. An honorable and decent man..also Jimmy Stewart and Audie Murphy.
Early in the First Decade when blogging was still a novelty to me, I wrote a few times (at Typepad/writewithfire) on what I saw as a post-hip and post-cool era that was either here or imminent. My arguments had more to do with Cool’s strapping down and immobilizing the imagination. The death of Ray Bradbury last week was a reminder of just what has happened since the 1950s. He believed in the freedom of the imagination — something beyond the threats of mere censorship. It has been the purveyors of Cool and Hip who have done so much to diminish reading in America and promote self-censorship. And as Bradbury said, the threat isn’t burning books but convincing people not to read them. Mission accomplished as they say at the NEA, AFT, Detroit Federation of Teachers (David Bowie’s “Panic-in-Detroit” HS teacher in long hair and overalls). Cool/Hip culture has no context, no history, no culture to speak of, merely a posturing and deference that would be familiar to any hanger on at the Court of the Sun King or Wayne & Garth genuflecting to Alice Cooper backstage. Bradbury by the way did not become “more conservative” in the 1980s, he remained what he had always been — self-educated, curious, imaginative, and thoughtful. Is there anything sadder than the formalism of cool — the hair, the slouchwear, the shabbiness of “new” things not well made? And the lack of curiousity… The elevation of the Trivial and the trivialization of the profound. An awareness of the postmodern Goof of Cool has been around for decades. See early Firesign Theatre or the earlier lost classic, “How to Talk Hip with Geets Romo.” Something more than “comedy albums.” Not to mention Maynard G. Krebs — a post-Beat, proto-hippie send up from the late 1950s Many Loves of Dobbie Gillis TV show. Reprised by the “hipster doofus” Kramer on SEINFELD.
We’ve known what we’ve to do for some time now. As Jesus said, move on and shake the dust off our sandals…
Exactly the problem in New Zealand-the Maori Party is dedicated to owning the whole country and milking the hard-working white of every dollar he earns whilst lying on a couch in a Government-paid house, living on social security and eating far too much. Rising from watching soapies and eating potato chips etc., every so often to perform a disgusting “haka” where rows of near-white (big bucks being a maori) bare-bellies dance up and down to the shouts of the murderous song, and ugly faces contorted with pseudo-rage, tongues poked out, eyes rolling and tattoos all over their faces, they exhibit what they think is evidence that they would all prefer to be living in the bush hunting for wild pigs and living on roots. They have the whites on a guilt trip over the fact that their own forefathers sold off their land to the whites for blankets, guns etc. The racist language by the maori in politics is ignored, because “after all they got stiffed a couple hundred years ago.” If you sell me your mercedes for ten bucks, your family 200 hundred years on, have no right to scream “foul” and to milk my family for x-amount of years.
Not to say of course, that there aren’t some (few) among them who aren’t hard working and decent, and not going about robbing people and filling the jails.
Pardon the old adage, but it is true: “Some of the latter, are my best friends.”
Cool is just like the SC definition of what constitutes pornography: You know it when you see it.
McCain was pretty cool in his flight suit, shown on the cover of his book. But that train left the station–you can’t be cool and an old fart at the same time.
Let me see if I have this straight:
Cool = Hanging out with Marxists, racists, and terrorists.
NOT Cool = The President flying an aircraft and landing on an aircraft carrier- in fact, it is the biggest gaffe in the history of politics and shows the President is an idiot, clueless moron.
————————-
Cool= taking money from the producers and giving it to non-producers and expecting economic prosperity.
NOT Cool= starting a business, creating jobs and hiring people.
———————-
Cool= stirring up racial, class and gender hatred.
NOT Cool= Thinking that a black President, a black attorney general, and a Supreme Court that is 22% black (almost double the 12% black in the population) will end racial problems in America.
Yah, Oba-Mao is cool all right. He has more talent than a profane and immoral rap “artist.”
Wonderful article!
Love the term Pissy.
Obama thought of himself as “cool”, but has since been seen by many as the true “cool cruel” using everyone to gain control or as much as he can.
Taking rights away from Americans and money too to bolster other dictators and destroying America. He is pissy as a president of the United States of America which was once a great Republic and now teeters on the edge of falling from a weak democracy to a third world nation.
Obama the chosen one has almost succeeded in doing the job he was designated to do. Somehow the left cool has become so powerful they could slip in this agent of demise.
Hopefully there are enough hurting people to awaken to this train wreck and put on the brakes in November.