New Mission for Spy--Get Set for the Rebirth of the Cool

Could it be that cool is, at long last, uncool again?

Is such a paradox cool or un?

In a bold challenge not only to magazinedom, but all America, the January Spy throws down the gauntlet. While most of civilization seems ready to line up outside the David Letterman show in matching goatees and Steve McQueen shades, Spy has decided to point and make fun of cool.

Back in the ‘50s cool worked, says Spy’s unattributed “Great Expectations” column. Back then, cool meant dissent, to be cool was to tell the mainstream of that stuffy, smug, repressive era “we’re different because we don’t agree.”

In the ‘60s, though, cool “was leapfrogged by its grungier brother, hip, and throughout the ‘70s it fell flat on its face.”

When cool re-emerged in the ‘80s, it had changed, Spy says: “Ironically, what cool had most despised in the ‘50s--television, because it knew television would always be Official America’s most powerful weapon--it now embraced.”

Even Spy, when it launched in 1986, “made much of its admiration for Letterman and what it saw as his ironic attitude toward his medium.”

Cool humor was enough for awhile, Spy says. But “for real dissent, the effect of a culturewide fashion for the trivial has been chilling.”

Real dissent is truly ironic.

“Cool is a permafrost of passionless gullibility that holds the nation in its status quo. Cool is experience-free knowledge, all-knowing ignorance. Cool is a generation so conversationally challenged, so conditioned by one-way debates with a piece of furniture, that confronted by disagreement, it seeks to regulate what the other guy can and cannot say.”

Cool, Spy rants on heatedly, “makes reasoned discourse impossible, interpretation self-referential, art irrelevant, and the words and ideas that govern our polity incomprehensible.”

Fine points aside (for instance, Catharine MacKinnon, the coolest censorship buff around, is not of the generation derided here), this stance makes sense.

For a few years, Spy has been floundering, looking for a reason to live, the columnist says, adding that the magazine has found that raison d’ etre in a new mission: becoming the voice of true dissent for the ‘90s.

So, starting this Spring, a “redesigned, renovated and refurbished” Spy will assume the job of (to paraphrase) ridiculing and exposing the fatuous verities of what the magazine sees as an arrogant new establishment defined by the Clinton Administration, media conglomerates and the Hollywood celebritocracy.

The defrosting has already begun. This issue includes Spy’s “100 Worst Places, People and Things of 1993.”

The top two losers are: 1) Jerry Seinfeld, and 2) The Clintons (“Overcomes Vietnam syndrome once and for all by substituting even more debilitating Somalia-Bosnia-Haiti syndrome”).

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Required Reading: Mimi Schwartz clearly had good intentions when she set out to write about Vidor, the all-white Texas town that has become a symbol of the South’s lingering racism and justice’s final challenge.

In the December Texas Monthly, Schwartz shows that the media overestimated Vidor’s menace. She’s also on target suggesting that the problems created by the bigots who do live there aren’t too different than those created by Los Angeles’ or New York’s bigots. And she’s surely right in saying that the attempts to integrate Vidor would have been more successful if the federal government had truly been committed.

Ultimately, though, her analysis never gels. Schwartz says that “the meaning of ‘integration’ has changed,” and that the government failed in its efforts to desegregate Vidor, in part because it didn’t attempt to teach the impoverished blacks it sent there “the most rudimentary rules of our society.”

But Schwartz’s point--that the government must educate the “deprived class” in question--is moot, meaningless, preposterous even, in light of the abject ignorance of the white racists who drove these would-be pioneers out.

* When former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates retired, he vowed not to do anything that isn’t fun. Serving as “guest designer” for a new computer game called Quest 4: Open Season has been a lot of fun, the Chief says in a Q and A in the December Computer Gaming World magazine. As Gates apparently sees it, the only drag about the role-playing action game is its reporter character.

“She’s a composite of all your worst nightmares?” the interviewer asks.

Gates, photographed in a bright Hawaiian shirt and jeans, replies, “You’ve got it.”

* On July 31, 1987, police in Florida removed 4-month-old “Baby M” from the home of her biological mother, Mary Beth Whitehead. Authorities handed the infant over to William Stern, the father by artificial insemination, and his wife Elizabeth--the couple to whom Whitehead had agreed to give the baby before having a change of heart.

The January Redbook catches up with Baby M--now called Sassy--during a court-mandated visit with Whitehead and her five other kids. Susan Squire’s article is an intimate, unflinching portrait of an understandably possessive, envious mother and her unusual family. Sassy comes across as adorable and deeply confused.

“It’s weird,” the girl whispers to the reporter, “having two moms.”

* Maureen Orth’s “Nightmare in Neverland,” in the January Vanity Fair, is, as advertised, “the definitive account of (Michael) Jackson’s fall.” Orth weaves her exhaustive research into a well-told, morbidly fascinating yarn.

Still, as Orth’s many references to the Globe, the National Enquirer, Geraldo, “Hard Copy” and Liz Smith attests, the story is still, by and large, just glitzy gossip.

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New on Newsstands: Spider, the Magazine for Children (for ages 6 and up) nestles into a niche between Carus Publishing Company’s other excellent kids’ magazines: Ladybug (2 and up) and Cricket (9 and up).

Like those, Spider gives children the chance to escape each month into a warm and inviting (but never treacly) realm of thoughtfully conceived games, and beautifully illustrated and well-written stories, poems and songs. ($29.97 a year, Box 639, Mount Morris, Ill. 61054-0639)

* Before readers get up too much speed down that new virtually real, digitalized, interactive, multimedia, info superhighway, they may want to check a guidebook.

That’s what Electronic Entertainment claims to be. The premiere issue suggests that it will do its job.

“The new industry obviously needs a watchdog,” says editor-in-chief Gina Smith, formerly a police reporter in Miami. “If you don’t believe it, read the papers. Or the business mags. Or the trade pubs. These days, you can’t pick one up without wading through some breathless article chock full of the hot new buzzwords . . . “

This cool (as in totally hot) new magazine offers apparently honest reviews of software and hardware, news on the so-called convergence industries, and plenty of specialized features. In the Party Girl department, for instance, an anonymous computerphile goes underground to parties frequented by the techie crowd. Readers will thrill to eavesdrop on conversations such as this, in which a guest quips to Microsoft founder Bill Gates: “Hah! The Newton is the 3DO of PDAs!”

($24.95 a year, Infotainment World Inc., 951 Mariner’s Island Blvd. Ste 700, San Mateo, Calif., 94404)