Some 30 years ago I read a novel by long-forgotten pop-sociology novelist Warren Miller called The Cool World (1963).  Miller, an accomplished, prolific white storyteller, wrote naturalistic fictions in the style of an updated, jazzy Frank Norris, George Gissing or Upton Sinclair.  The Cool World was written from the point of view of a young black man in the ghetto (it couldn’t be written today, with all the PC vigilantes on patrol) in grunt-and-blurt ghettoese and was pretty exciting, like 1950s melodramas about the Great Juvenile Delinquency Menace, our very own purely domestic cold war (West Side Story, Rebel without a Cause, etc.).

            I was impressed by the adventures and amazed by the forbidden black world (like squinting into nickelodeon machines at carnivals that offered 2-minute flickery films of The Sultan’s Harem or Backstage at the Lido).  I forgot the story except for the core concept that “cool” ruled, and life could be measured by its CQ, its Cool Quotient.  A better insight into American culture than Miller knew.

            On first thought, “cool” is a juvenile expression, a Wow! Effect of youth, a modern version of the Enlightenment’s Nil admirari of laid-back detachment (from old groovy Horace in Augustan Rome:  “Not to admire is all I have to do,” or “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing”).  Cool has been accepted and deconstructed down to the bones by self-proclaimed experts like Tom Wolfe (hip is the pedestal under his later career as a boorish thicko Neocon), bags of Beats, Lord Buckley, Lennie Bruce and many others.

            The jazz world—distinct from 1950s pop, rhythm and blues and rock and roll—supplied icons and instructions for cool.  Bird, Dizzie, Miles, Monk, Lady Day just looked cool—you hardly had to hear them play or talk.  Earlier incarnations like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Stuff Smith, Leo Watson (of the magical Spirits of Rhythm) or Slim and Slam (Slim Galliard and Slam Stewart, Crown Princes of Vout), Prez or Bean were equally charismatic.  Jazz language was cool whether functional (groovy, swinging, with it, down, gone) or musical onomatopoeia (zoot, oobladee, bop-sh’bam, re-bop, klactoveededstene).

            These are only the high surface of the cool world, though—the Himalayan peaks.  Down on the planet, cool is ubiquitous, a universal material of life, like carbon.  Cool drives American esthetics, acknowledged or not, forms the skin of our manufactured world.  World War II warplanes were cool:  beginning with the introduction of monoplanes and the concept of streamlining, they became the futuristic, dart-like shapes schoolboys doodled, like manned bullets or Buck Rogers’ rockets.  Old lumpy fighter planes like the Brewster Buffalo became deadly daggers like the P-51 Mustang, the fat Republic  P-47 Thunderbolt and the epitome of lethal cool, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, (or its big-brother prototype test-flown by that Eagle of Hip, mystery entrepreneur Howard Hughes), and a fantasy of coolness with two engines, two tail booms, heavy weaponry and an indefinable element of The Sublime in its two-is-one, Yin/Yang design.  The Navy’s gullwinged F4U Corsair was cool. The gullwinged Nazi Stuka (Junkers 87) dive bomber was super-cool, even if it was also supremely evil.  Naked evil in newsreels and aircraft spotter kits was often cool.  Tiger tanks, Lugers and V1 or V2 rockets were polestars of cool, like Mitsubishi Zeroes, broomstick Mauser pistols and Samurai swords.

            Everything in the mid-30s was cool by virtue of “streamlining”—cars, toasters, trailers, houses, stoves and refrigerators.  Even objects that stood still were shaped to lower wind resistance.  The cool world became moderne, art deco, industrially streamlined.  Everything looked like it was moving off at warp speed for an even cooler future, described by General Motors at the 1939 World’s Fair and in a thousand Sunday supplement articles during the War, about the World of Tomorrow.  This Tomorrow place would be built of dreams and plastic, an autogiro for everyone, moving sidewalks, bubble domes over cities to control weather, food reduced to aspirin-sized doses, clothes that shed dirt and never wore out, cars shaped like footballs, houses as transparent as politicians’ lies.

