2 of 5

Nothing says "establishment" quite like Latin class, and at my school eight semesters were required. My friends and I were typical teenagers to Herr Roth, antagonizing him at every opportunity. One day I pushed him over the edge. When class was dismissed, he pulled me into the hallway. I was terrified, but with all the other kids walking by I needed to compose myself quickly. The man yelled at me for 20 minutes straight. I can only guess what he was saying— probably things like "You're wasting your life"—because I wasn't really listening. I was too busy demonstrating, via body language, that I didn't care how angry he was.

Then it happened. Suddenly I realized, I'm trying to be cool.

At that moment, I understood that cool doesn't reside in objects or people; it is a tool that can be wielded. Furthermore, I understood that this was an incredible and possibly dangerous secret to power and influence. More thought was needed, so I wiped the smirk off my face and let Herr Roth finish. It worked. He calmed down within seconds of feeling that he was being listened to.

It was as if scales had fallen out of my eyes. The entire world felt different. I could manipulate people with something as simple as body language—and I could just as easily be manipulated. On that day cool became a subject of my curiosity.

I've had my eyes wide open since that moment with Herr Roth. I have learned that cool is far more powerful than we realize, and that like the ring of power in J. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, most of us don't have the mental strength to wield it. More often, cool wields us.

Cool is not innocent. Cool is the sunglasses we wear so people don't see that we're lonely, frightened or ashamed. It can alienate us from community, family and God. We're so attuned to cool that we can hardly imagine life without it.

But what is cool anyway? For a passion so prominent in our hearts, we barely notice it, or think about it. We watch our tempers, we control our appetites, and we surrender our jealousies to God, but cool flies below our radar. Where did it come from? How does it affect our community? What does cool want? Is it merely a hangover from adolescence? Or is it something bigger?

One of the difficulties in defining cool is the word's near omnipresence in contemporary American English. We say "cool" as a generic term of approval. It can mean spontaneous, clever, slick, fashionable, high-tech, successful or original. Cool is a compliment; "That's cool," in fact, was the most common response people had when I told them I was writing this book.

In their book Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, Dick Pountain and David Robins supply a definition of cool: an attitude of permanent, private rebellion. I think this needs to he taken further. I define cool as the private performance of rebellion for rebellion's sake.

First of all, cool is private. It is individualistic from beginning to end, even when small groups of in-the-know insiders are involved; even in tight-knit cliques, membership is less about faithful friendship and looking out for each other, and more about excluding outsiders.

next page... |  2 of 5