Being Cool
 
   
   
   
   I grew up in a culture of passivist white collar relating. Being cool,
in the sense of psychic competitive superiority, was a forbidden topic, in
a class with masturbation, but I picked up a clear understanding that being
cool was fundamental to any social bonding, and that the meaning of cool
varied enough among different cultures to prohibit qualifying for more than
one cultural style. Habit being what it is, I am pretty locked into the
style of cool idealized by my formitive culture.
   In spite of the prohibition on the word cool and on any discussion about
achieving it, I never had any confusion in my youth about it being the most
important life issue for everybody of both sexes. The meaning in regular
use on the internet appears to me to focus on superior knowledge about
consumer and conversational fads, and a lack of genuine heartfelt concern
about any larger social or political issues. The presentations about it
I've found on the internet seem to be tongue in cheek, as if to suggest
that to be cool is actually childish or ridiculous. The women in my
originating culture appear to relate to cool this way, as a social game
played only in formal settings and never with actual relationships. I and
the other men I grew up around related to cool as a kind of understated
technical show and tell, done only with sincere friends. Everyone seemed to
recognize a difference between an appearance of cool and an actuality of
cool criteria, but with women treating it like a game show and the fellows
treating it like a spiritual quest. I took it perhaps more seriously than
most.
   For me, to be cool means to be an academically successful boy scout who
never has even a hint of a financial crunch, a temper tantrum, a preventable
health issue, or an addiction of any sort. To be cool also means to lack
even the wish to obtain something without explicit honorable effort. It
means engaging in crime solely in a crisis context, as explicit political
activism promoting a saner kinder world. It means to end each day having
cleared some genuine noble achievement in behalf of a saner kinder world,
especially related to incremental skill development having some kind of
direct practical usefulness. And it means being hugely desirable and
functionally essential to my associates.
   Unfortunately my life met a serious impasse when I took on direct
support of myself and noticed the moral and esthetic compromises of white
collar America; particularly the large scale industrial demand and the
suppression of amateur expression. Forsaking my originating culture, I have
had to become somewhat covert about my values and my nature in order to find
acceptance in the white trash culture I have adopted. Those around me are
easy with my voluntary poverty and childish life expression, but are
heedlessly lame about money and every other resource, engage in crime
wherever they can clearly get away with it, seek something for nothing at
anyone's expense as much as possible, wallow in all manner of addictions,
loudly proclaim their self-induced crippledness and crass disregard for
public benefit, and launch into violence at trivial insults.
   And they are quite as obsessed with being cool as anyone I grew up with.
They also appeal directly to me to recognize and validate their success in
being cool, based on their inevitably white trash concept of it. I'm
supposed to give positive importance to their choice of fad or corporate
name brand clothing, their ability to beat up or terrorize someone who gets
upset by their rudeness, and their success in shoplifting or driving without
proper paperwork. That I'm appalled doesn't generally occur to any of them,
and my frozen horror they appear to view as agreement, presuming I hold the
same crass indifference that they express towards anyone else's delight or
success in life.
   What draws me to the white trash people is their acceptance of weeds,
garbage, overcrowding and appropriate technology. They loathe the first
three just as much as the people I grew up with, but they are more accepting
of my apparent failure or ridiculous eccentricity. They validate my
appropriate technology, though solely for it's shock value socially;
industrial overkill is fine with them. They really appreciate a harmless
weird associate to tell stories about and to watch like a circus.
   I have linked up with only one other fellow with a similiar story to
tell of falling out of white collar America.
   A book called Cool Pose gives an especially ludicrous portrayal of this
paradox of contrary concepts of cool. The authors, Richard Majors and Janet
Billson, are both successful academics who have focused on ghetto black
culture instead of the ghetto whites as I have. They refer to cool as
entirely a focus of poor black men, instead of everybody, and they describe
the poor teenager style of cool as a way to cope with racist rejection by
white collar white people, rather than as I see it, a deliberate cultural
art form, no more a response to cultural conflict than their own
unrecognized style of cool.
   Their complete denial of their own drive to be cool, in the style that I
also maintain, baffles me profoundly. Ironically, at one point they even
define the black fellows' cool presentation as always a sham, not actually
"cool" in the sense that the authors leave undefined, and they suggest that
the blacks consider themselves not actually cool, that they are actually
ashamed of their lives. I think the authors' idiocy may actually be
widespread. The book has the usual validating reviews from other academics,
with no hint that any of the reviewers noted the serious illogic of the
book. The book gets into reporting of how cool is overtly recognized in
black African societies, suggesting to the authors that cool in an African
concept, and suggesting to me that Africans don't prohibit discussion of it.
   The book makes a passing reference to the struggle I've studied
