Gutfeld In The American Spectator, On Being Cool

Actually, this isn't the sort of article I thought it was going to be, but it's very good.

SINCE 9/11, these two lines of thinking should compete for attention in your brain each time you're faced with a potential crisis. Should you do nothing and be cool? Or take action, and look stupid? If you don't wrestle with those two thoughts when you're on a bus, subway, or plane, then you are a liar. Or a coward.

...

These two lines of thinking reveal the key differences between the left and everyone else on earth. Normal folks are willing to take the risk and appear stupid. The left cannot fathom why anyone would do such a thing.

Why? Because it's uncool. And that's the only thing that matters to the left. They claim to be concerned about tolerance, but really they are concerned about how cool they appear to others. They need to be admired. The left will never stand up for anything, because doing so undermines the protection necessary for their fragile egos. And it also requires balls, which they sorely lack.

And that makes them all cowards. Because, in order to prevent evil, you have to take a risk-not of death, but of embarrassment.

The bravest response for all of us? To have the balls to appear stupid -- at any and all times. We need to stand up and demand to see what's in a fidgety man's back pack, even if it turns out its nothing more than back issues of the Utne Reader and a "neck massager."

We need to be willing to face the mobs in the street and the mobs online. We need to punch a coward in the face when it's called for, and do so in front of his friends. We need to be the scary ones, for once.

Incidentally, I linked a video of his friend, Neil Hamburger, a while ago. A lot of people didn't find him funny, but I didn't want to argue with them. (A rule I haven't observed lately.)

Still, I think he's pretty good. His schtick is the anti-joke -- the joke so unfunny or obvious it's actually kinda funny, or just ugly statements so cringe-inducing they're nervously funny.

Like I said then, this is the guy who watched Rupert Pupkin's pathetic, wince-inducing act in The King of Comedy and thought to himself, "Needs a little polish... but that guy is on to something, baby!"

posted by Ace at 07:47 PM

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