With
President-elect Barack
Obama set to take office in
just
over a month, everyone is wondering whether this heralds the
end of
racism. Here at The
1585, my answer
is… um… Okay, sure, it means
the
end of racism.
Unless you count as
racist the
record numbers of imbeciles all
over the country openly threatening to kill him because he’s
Black, some of
whom are schoolchildren.And
it kind of
seems like, you know, you should probably count those people.
So, end of racism?Not
so much, no.But
there is another
marginalized group to which
Barack Obama belongs and, though this issue has certainly been
discussed less
than has race in conjunction with the election, society’s
view of this other
group may be undergoing an even more radical shift.The
dawning of the Age of Obama just might
mean the end of that other
n-word: the end of the concept of
the Nerd.
So,
wait, you’re
thinking now, this
is just another
“Obama
is a Nerd” essay? Didn’t
I already
read like, three dozen of
those the day after
the election? There
are practically more
essays
about Obama being a Nerd on the web than there are video clips of
British girls
taking showers with their pantyhose on. Why do we need
another? But this isn’t
just another“Obama Is A Nerd” essay;
it’s the only
Obama
Is A Nerd essay
you'll ever need — i.e.,
no less than you have come to expect
from the Genius Factory that is The 1585.
Admit
it:
You have
never seen this picture before in your life. It
has not been on
one single
other person’s blog, not ever.
I know you already
know that
Obama collected Spider-Man
comics, and that he once greeted Leonard Nimoy with the Vulcan hand
sign, and
that some dudes on his transition team play Warcraft or something.But
these things are
peripheral.Really,
they say as much about Obama’s age* as
they do about his nerdiness.And
in any
case, the extent to which Americans are willing to vote for someone who
likes
science-fiction stuff is not the main issue when it comes to how Nerds
are
thought of or treated.This
issue is the
extent to which Americans are willing to vote for someone who is
openly,
unapologetically smarter than they are.
*(Which
raises the totally separate question:Is
Obama a member of
Generation X?According
to the definition given by Generation
X
author Douglas Coupland — Americans
born under JFK, LBJ, and Nixon — Obama is
a member of Generation X, by just under six months.But
according to the “were still in your
20s when Nevermind
was
released” upper
limit, Obama misses by seven weeks.)
Now, we’ve had
smart
presidents before, of course.Most
presidents, really, have been
more-or-less smart, if not necessarily geniuses.But
the ones with noticeably high IQs have
always been obliged to temper this fact with something.Smart
Democrats have had the best luck with
“folksy
bullshit,” “being from the South,” or
“being cute” (in Bill Clinton’s case,
all three), whereas smart Republicans utilized the strategy of
deploying
surrogates to pre-emptively demonize all other Smart People as
disingenuous
traitors and/or pussies, thereby making themselves seem like
trustworthy
regular guys and
leaving them the
only dude in sight with skills — a strategy later adopted by
the Sith.
"Spiro,
go to the
Jedi Temple... Do
what must be
done."
Obama,
then, is not so much
notable for being smart as he is
notable for — somehow — not needing to do anything to obscure
the fact that he is smart in
order to win.
Now,
this is inextricably tied up with the
race factor for not one, but two reasons. First
of all, as a Black man, Obama didn’t
really have the option of
pretending not to be smart: the avowed, conscious racism of
the far-Right aside,
even the unintentional subconscious racism of potential Obama
supporters
necessitated his taking every opportunity to demonstrate that, hey,
this is one
smart guy here.
When
a Bill Clinton
plays the aw-shucks card, deep down people know it’s a
put-on, but the same
would not necessarily be true if a person of color acted like
that.
But
this only explains why
Obama had to
come out as a Smart
Person, not why
it worked.
It worked
because,
as it turns out, the counterspells the Right normally uses against
Smart People
don’t really work as well on a Black guy.The Republicans have gotten used to
being able to win
simply by throwing the issues out the window and going “the
other guy’s a fag.”Not
literally gay,
necessarily, but a “fag” in the Junior High sense
of too
intellectual and not macho enough.Indeed,
to a lot of the country, the first
thing basically automatically
means
the second.In
fact, with the exception
of Carter ousting Ford (who, being essentially Nixon’s skid
mark, was doomed)
in 1976, this is the first election in
living memory in which the less
macho guy has won.
Of course, this
begs the
question of what we mean by macho.I’m
inclined to
think that either John
Kerry or Al Gore could
technically have beaten George W. Bush in a fight (they are both bigger
than
him, and are both combat veterans).But,
as we found out in those two elections, macho
doesn’t just mean who would win in a fight.Bush
was widely perceived as the “tough
guy” in both elections, despite
not being even close to being the tougher guy in
any demonstrable literal
sense of the term.
We have a
metaphysical
sense of
who is supposed to, quote, win
a fight,
unquote, that does not
always correspond to the facts of who would actually win a fight.When
the guy who is
“supposed to” win loses,
people inevitably find a way to say that the other guy did something
“cheap,” even
if it was a totally fair fight — and the guy who is
“supposed to” win is almost
always simply the dumber
guy.
