Time knows you’re not cool

Time magazine seems to fancy itself an arbiter of coolness. Yeah, take a minute to let that sink in.

Bookslut, the brilliant and brilliantly named literary blog, noted on Friday that Time had interviewed Neil Gaiman. A versatile and talented writer (and great blogger), Gaiman is poised to hit a new level of fame. In two weeks, his book Stardust becomes a major film starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert Deniro and Claire Danes. And it’s a damned fine movie—Badmouth’s review will be posted next week. Later this year, his co-adaptation of Beowulf comes out, with names like Angelina Jolie and Robert Zemekis involved. Part of the publicity wave Gaiman will be surfing is this half-assed tip of the hat from Time. For such a short piece, the writer manages to weave a fair amount of contempt for Gaiman’s field of endeavor and his audience—which would seem to reflect indirect condescension on the author, for writing to these maladjusted nincompoops.

The article is headlined “Geek God” and a flattering assessment of his Sandman comics ends by observing that it “won Gaiman the passionate loyalty of a vast army of nerds and goths.” Whatever, jerky Time writer. It’s nice that Gaiman’s “nerdishness” and “geek principles” are repeatedly cited, as are his genre roots. Nothing does a better job of telling a mainstream audience to pay no attention to an artist than to say his work is the province of losers and misfits. “Nerd,” “geek” and “goth” are not used to suggest a crowd the reader should wish to join.

Why are these terms useful? They tend to connote social awkwardness, but that’s a pretty odd label to put on a bunch of people for liking a writer. How many Gaiman fans does jerky Time writer know? And if I like Sandman but can comfortably converse on a wider variety of topics, too, am I still a geek? Would it help if I stuttered?

Ah, but perhaps it’s editorial mandate—also on Time’s site on Friday was a headline about the genre-ish media show in San Diego that has become vitally important to Hollywood in recent years: “At Comic-Con, 120,000 geeks are being entertained by everyone from an old English monster to a young Mr. Spock.” Did the people who flocked here to San Francisco three weeks ago for the All-Star Game get similarly derided for gathering from afar to share their interest? “Hundreds of thousands of people who haven’t read a book since high school (if then) gathered Tuesday to celebrate corporate-endorsed steroid monkeys performing little tricks for millions of dollars in a game that doesn’t even matter to the rest of their pointless drag of a season.” That wouldn’t be fair, now would it? That would be crass simplification, pandering to a stereotyped fraction of a group, and an insult to many thousands of people simply enjoying interests that reflect only a facet of their personalities. I’m sure Time would defend good American sports fans everywhere.

Over the weekend, screenwriter and blogging genius John Rogers, at Comic-Con, touched on the same issue with more detail and immediacy. I could excerpt several paragraphs of well-drawn commentary, but just take this bit here and click through to Kung Fu Monkey.

A thousand stories, tens of thousands of families … yet the newshacks couldn’t wait to hustle up the dozen or so real freaks in costumes, the literally .001% that gave them what they wanted. Not even the kids in the Harry Potter outfits, or the Japanese anime kids, or even the clever unfolding Transformer rigs—no, they found every empty-eyed overweight forty-five year old Flash or flab-rolled part-time stripper Catwoman and latched on tight for the creepy interview.

What is the point? Particularly, why ridicule people for liking something? Why punish harmless enthusiasm? There are people who travel from across the country to Chicago to sit in Oprah Winfrey’s audience. There are people who not only watch every episode of American Idol, even when it’s running at a four-night-a-week pace, but they actually vote. People plan their weekend around televised sporting events. I have watched the book section editor of a major-city daily newspaper leap up and yell at and pace in front of the television when our college team is playing. Up by a dozen points, and early regular season, no less. Who have we missed? Shall we make fun of the scores of women who make scrapbooks or gather in knitting circles? Well, probably, but we’ll be wrong to do it.

Perhaps the mainstream arbiters of corporately defined cool are put off by the enthusiasm of the “geeks.” The Simpsons Comic Book Guy, as standard-bearer for this cliché, often demonstrates a pedantic command of four-color trivia, and yeah, that character wasn’t invented outta thin air. But then, my father can probably tell you the starting lineup of every Yankees team during his youth in the fifties and sixties because he was a big fan and has a decent memory. What can you do? It’s not like I’m trying to remember nearly every member of the Legion of Superheroes from the late fifties ’til, maybe, ten or fifteen years ago. My girlfriend recently quoted, for comic effect, a fairly memorable scene from a Friends episode. People remember what they like, or spent a lot of time with in years past. And if they’re passionate about disrupted slayer succession caused by Buffy dying and then being revived, or the fate of Harry Potter and friends, or salsa dancing, or Lost, or how many home-runs Barry Bonds cranks out of the park, or whether the Smashing Pumpkins reunion album is any good, so freakin’ what? Let people have something to excite them for the slim portion of the day not spent sleeping or thanklessly clearing the inbox for whatever company is exploiting them.

Are some of those people in homemade Batman costumes a little weird? I’ll spot you that one. But should the media really aspire to be the bully that kicks sand in their faces? As comic books and fantasy novels catch wider attention for filling theater screens with wonder and adventure, why deride the people who enthused over Spider-Man, Harry Potter, 300, Sin City or Stardust first? Why not say, “Hey, there’s some pretty cool stuff these people are into. Wonder what else is there.” Yet instead, what do we get from Time and those roving convention-floor news crews? “We’re drawn to Comic-Con by all the cool stuff, but let’s just make fun of the people who are drawn here by the cool stuff.” “Neil Gaiman? We like to read his books, but we need you to know we think we, ourselves, are much cooler than the rest of the people who read his books.”

If the world needed an arbiter of what’s cool, I’m pretty sure that arbiter wouldn’t be Time magazine. But what do I know? I’m one of those Economist nerds.