Cool

Last week, we read "Are Black People Cooler Than White People?" an essay by Donnell Alexander. It begins,

"I'm cool like this:
I read fashion magazines like they're warning labels telling me what not to do.
When I was a kid, Arthur Fonzarelli seemed like a garden-variety dork.
I got my own speed limit.
I maintain like an ice cube in the remote part of the freezer.
Cooler than a polar bear's toenails.
Cooler than the other side of the pillow.
Cool like me."

The title of the essay is more of an attention-getter than anything else and he even calls the question "dumb" at one point. But his thesis is essentially that the idea of cool is inherently black. "Cool," he writes, "was born when the first plantation nigga figured out how to make animal innards -- massa's garbage, hog maws and chitlins -- taste good enough to eat. . . Cool is all about trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents. It's about living on the cusp, on the periphery, diving for scraps. Essential to cool is being outside looking in."

Later, he writes, "(Blacks) have been treated by the country's majority as, at best, subhuman, and, at worst, an abomination. So in the days when they were still literally on the plantation, they devised a coping strategy called cool, an elusive mellowing strategy designed to master time and space. Cool, the basic reason blacks remain in the American cultural mix, is an industry of style that everyone in the world can use. It's finding the essential soul while being essentially lost."

For we honkies, there is room in his idea of cool for us too:

"Some white people are cool in their own varied ways. I married a white girl who was cooler than she ever knew. And you can't tell me Jim Jarmusch and Ron Athey and Delbert McClinton ain't smooth.

"There's a gang of cool white folks, all of whom exist that was because they've found their essential selves amid the abundant and ultimately numbing media replications of the coolness vibe and the richness of real life."

So the way I interpret this is, cool is being able to maintain your composure and perspective even when the world is ganged up against you, even (especially) when you are on the outside of what is going on in the mainstream. Interestingly, it's actually a very similar idea to that old poem by Rudyard Kipling, "If." You know, "If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you. . . etc."

I like this because it inverts the high school concept of cool that places the most popular, richest, best looking types at the top of the pyramid and instead gives precedence to those who are doing their own thing, "finding their essential selves" as it were. Being an outsider is integral to cool. (This is comforting to those of us who were never at the top of that traditional pyramid in life.)

The other thing that strikes me about this definition is that, according to it, shouldn't Mormons be, like, super cool? Theological, social, sexual, geographical outsiders taking a salt-caked desert wasteland and building a flourishing city? Doesn't that qualify as making a dollar out of fifteen cents? Isn't "being in the world but not of the world" the same as finding your essential self amid the numbing onslaught of contemporary life?