BY FLETCH WORTMANN

In print | Published February 22, 2007

Understand this: I am a better person than you are. I listen to bands you have never heard of. Bands so experimental that they do not actually exist, named things like “The Art Plebeians” or “The Ironic Reference to a Children’s Television Franchise Popular in 1987.” My sexuality is in constant, fashionable flux; specifically I lean towards whichever gender and orientation you are not. And all of my clothes were purchased at thrift stores. All of them. Even my socks. Even my underwear. For I am hipster.

If only. Sadly, any ambitions towards “hipster” I may harbor are futile. While I certainly have the necessary misanthropy, I lack essential qualities such as “self-confidence” and “not looking ridiculous in clothes that my father wore in the 1970s.” When a hipster wears a faded Super Mario Brothers shirt, it is to make an ironic statement about the disposable nature of American consumer culture; when I wear a Super Mario Brothers shirt, it is because I really, really like Super Mario Brothers.

You may wonder why I introduce the subject of hipster now; these days everyone makes fun of them. Everyone. I have trained my own mother to make fun of hipsters as one trains a gorilla to use sign language, in that the thing is not entirely sure of the meaning of its gestures but knows that for its efforts it will receive praise and a tasty monkey-treat. There are essays, articles, satirical handbooks and sociopolitical manifestos of scorn. No one takes hipsters seriously anymore, and this is our critical mistake.

Think about it. Look at the hatred, the veritable pop-cultural warfare waged against them. Any ordinary subculture would have withered and died under such ridicule. Yet the hipster survives. Like the cockroach, hipsters are impervious to our attempts at satiric nuclear annihilation and so grow strong in the radiation. Still, they scuttle, consume refuse, make strange clicking sounds with their mutated mandibles. Hipsters are indestructible, immortal. They are gods, they are horn-rimmed, leg-warmed, radio-headed titans, they are mythic heroes; they are like Beowulf, like Achilles, and they cannot be destroyed. They are a popular youth subculture and, as we all know, popular youth subcultures remain fashionable and influential forever, no matter what.

Thus I make a final supplication. To the hipster: let me join you. Teach me your ways. I understand I cannot be one of you, but let me serve beneath you, let me even lick the mud from your Converse All-Stars and I will be forever loyal. I would kill for you. I would die. I would abandon my country, my principles, betray the people I love most.

I understand the futility of my pleas. And yet still we must dream. It was recently that I experienced such a moment of hope. I am currently taking Introduction to Education and, as part of my coursework, I must observe classes at a local school. One day after class, a young student approached me; if he did not actually do so, it only emphasizes my tragic desperation.

“Excuse me, sir,” says the child. He stutters. His eyes are wide and deepest blue, his innocence perfect in his nonexistence. “I couldn’t help but notice that you are wearing corduroys. Are you,” he asks, his lip quivering, “are you a hipster?”

“No,” I mutter. I turn and shake my head and spit at the ground. “No. I’m sorry. I’m not.”

He looks away, disheartened. I see a single tear well up in the corner of his eye. And then his face brightens. “But maybe someday!” he says, his pale face shining in the morning sun. “Maybe someday…”

“Yes. Maybe someday.”

I walk away, and the child smiles. And for an instant, for a brief glorious instant, I feel a great sense of emotional detachment and contempt for my fellow man; and my t-shirt feels more expensive, and the music from my mp3 player sounds just slightly more obscure. And there is hope. And all the world is beautiful, in a kitschy ironic kind of way.

Fletcher is a sophomore. You can reach him at fwortma1@swarthmore.edu.

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