There was once an age when the rich declared themselves gods, when rock stars didn’t hesitated to puke on or screw anyone that got in their way, when artists made art and lived in hovels without heat but surrounded themselves with cigarette butts, pet rats, and whiskey bottles, and when golf and tea parties were things the Three Stooges made fun of. Now we get to listen to silly sluts who were dumb enough to marry Billy Bob Thornton talk about how much their newly adopted Southeast Asian brat means to them, listen to rock stars talk about poverty in Africa, and have to nod our heads while a bunch of wine-sniffing “artists” ask, with all seriousness, if buying a Volvo means they are middle class.

But, before launching into a well-balanced, and rationally considered social commentary, let me point out a couple of things. First, I do not advocate joblessness, alcoholism, heroin use, or looking like an idiot by entering ones forties with a GBH haircut. Second, I have a job and a place to live that doesn’t have bong water stains on the carpet or a refrigerator with a padlock on it. Finally, being a poor working stiff, I know that the nobility of poverty shtick is a crock and the when one lucks into a decent paying job it can fill you with a confounding combination of relief and guilt.

That having been said, I’ve come to feel like some sort of pay-toilet Rip van Winkle who instead of simply waking up to find himself old, wakes up to find the entire country attempting to become some sort of demented third-rate country club. Now I’m not about to lay down some weak, punker-than-thou polemic about how everyone’s sold out because they don’t go to all-ages shows anymore or they bought a car that actually runs more than three days a week. If you actually get a chance to get old, have a steady income, and have money to fix the car that you didn’t have to borrow from friends and family, you should be proud of yourself.

What I’m hootin’ and hollerin’ about is the tidal wave of bourgeois crap that has subsumed just about every nook and cranny of what’s left our society--most disgustingly what’s left of anything cool or underground. What was once the province of a select nakedly greedy few has become available to poseurs of every ilk. Now everyone from South Norfolk loading lock workers to smack-sniffing art students are trying to feel like swells by talking about playing golf and smoking cigars. Why pretend to be a fat cat when the fun of actually being rich has been to run people over with your carriage and get out of it with a well-placed bribe while making the injured feel they had no business being in the road to begin with?

Bourgeois clutter is killing cool. In days of old, wealth was the manure from which cool sprang. It was the rich who, directly and indirectly, bankrolled and often brought to the forefront cool people like Picasso, Oscar Wilde, Mozart, Henry Miller, and Elvis Presley. Often being rich was cool in and of itself. It allowed you to beat your servants, host orgies with Hollywood starlets, and manipulate the economy and media to your hearts delight and with relative impunity. William Randolph Hearst, Fatty Arbuckle, and Keith Richards never pretended to be just like you and me and wouldn’t have wanted to. They had a lot more fun than we did, never got into trouble like we would have, and they delighted in rubbing our noses in these facts. And, of course, we ate up every moment of it.

The problem is that nowadays the rich and famous are more likely to spend their free time in the public eye talking about their investment strategies and their wine cellar than trying to defend being found naked in a public restroom with a 17-year old. Bottom line: how can cool survive when even today’s rock stars give out stock tips instead of falling on the floor of an airport because they slipped in a pool of their own vomit? What kind of role models for our children are these modern superstars?

Now that the rich and famous have taken to using a feigned mediocrity to mask the naked greed that their forebears flaunted, where do we find exemplars--people worth emulating--in a quest for cool? People like Johnny Thunders, William S. Burroughs, Marquis de Sade, and Robert Mitchum? Where is the debauchery, the excess, the rumors or Faustian bargains and buggery? How about something as simple as cool clothes that fit? I don’t give a damn about some sissy from the Dave Mathews Band talking about the vineyard he’s investing in. Why don’t bums like that do us all a favor and become real estate agents. This would serve a dual purpose: It would keep me from falling asleep at the wheel every time I hear their crap on the radio, and it would help them become who they are in their hearts--greedy bores.

The old gods are dead and with them cool is running headlong into the grave. One of the scariest by-products of all this is what I’ll call the Invasion of the Bourgeois Snatchers. This is the insidious process whereby once-cool individuals and entire subcultures have been seemingly brainwashed into believing there is no shame in paying ten bucks for a pound of coffee, and they’re being really hip in doing it. Cool is dead, and we’re in a new age-- the age of the bourgeois man holding gourmet coffee in one hand and Guatemalan pottery in the other. Hey Socrates, pass the hemlock. I don’t feel so good myself.