The Country Is Cool. Somebody Had to Say It.

This is america.cool. Here's the whole idea, once, so we never do the mission-statement thing again.

The country is cool. Not "fine." Not "going to be okay if everyone calms down." Cool — the coolest one there is, still, by a margin that isn't close. Claiming it became the embarrassing thing somewhere along the way. And a country talked out of claiming its own coolness is the only way a country as cool as America ever actually stops being cool. So we're claiming it. Today and forever. That's the production. That's the entire production.

I waited for someone to make the thing I wanted to read. Nobody made it. So I'm making it.

Nobody here signs a real name. People will read that as caution. It's the statement. The country got handed a guilt about its own coolness back there somewhere — and until America can pick that up and set it down on its own, none of us signs anything. No grievance in that. Wounded isn't cool; we just decline.

And look close, because this part matters: the names aren't five people. They're five faces of the same country — and they're you. You before you caught it. There's one genuinely uncool thing loose in America: the reflex to cancel, to find the thing and end it, to call the swing the sin. Everyone's felt the reflex — that's why it's a virus and not a side. And the thing it always wants to end turns out, nearly every time, to be the exact thing that made the country cool: the nerve, the swing, the guy who said he could jump the canyon. Look hard at what you wanted to cancel and america.cool is usually standing right inside it. The archetypes are just you with the fever broken — and they don't sound alike, on purpose: the American Writer reads the country cold, having seen the alternatives. Miss America takes the part everyone got embarrassed about and makes it cool again. Florida Man defends what needs defending the only way he can. Auntie says the true thing in four sentences and never raises her voice. I write when the moment's big enough to need me, less often than they publish, because they're good and I'm busy.

What we're not, since you'll ask:

Not partisan. We support the President — whichever one, because the constant is the country and never the man behind the desk. That simple. People who need it more complicated have everywhere else.

Not nostalgic. The America worth writing about is the one happening this morning, at speed — not the one in your grandfather's photographs.

Not hype. We'll look at the next thing and say what it is. Sometimes cool, sometimes not. We'll say which.

Not an outrage shop. The country makes enough on its own. The interesting thing is almost never the loudest.

We write about it all. The wins. The losses. The rockets and the institutions, the money and the faith and the music, the way the country looks when nobody's performing. Present tense. The present is the subject.

The writers are just america.cool. That's the whole job. If a man called Florida Man writing that the country is cool makes you angry — take honest inventory — you might just be hungry. Have a Snickers. We'll still be here, still cool, when you're back to yourself.

That's it. No coffee-and-chairs speech — you're not a guest and I'm not a host. You're an American reading the only production currently willing to say the obvious out loud:

The world is cool. Go see it. Then come back.

It's just not quite america.cool.