The Burden of Being Cool

When I upgraded from my old iPod to my new one, I had to give the latter a name on my computer. Whereas the old one bore the title "Judson Knight's iPod" (you can praise my creativity later), I chose for the new one the whimsical appellation "Cornucopia of Cool." And after all, what else could you call an iPod that, when placed in the random song-playing mode, yields a back-to-back list of cool songs like this, as it did this morning:

"Ether" by Gang of Four (okay, I selected that one to start with, but the rest were truly random)
"Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana
"Me and My Bobby McGee" by Janis Joplin
"Green Plastic Trees" by Radiohead
"Under Pressure" by Queen with David Bowie

(For the last of these, I have to thank my good friend Harry Joiner. My four-year-old especially adores the CD he gave me recently--"I just love Mr. Harry's song!"--and yesterday in the car, while "Under Pressure" was playing, I looked in the rearview mirror to see her bobbing her head back and forth, a serene look of unabashed pleasure on her face. Just this moment, she was playing in my study, trying to distract me for the thousandth time this morning, and I said, "I'm writing about you here--you have to let me concentrate." She gave me a big grin, eyes wide, and went back to playing on the floor.)

Now where was I? Oh, yes--in choosing the name "Cornucopia of Cool," I was partly poking fun at myself, because as I've admitted many times here on this blog, one weakness of mine is that I take a little too much pride in being perceived as cool. And even if I didn't recognize this, every happily married man in the world will tell you that one person can always bring you back down to earth if you're getting a little too uppity: the wife. In my case, Deidre punctured all my pretensions long ago by observing, with a chuckle, "It's very important to you to be cool"--which of course ruins the whole thing, because someone who was really cool wouldn't care about being cool.

The idea of being cool, of course, is an affectation, a component of our popular culture with roots far older than the 1960s, when that particular meaning of the word first came into the general vocabulary. Far older even than the late 1940s and 1950s, when jazz musicians and beatniks first started using "cool" to refer to something other than temperature or an aloof demeanor. I think it goes all the way back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), who, though his name is hardly a household word, may have had more influence on modern society than all but a handful of thinkers. In his brilliant and delightfully gossipy book Intellectuals, British historian Paul Johnson presents Rousseau as the first modern figure, who--among many other things--popularized the idea of the outsider as being superior to the rule-following mass.

As in so many other things, Rousseau turned traditional ideas upside down, and in so doing provided a badge of pride for all those who colored outside the lines thereafter: Shelley, Wagner, Tolstoy, Picasso, James Baldwin, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Johnson profiles most of these in his book), and so on up to the present day. Many of these individuals--Shelley the Bonapartist, Wagner the anti-Semite, Tolstoy the socialist radical--supported rotten ideas that led to the death and enslavement of millions, which is hardly cool by any honest standard. Yet what mattered more, in their presentation of themselves and their work, was the beauty in their art and not the truth (or lack of it) in their beliefs.

And of course that's the ultimate flaw in coolness: it's more about form than function, style than substance. And even when a given artist didn't adopt particular political or social positions, the burden of being cool took a toll that was all too obvious. Look at one of the coolest figures of my own generation, an extreme outsider who turned his painful past into some of the most powerful rock 'n' roll since the 1970s: Kurt Cobain. Where did his coolness get him, ultimately? Dead of a gunshot wound, sitting on top of 30 million dollars and a body of work that could have been much greater if he'd chosen to set aside the heroin and truly engage in life.

What I'm saying here is that being cool is often a defense. I know it was for me, growing up as I did always seemingly on the outside: a mama's boy in a family of macho men, a white kid in a country of dark-skinned people (the Philippines), a semi-foreigner in his own country, a boy who would rather make up his own games than play sports, a student who never studied what was required but chose instead texts far afield from his grade level. Too law-abiding to fit in with the bad kids, too rebellious to fit in with the good kids; too working-class to fit in with the rich kids, too middle-class to fit in with the poor kids; altogether dissatisfied with crowds, and so determined to make his own crowd.

Of course, I got past most of those demons, or I wouldn't be sitting here writing about this so casually. And I figured out a long time ago that the truly cool person, if there is such a thing, is one who puts himself on the line for something that really matters. I happen to think that the coolest individual of all time was a crazy-sounding rabbi in Judea during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, but I'm not asking anybody else to agree with that. Besides, we've got plenty of contemporary rebels to admire, like Rubin Ghandarba.

He's a fourteen-year-old minstrel in Nepal, a member of a very low caste in that Hindu nation, which is in the midst of turmoil that pits savage Maoist rebels against a dictatorial king who rose to power literally over the bodies of his family members. In contrast to the traditional songs of Himalayan bards, Ghandarba's concern current events. There may be little subtlety in lines such as "The people must rule, the king must go," but you've got to admire the kid's spunk. We're not talking about America, where protesters can speak out against the government with virtually no fear of reprisal--and a guaranteed spot on Larry King if any such reprisal occurs. "One day," another member of Rubin's caste told Matthew Rosenberg of the Associated Press, "he is going to get in a lot of trouble--or he will get killed."

If he were to meet such a fate, it's uncertain what he would be dying for, other than the right to speak his mind, because Rubin doesn't support any particular faction in Nepal, which held elections under extremely tense circumstances yesterday. I found one sentence in Rosenberg's piece particularly haunting: "It is hard to tell how much of his anti-king sentiment is heartfelt and how much is simply the desire of a young boy, who left home as a child, to be accepted."