what's cool

Let's start with the three forces you claim rule school the army and corporations, to wit: hierarchy, classicism, and social crap.  I think the big thing about hierarchy is that it is written down, it's like one of those charts where the top man is in a box on the top and there are lines going down from him to the boxes of guys he is in command of, and lines going down from those, and so on and so on and doobie doobie do on. 

Sorry that last part comes from Everyday People, a song of the sixties, hijacked now as are all those great paeans to the equality of man and to peace and to love, put now into the service of peddling some stupid fucking pill which if you watch the commercial to the end a fast soft voice warns you that it may cause madness and a long and lingering and painful death.

Anyway the hierarchical chart is clear as a bell, you know who you are above and who you are beneath.  It's the kind of thing that Beagles likes, he likes chains of commands and procedures to be followed.  He doesn't like breaking rules.  If that teacher had said no jeans and that's it, he would have been fine with it, but she said the students could decide and then she overruled their decision, violating her own procedures, a contradiction in the logical chain of command, that many years later had Beagles heading north to Alaska. 

Myself I am not such a stickler for rules, they are only so many words, they are written by mortal and fallible man and they are often at variance with what is really going on.  If you want to know what is going on you can look to the constitution, but it's more informative to look at who is occupying the congress the presidency and the supreme court.

Classism has a distinct definition in Marxism and postmodern philosophy, if the latter can even claim the exalted mantle of philosophy, which I don't think it can, but this is my second digression and it is almost sunrise so I'll move along.  Hard to figure exactly what Beagles means by it, but I think he means something close to family and money.  If you are the son of a famous or rich family then you are upper class, and have various social advantages just because.

Social crap appears to mean cool and that is the toughest one.  Where does it come from?  Let's go back to high school.  You may be the class president, and you may be from a prominent and rich family, you may be good-looking, athletic, or smart, but none of these are enough to make you cool.  It's just something, the way you walk, the way you talk, other kids can see it right away.  You show up in a flannel shirt and the next day all the kids are wearing flannel shirts, just the way it is.

They've done studies, advertising agencies have done studies, as to what makes a kid cool, mainly so that they could harness this innate and elusive property to selling their flannel shirts.  If they could harness this power they could become rich and rich is the only thing that trumps cool. 

They observed, they isolated, they distributed questionnaires.  Now that I think about it, I read the article twenty years ago, maybe thirty, it's all the same at our age huh?  I wonder what came of it.  I have always kind of assumed nothing, but now that I think of it, look at the clothing industry.  Maybe in our day a certain kind of shirt was cool, you know i particularly remember that thin silver belts were all the rage when I was starting high school, but it didn't matter who made them, as long as they were thin and silver.

But maybe they admen have conquered cool because now the company that makes clothes is what's cool, it doesn't matter what they make, the fact that they make it is what makes it cool.  They put their name on a t shirt and the t shirt becomes cool just because it has their name.

I think.  What would i know about it?  The thing was, these advertising companies who did that study twenty or thirty years ago that I wrote about, what they wanted to do was find the cool kids and pay them to wear their clothes.  But I think if the other kids found out that the cool kids were taking money to wear certain clothes, they would instantly become uncool.

I think there is something inherently uncontrollable about cool.  There are no procedures you can follow that will guarantee that you will be cool.  If you have to ask how to do it, you can never do it.