            Detroit seized streamlined cool to bootstrap itself from the deepest pit of the Depression.  Chrysler built its Airflow cars, undulating variations on the old shoeboxes of the 1920s.  Cord-Auburn-Duesenberg cranked out zippy boat-tailed Auburn Speedsters in candy colors and the audacious coffin-nosed Cords with their disappearing headlights, low-swept fenders, jalousie grille, front-wheel drive.  Such aberrations from the automobile norm disappeared in the late ‘30s, reappearing a generation later as collector’s items.  Design guru Raymond Loewy rejuvenated the old Studebaker wagon works after The War with his push-me pull-you streamliner cars.

            Streamline was domesticated cool, sold at Sears Roebuck.  Pop cool was all around:  airbrushed pinup girls, as calendar entries, magazine pages or nose art on a B-17 or as Betty Grable singing and dancing in films.  Adenoidal, skeletal Frank Sinatra, precursor of all rock idols, hip and cool if not yet Chairman and advocate of Old-Guy Cool.  Girl singers for big bands metamorphosing into pop singles, shaping wholesome girls-at-home images into vampish Queens of Cool, like Peggy Lee, June Christie, Rosemary Clooney, Kay Starr.  Even Doris Day had a teensy shot of cool in her rubber dolly persona.

            The American OGPU imagery of the Cold War inhibited cool after 1947, while Young Republicans were as thuggishly square as Russian agents.  Still, spies wore tailored suits and stingy-brim hats and had reams of hip dialogue, as 007 or Maxwell Smart.  But McCarthyism was a cultural repression, so cool went sideways along with Walt Kelly’s Pogo and the smart-alecky wit of the folk movement and its coffeehouse insouciance.  Cool pop movies arrived with juveniles and their angst (Blackboard Jungle!) or about flying saucers and creatures from outer space and other analogues of the Cold War, and a few hyper-cool movies zipped off into the interplanetary void, perhaps the best the Dr. Seuss movie The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, a takeoff on funky middle-class art works and treasures like Busby Berkeley musicals, Dr. Spock, the Bickersons and the American way of child-rearing, including piano lessons, politeness and Good Behavior.  It was a weird, cool movie, and still is, decades ahead of its time, orbiting out there near Betelgeuse.  It was far more interesting than the grainy homemade films of Kenneth Anger and other avant gardists or the big Beat movie Pull My Daisy and its immortal inquiries about “tortured socks.”

            Cool subversion of the Cold War status quo emanated from EC comics, as they tore into the sacred emblems of Americana, from the American Way of Death (Tales from the Crypt), to war (Frontline Combat), to westerns (Gunfighter), to all pop culture (Mad), to science fiction (Weird Science).  EC was crushed by a juggernaut congressional investigation like the crusades preached by McCarthy, Kefauver and the other grim agents of anti-cool, bringers of death to the hip culture.  Their object was to stuff every American male into button-down shirts, wash pants with buckles in the back, suede loafers and skinny ties.  Women had to don floppy skirts (with or without poodles), shirty blouses, saddle shoes, bad hair and acne cream.  But cool leaked through the space time continuum, revived in the ‘60s by the Hippies, who thought they discovered it (oh, wow!), redistributed by black comedians like Godfrey Cambridge, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby or Cleavon Little, fed back intravenously into pop culture.

            Nowadays, cool leaks into design and domesticity in strange ways—not through Ikea and Crate & Barrel and Smith & Hawkins but through devious byways.  Instead of the DeSoto Airflow, we get a ¾-scale model in the Chrysler PT Cruiser, self-conscious art deco Car for the Cool.  Odder still, noting the grotesque coolness of the Tiger tank, we have the Hummer, an oversized, overweight, overpriced civvy cousin of a military troop car, as a cool emblem—like the former craze for Dr. Porsche’s people-car and military jeeplet, the Volkswagen Beetle (peace-loving, civilian-world cute, name borrowed by four kiddies from Liverpool to signify harmlessness).  By the millennium Hummers were cool because huge, useless, malign and offensive—SUV squared beyond reductio ad absurdum. 

            If hipness and cool are always perverse, disruptive, rebellious, stupid (not revolutionary), a cheerful and mindless Up Yours to the universe of Squaredom, we have all popped from the wormhole.  Cool rules, the known universe has been mapped and conquered by hip. 

            We captured the Fortress of Solitude.  Roll over, Superman! ###