exhaustively, of root opposition between male and female styles of cool.
Ironically, women have easily as much or more trouble with getting respect
for their style of cool from the financially dominant academic men they
deal with as the ghetto men do. One country club manager discussed with me
his tendency to dodge relating to the women club members when designing an
event. He expressed grimness about wealthy women whose concept of personal
poise totally validates brutal, pushy self-centered presentation of ideas
about petty decorative details. He could not imagine how they could embrace
a life in which they've overtly trashed intellectual rapport so heedlessly.
I am similiarly baffled by fellows who trash my respect for them by boasting
to me about shoplifting they've done.
   Likewise the authors of the Cool Pose book write about the poor black
teenagers' ideals with brutal self-righteous disrepect, as if they assume
that any sane successful person would loathe senseless murder or violent
gang initiation ritual. They really believe that the poor teenagers adopt
the thuggery style of cool out of lack of choices, rather than a childhood
steeped in glowing admiration for adult thuggery. Thus reading their book
presents a frustration similiar to reading an economic text written by a
speculator.
   My own child is growing up in the white trash version of thuggery
admiration. We aren't in a big city, with genuine gangster potential, but
he's ready to admire whatever heartless thuggery gets expressed around him
by adults, other kids or characters in the media. Ghastly depictions in the
video games don't faze him a bit, and he shoos me out the door in polite
tolerance of my feeble sensibilities.
   If I try to coax his interest in useful competence development, such as
repair of something or cooking, he resists in abject horror of engaging any
activity that would demonstrate his present inability. He would rather stay
actually inept rather than risk the embarrassment of not maintaining the
pose of heartless superiority characteristic of the gangster. This is what I
believe is the root of gangster poverty. The gangster cannot let down his
expression of heartless superiority enough to focus on useful managerial
development of his own life; because someone he wants to maintain bonding
with will jump at the chance to wreck his day with heartless belittling
remarks about his feeble appearance, and very likely the remarks will get
repeated over and over for weeks by many other people.
   The self-destructive posturing of the poor people appears to ruin other
poor people but it triggers no weakness in my nature. I will never be a poor
money manager or inclined to be rude to an antagonist.
   The academic culture that originated me does developmental sabotage with
improvisational music, unusual art or gymnastics, minority political
theories, and amateur production of any sort; with similiar ridiculous and
destructive results. They support focus on several hundred year old music,
the study of HIV, development of drugs designed entirely to control lab
result numbers instead of addressing actual malady, or incarceration instead
of violent punishment of people who only honor violent authority in their
personal life. Like crabs in a bucket, they won't arrange mutual support
outside of the exact parameters in an explicit written contract. Any human
development that can only happen with consistant conscious emotional support
doesn't happen among those I grew up with.
   This is a major factor in my preference for ghetto associates. The
deranged heartless illogic of my academic origins was more appalling to me
than having to hide my tools from chaotic larcenous roommates. The complete
lack of mentoring in my youth I could accept, but not the seductive
pretense of wise reporting and continual predatory inquisitiveness. I am
liable to take seriously a medical report focused on controlling blood
pressure instead of focusing on figuring out what the person's body is
trying to fix with the high blood pressure, such as cellular level
dehydration resulting from continual digestion of fats and the presense of
caffeine. I cannot sanely ponder matters like that or explore feeling
expression while the focus of competitive mockery by intimates or while in
defensive lonely solitude.
   Religion was my first spook about my childhood culture. Academic people
trying to maintain their cool superiority about religion, without having
any direct religious experience for a reference point, were worrisome for me
as evidence of highly illogical and potentially deranged leadership in my
childhood. The subtle feeling that I've found to be vital to religious
development could not happen among them.
   More recently, the 911 event demonstrated world political control by
people who pretend having an academic mind but who actually honor none of
the passivist democratic idealism of true academics. I think that the false
comraderie of academia actually makes for worthless political unity in real
government activity, so nations are ruled by actors and business royalty.
   I have the impression now that maintaining a false cool pose is what
drives unnecessary tragic industrial obsession, illogical medical study,
and predatory warfare; that each can serve as a surrogate focus to
substitute for the dignity of an actual spiritual significance in one's
life. And also, like with alcoholism, the surrogate activity sabotages real
progress.
   This is perhaps the unintended real wisdom offerred by the Cool Pose
book: that all forms of cool, even my own, can only be developed for real
through being deliberately uncool. In my childhood I was able to master
selfish resource management and handling of physical attack because the
academics are utterly shameless about selfishness and cowardliness. I had to
forsake them to create music from the heart and to write these essays.
   
   
   
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