Free Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You by Greg Gutfeld Page A

them roam free. Which is about the craziest thing you can do. Themessage delivered by Big Media every day, in a thousand different ways, is that it is better to be dead than intolerant. Lucky for them, messengers themselves are rarely being shot at or stabbed by madmen without provocation. Harvey Weinstein rarely takes the subway, I hear. He discovered there’s no dining car.

ADDICTION TO ACCOLADES
    Award shows are funerals for the living. If you do not believe in God (and I veer in and out of that group depending on my success in finding a parking spot), then what replaces heaven? Fame. Fame is as close as you get to achieving immortality. Lots of people knowing you is the next best thing to a deity knowing you. Roughly one hundred years ago, the kind of fame we see now never existed. Sure, there was local fame, where the people in your village knew who you were because you happened to be really good at skinning an elk or cobbling a shoe. And there was the “legend” kind of fame—more like infamy—where the likes of Jesse James were known through gossip and pamphlets. But the kind of fame where a man born in Malibu is recognized by strangers in Tokyo—that never existed. Jesse James could still get a drink in solitude, provided he didn’t wear a name tag that read I’M JESSE JAMES . (And, really, most fame occurs after death. Which is pointless, if you want to get laid now. No wonder the promise of “seventy-two virgins” is so necessary.)
    But thanks to the invention of modern entertainment in theform of motion pictures, we’ve created a new kind of sensation: the recognition by millions of
you
. (And it is
you
. You control their fame. If you just turned away from their needy grab for attention, it would be a different world.) Fame didn’t figure into our evolutionary adaptations. I compare it to flying. People designate weirdos like me who hate commuting by plane as having a fear of flying. But “fear of flying” is nothing more than your evolutionary sense telling you, “This isn’t where you, as a human, are supposed to be.” (It’s much the same feeling one gets in certain areas of New Jersey.)
    Recognition by hordes of strangers is not meant to be, and when a person feels it, it’s the same disorientation you would feel skydiving. Except it’s way cooler. And for those rare few who experience it (I reckon there are approximately 74,500 famous people on earth—I’ve actually counted all of them, including Dana Perino, who counts as one-half), it diminishes the idea of an afterlife. The idea of an afterlife helped to cope with hell on earth. But if life on earth is heaven for the famous, then heaven evaporates. Heaven can’t compete with the immediacy of instantaneous gratification. Fame is now the reason for life. And this mortal immortality, if you weren’t a decent person before, will turn you into an asshole. Or worse, Barbra Streisand. We are now surrounded, outmanned, and outgunned by a generation of phonies, grasping for acceptance through appearance and behavior that have no productive impact on the world. It is all sound and fury, signifying nobodies. The key, of course, is to look good doing it.
    Awards shows are those necessary oases that remind the chosen few that they are, indeed, famous. And cool. (As for my own fame, it is both late in arriving and appreciated. Fameat middle age is like discovering a whole new set of relatives you never knew but who know you. And they really like buying you drinks and asking you about Bob Beckel.)
    The truly cool are people who work their butts off, heads down, unencumbered by desires for acceptance. Their success is based on achievement, not by external accolades. They know what they do is—if not great—at the very least their best, and reflects productive work. (If you’ve ever run into a military vet, you know
exactly
what I mean.) These are the people sitting in coach on a discount airline, trying to make it to their kid’s soccer game