kids these days

I really didn't want to get into the youth culture which is just a side issue in what I what I wanted to discuss which was the nature of cool and how it is a driving force, or maybe it is an effect, of the human natural.  The human natural is a phrase I picked up from George Chin the owner of the restaurant where I worked for around ten years.  It's basically just a paraphrase of 'human nature,' but it has a certain ring to my ear. 

In a perfect society there would be no cool.  Well actually there should be no cool, but we are speaking of the human natural here.  I guess that is the problem with those ideal societies, they look pretty good on paper, but when you put people into them they fuck it up.  When I was tending bar in Champaign one of the deans used to talk about how well the university would run if it didn't have any students.

But anyway my crackpot theory is that cool is an outgrowth of a survival mechanism that allows us to kill the king.  Otherwise the king would hog all the stuff and all the wives (like those Mormons in the hills do) and Joe Sixpack would never get to have any progeny so his genes would end right there.  Which would be great for the king but not Joe Sixpack.

But what if we were able to shoehorn people into that perfect society, maybe we could remove their sense of cool, or maybe we could channel it into some video game kind of gizmo.  We would have all these nice people living nice lives being nice to each other and having just the right amount of kids and never coveting their neighbors or lusting after their neighbor's wife, and what would they do for entertainment?  What would their tv shows and movies be like?  No bad guys, no conflicts, just nicey, nicey, nicey.  That doesn't sound like entertainment.  Hardly sounds like a life worth living.  Maybe we should smuggle some philosophers into their nicey nicey society, philosophers always make trouble. 

I think I have seen that essay before.  I think you are mostly trying to be funny.  A lot of people believe that the current youth culture began with Davy Crockett, or more particularly his coonskin cap, of which i am sure I had at least a couple.  They were cooler to look at than to wear, they were hot in the summer and they had no bill to block the sun and that tail kept getting in the way.  But anyway the advertisers realized they could make big bucks peddling stuff to kids who had money from their indulgent parents in the fat post war boom, and it was in their interests to cater to this crowd via the corrosive effects of that new device tv.  Others think it was the automobile because now kids could get away from prying eyes and be up to no good in the automobile. 


I expect it was always around.  Isn't there some quote from like Socrates about how kids are no good these days.  Whenever the conversation wanes among us oldsters it can always be perked right up with the phrase 'How about kids these days?"