Imagine, for
example,
that Bill
Gates hired some top-notch
karate masters to teach him karate, and stuck with it until he became a
black
belt.It would
thereafter be the case
that Bill Gates would be able to beat the vast majority of people in a
fight — and yet, he would still be considered less macho than
the average
person.He would
still not be the guy
who is “supposed to” win.
Although this is,
when
you cast
a spotlight on it, clearly
unfair, it is actually a consequence of our American obsession with
fairness.We want
people to be equal,
and for people to be equal, things have to even out.The
smart guy gets to be smart but not tough,
and the tough guy gets to be tough but not smart.It’s
the same reason people insist on
continuing to believe that beautiful women are dumb, despite the fact
that many
exceptionally intelligent women are also quite attractive, and the vast
majority of stupid women are also ugly.
Consciously, as
good
Americans
we hate stereotypes
because we want
every individual to be treated fairly
— but
subconsciously, we need
our
stereotypes in order to
continue being able to see life
itself as fair.
Of course, America
has not always been so averse to inequality.In
our shameful past, a combination of racist hatred
and the traditional
Western mind/body division resulted in a conceptualization of Blacks as
unintellectual and “tough” to the point of being
animalistic.And
even in this more enlightened age, many
perfectly well-intentioned white Americans who genuinely do not hate
anybody will still be surprised
despite themselves when a Black man is
“well-spoken,” and may deep down believe
that he is probably at least a little
bit better at sports or something. Call
it racism-lite.
And ironically,
despite
all the
concern that conscious
racism would lose the election for Barack Obama, it may well have been
subconscious racism-lite that won
it
for him.
Yes, many McCain
supporters
were driven by overt, conscious
racism, and they failed.But
think about
it:Obama is a
skinny ivy-leaguer who
has never served in the military.In
a
completely non-racist society, the Republicans could have blown him out
of the
water with the same game plan they used against George McGovern or
Michael
Dukakis (assuming, of course, that this hypothetical non-racist society
was still
stupid enough to fall for
all that other
crap, which seems
unlikely).Had race
been a non-issue, the Republicans
could simply have called him a Nerd, which has always
worked for them in the past.But
it couldn’t work this time.
“A Nerd?!,”
the
American public would have asked, confusedly.“Umm…I
don’t know whether you
noticed, but he’s a Black
Guy.”
In short,
stereotypes
about
Blacks and stereotypes about Nerds ended up canceling
each
other out and getting a Smart
Black Guy elected President of
the United
States.Which
is awesome.And
along the
way, said Smart Black Guy was able to get away with saying awesome
stuff like
the following:
“I’m
not
against all wars, I’m against dumb wars.”
“The
other
thing is,
they’re making fun of a step that every
expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by three to
four
percent. It’s
like these guys take pride
in being ignorant. They
think it’s funny
that they’re making fun of something that is actually
true.
They need to do their
homework.”
“So
when Brian
Williams is asking me about a personal thing
you’ve done, and I say, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of
trees.’
And
he says, ‘I’m talking about
personal.’
What
I’m thinking in my head
is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve
global warming because I fucking
changed light bulbs in my house. It’s
because of something collective.’”
If
a white guy
said those
things, he’d be a Nerd to End All
Nerds. When Obama
made that crack about
homework, it was barely even a metaphor:
He actually
pretty much meant actual
homework!
About science!
Obama
has
come closer than
any A-list
politico in recent memory to actually coming right out and saying
“Conservatives
are conservatives because they’re
stupid.” And yet, he is also the coolest
politician since Bobby Kennedy. How
the
hell does he do
that?
The answer is
simple: it
is easier for African-Americans
to get away with making fun of stupid people than it is for white Nerds.And this
makes perfect sense.
Black people hate
stupid
people
because stupid people have enslaved
them, lynched them, dragged their preadolescent children to death
behind cars
for no reason, made treating them this way the basis
for the
economy of half of the planet for 500 years, and said it was all fine
because
supposedly their sweat smelled different or something.Conversely,
white Nerds hate stupid people
because when we were 14 they used to throw our hats on the roof.
Frankly, Black
people’s reason is better.
Now, in the Black
community, it
is customary to say
“ignorant” rather than “stupid.”And
technically, I guess, ignorance is
what we’re really talking about when we
make fun of stupid people.But
we say stupid
anyway
because… well, it’s more
fun, because it hurts more.Many
assholes
don’t really mind being called ignorant.They
kind of get off on
it, actually.
Blacks were denied
equal
access
to education for so long
that they were not in a position to use an insult that connoted the
simple
absence of intellectual training — so they had to make use of a
term that sort
of meant
“stupid” but also implied
a lack of fundamental decency.
In the
tire-pressure
speech,
Obama used the traditional
Black term — "ignorant"— but
Obama is
educated to the point of being a Nerd in the modern sense, and when he
says it, the term has much more in common with dumbass
than bad person.He
can mean
it the way Nerds mean it, but people will still hear
it the Black way and not call him on it.For
this reason, Obama is the ultimate
Nerd — he’s like a vampire who’s
immune to crosses and garlic and can come out in the daytime.
