Hipsters Mock the Poor

American culture is weird.

Thanksgiving is a perfect example. Put aside all the token rhetoric about gratitude and think about the mainstream reality: a) An already morbidly obese and diabetic population rush to buy busloads of meat, etc. using credit cards that will later bankrupt them, b) then spend more money they don't have in order to watch movies that holiday night meant to advertise a lifestyle they can't afford, then c) wake the next day to march in droves to Best Buy, etc. to purchase refrigerators to pack away whatever their traumatized digestive systems can't process. Mixed in with this is also an amusing tip of the hat to the virtues of putting in time at the local soup kitchen.

American culture is weird. Think of children in elementary schools making construction paper feathered head dresses to celebrate the holiday. Think of white kids mimicking their fantasies about American black culture. Think of the website Hipster is the New Homeless. This is exactly what it sounds like: a website devoted to comparing the voluntary fashion trends in Williamsburg or the Mission to the involuntary realities of homelessness. Super bizarre-o.

Hold up, Patty Protest. Before you freak out about the tastelessness and insensitivity of this website, remember a phrase oft-appropriated from Ice-T: don't hate the playa, hate the game. It's easy to react a la knee-jerk and condemn the website itself. But spend a few minutes with it. What you'll find isn't so much a collection that renders heroic or even credible an upper class impulse to mimic/mock the very people it rejects. It's documentation of weird America. So forget about the website for just a moment.

Fault lies with hipster culture itself. The word hipster used to imply a declawing of dominant commercial culture through satire, mockery, whatever. But even that sarcasm was swallowed by malls and movies years ago. Now hipster, at best, is code for connoisseurship. It's what you buy. What's being sold, in this case, is the sublimation of guilt about homelessness into fake irony. But there's nothing ironic about it.

It's just America at it's weirdest, appropriation at it's most repulsive. So tell your friends to put on a clean shirt.

Image: LA Times