Casual
BROOKS, DAVID
Casual THE DUMB AND THE BEAUTIFUL In the past 20 minutes I have seen 4 1/2 acres of pelvic skin. I'm sitting in a sidewalk bar called Wet Willies in the South Beach section of Miami. I'm nursing a...
...Their apathy toward our world is actually an offensive force...
...They wear those shower room Adidas flip-flops, baggy athletic shorts, and sleeveless black T-shirts so perfectly form-fitting that they must be made by Hugo Boss...
...But I distinctly remember in college I thought that I had cool musical taste...
...Their legs are like elongated Barbie limbs...
...Spending 45 minutes discussing the jazz group Weather Report, we were just playing at connoisseurship, and connoisseurship requires effort and hence is not cool...
...The people in South Beach are cool...
...Some of the middle-aged men and women visiting this neighborhood are probably titans of industry, pillars of their community...
...I recall being inordinately proud of the fact that I knew it was cool to wear Japanese baseball jerseys even before the boutiques in SoHo started carrying them...
...It overwhelms us, and we acknowledge that we and everything we live for is uncool and therefore pathetic...
...But here they are acutely aware of their own pale, paunchy insignificance...
...Besides, he'd just stare at me blankly...
...It's as if Jeb Bush had passed a law forbidding the wearing of any pair of pants that covers any portion of the body that could possibly be considered part of the torso...
...Their stomach muscles are rippling and buff and you can see an Asian style serpent tattoo burrowing down toward their reproductive regions...
...Here there is an entirely different status mountain to climb, and at the tippy top there is the blinding hot clique of elite personal trainers, cutting-edge hair stylists, and powerful publicists...
...I recall listening to obscure and therefore cool alternative radio stations...
...They are about 8 feet tall on their pink platform clogs...
...If you threw a quarter at one of these women and hit her in the chest, it would become momentarily embedded in the silicon and then it would come rifling back at you at four times its original speed with enough velocity to bore through bone or concrete...
...What matters is that you be cool...
...But let's face it, what my friends and I were doing wasn't really being cool...
...Do beach people feel pathetic when they come into our realms and have to measure themselves by our standards...
...The cool South Beach folk are so indifferent to us and everything we represent that they annihilate us...
...The cool people work at Oxygene boutiques (Milan, Paris, Beverly Hills, Miami) and their job is to stand by the door and stare down people like you who wander by, so you don't even think of going in...
...DAVID BROOKS...
...For example, intermingled with these genuinely cool beach people there are little groups of people like me who are in Miami for conferences or sales meetings...
...I'm nursing a phosphorescent blue drink in a plastic cup, and on the sidewalk in front of me there is a parade of young women with their sub-belly-button regions exposed...
...Those of us who come here from normal America feel our pathetitude in the presence of these cool and beautiful beach people...
...But in a world stuffed with thoughtful people, South Beach is a refreshing oasis of stupidity...
...It has to be said that some of the older women have clearly taken advantage of Miami's abundant supply of cosmetic surgeons, and their faces are now having trouble keeping pace with their mammaries...
...Here your job title will impress no one...
...Here it doesn't matter if you have sophisticated views of urban sprawl or the plight of the Kurds...
...We were just doing academic one-upmanship on shallow subjects...
...The coolest of the cool men are driving Porsche Boxster convertibles with their stunningly beautiful girlfriends, whom they are ignoring while talking to their buddies on their cell phones...
...And so these beautiful people of all ages, with their trousers so low they probably don't have to adjust them to go to the bathroom, are strolling up and down the sidewalk reminding me there is a lot to be said for other people's vanity...
...And then he would make some remark, but wherever the cool people are the dance music is cranked up so high you can't hear what they are saying anyway...
...Sitting here, I can't remember exactly when I stopped trying to be cool...
...The young men look like Miami Hurricanes in between practice sessions...
...I don't know...
...Here your Ivy League education counts for nothing because all the best people went to one of those obscure universities in Switzerland favored by the Eurotrash, and they left after two years anyway without getting a degree...
...They send off gravitational waves that alter the status codes for miles around...
...Because here, all the rules are different...
...I may be a weenie, but I'm not such a weenie that I'm going to pull over a cool person and ask him a question like that...
...This isn't exactly a parade of MacArthur genius grantees...
...The women here are cool...
Vol. 8 • October 2002 • No. 5
