Some time ago I was eating dinner with friends in a diner in the city in which I live. It is a small neighborhood diner with both traditional greasy spoon and vegan options, so the people who frequent this diner are as diverse any place I have seen.
My friends and I order food and it comes rather quickly. We offer blessings over the food and begin eating and building with each other when we hear a group of young hipsters talking in the booth adjacent to us.
One of the young men in the group was waxing pompous and confident (God bless him, but is there any other way to wax?) about Nietzsche. Rather, he was spouting off well-known, often-used Nietzsche quotes perhaps in an attempt to sound appropriately, but effortlessly, well-read. “Nietzsche said ‘that which does not kill us…'” and “Nietzsche said that, ‘all great things must first wear…'” I gave him snaps for knowing that it was Nietzsche who actually said those things. I have heard those quotes attributed to many, many other authors.
The scene was almost so ironic, it wasn’t.
I love hipsters. Really, I do. And its not just because of their skinny jeans, their retro gear, or their really cool lingo.
I mean, really, if it were not for hipsters and their lingo (“dope,” “fresh,” and “I’m going to get my *insert any verb like run, or freak, or eat made to sound like an adjective here* on), how else would people of color know when their slang is outdated?
And without them Dabbing, Whipping and Nae-Naeing ironically, how would we know when create new cultural phenomena?
I love hipsters because of their ability to make almost everything passe and uncool simply by saying that it is. Even the sublime. Even the things the rest of us degenerates think are kind of cool. Like integration, gentrification, jazz music, chastity and integrity.
Ask Coldplay, The Black Eyed Peas or the good people of Pabst Blue Ribbon, who are all victims of hipsters and their wrath, about how this all works.
In several of his writings and texts, Nietzsche made his now famous utterance, “God is Dead.” Of course, Nietzsche did not make this utterance because he believed in a God and that he killed that God.
We know that Nietzsche was a steadfast atheist. Rather, Nietzsche meant that God as Christians understood the concept (as well as God’s underlying ethical system of virtue) was passe, out of style and “unworkable.”
Presumably, he meant the interpretations and writings of the church fathers as the early church developed in Europe and North Africa.
Yes, the early fathers were sometimes inconsistent, and their hermeneutics were frequently bigoted, and expressed a fear of women. Unworkable.
Yea. Unworkable like “casual Fridays” at work. Unworkable like a Nick Canon joke.
This is kind of a genius. Nietzsche was able to undercut the sacred texts within the Abrahamic tradition, simply by saying it was unworkable.
Nietzsche was perhaps the first hipster. So, he may not have had the throw back Brewers’ jersey and the slightly bent trucker cap —the uniform of hipsters — but he was able to make God, his arch enemy, uncool, simply by saying that God was.
Wouldn’t that be cool to banish things like poverty and oppression from our reality, simply by saying they are passe?
But, you know, if it were cool, then it would be uncool.