Of course, the
second I
started
implying that there’s no
such thing as Black Nerds, a bunch of you were probably ready to go
“What about
Urkel?”But
if you think about it, Urkel
actually kind of proves my point — i.e., that’s
how nerdy you have to be to count as a Nerd if you’re Black,
and no-one is
actually that nerdy in real life.
It’s not like
Urkel
was a nerd simply because he was
smart.As I recall,
Whatsherface the
main girl on that show was also
supposed to be smart — she just didn’t wear rainbow
socks jacked up to her
eyeballs and couldn’t build robots and shit.But
by the standards of middle-class suburban Anglo
culture, she would
have been a nerd too.By
the standards
of middle-class suburban Anglo culture, pretty much everyone
who has ever read a book is a
Nerd.Nerds in a
suburban
Anglo school are like
slaves in ancient Sparta
— they
are considered
inferior, but comprise like 90% of the population.So
basically what you have in a white high
school is about eleven people sitting at one table considering the
entire rest
of the school inferior.
Seriously?I
used to
hate the popular kids, but when I think back on how simultaneously
fucking
insane and
completely unquestioned
this system was, now I just think they must have been geniuses.How
the hell else could
they have
successfully persuaded a mass of people who outnumbered them like
15-to-1 to
allow them to treat them this way?Only
in a demographic with no real problems could people be convinced that
this
makes sense.
In a culture where
people actually
have real problems, studying
isn’t enough to make
someone a pariah.It
is only common sense that you study,
because you need to in order to get the fuck out of where you live.On
the other hand, in a
stratum of society
where your parents will be able to bail your ass out of virtually
anything you
could possibly do short of hold a major American city hostage with a
giant
laser, anyone who studies must simply have nothing better to
do — if they did,
then they would do that instead, because there couldn’t
possibly be any
consequences for it.
Both rich kids and
poor
kids
commit crimes, but the crimes
poor kids commit tend towards the pragmatic — they usually
involve, you know,
making money somehow.If
a poor kid
steals something, it’s probably worth something. Rich
suburban kids, however,
seem to go out of
their way to devise the least
pragmatic
crimes humanly possible.When
a carload
of white kids drives around all night smashing mailboxes with a
baseball bat
out the car window, for example, there is no conceivable way for this
to result
in profit. It’s not like it’s a video game
and the mailboxes make a high-pitched ping
and turn into spinning
gold
coins when you smash them.If
you are a
Caucasian male who grew up in the suburbs, odds are that by the time
you
graduated high school you had made off with enough odds and ends from
Taco Bell to
pretty
much assemble your own entire Taco Bell in your room (or,
alternately,
in “your friend’s back woods”), but how
often did you steal anything that was
actually, you know, worth
any money?
When suburban kids want to break the law, they have to invent crimes.
But as the
younger
American
generations replace the older
and the culture becomes increasingly post-racial, all the distinctions
just
highlighted may not be around much longer. To
people who are old enough to remember the
Challenger explosion or to have been
traumatized by the fact that
they never aired Part Two of the finale of ALF, Nerdism
exists, and it is a white thing. But
the Millennials barely know what race is
(granted, the Millennials
barely know what anything
is, but
the
fact remains).
As
Black culture and
white culture slowly become simply culture, what will happen to the
Nerd?
Will Black
culture cure white culture of
Nerdism, or will white culture infect Black culture with it?
My guess is that
suburban
Anglo culture losing its
insularity will be a big help, but it also appears to us as if
white America is
already tending in a post-Nerdist direction anyway.It
is with very cautious optimism that we
suggest that America
may be on the verge of a new Golden Age for Smart People, of which
Obama
himself is as much a symptom as a cause.
I've discussed
in an
earlier essay how it almost
became cool to be smart in the
early ’90s, but the sensitive-intellectual thrust of youth
culture was checked
by the suicide of Kurt Cobain, and eventually arrested altogether due
to its
being associated with Academic P.C. (just as, in the late
’60s, bourgeois
backlash against youth counterculture and bourgeois backlash against
the civil
rights movement quickly melded into the same generalized backlash).By
the dawning of the new
millennium, it was
cooler to like mindless dance music than rock, reality shows were
outcompeting
scripted shows faster than the oaks do the maples in that stupid Rush
song, and
George W. Bush had been (sort of) elected president.
And all that shit
might
have
been no coincidence.Youth
culture had been betrayed by a genius,
the political world had been betrayed by a “slick”
president, and the P.C. intelligentsia,
led by academic feminism, was decrying the entertainment world and its
too-thin
actresses even as the bourgeoisie was getting fed up with both the
entertainment world and
the P.C.
intelligentsia
themselves.
Ergo,
the apotheosis of the
“regular guy.”
Apotheoses of the
regular guy
have happened before, of
course. That’s why, even though they appear to have
little else in common, Jimmy
Carter coincided with Punk.And
although
“regular” people may seem like a good idea at the
time, they tend either to
turn out not to have any idea what they’re doing (Carter,
Bush) or just get
boring and repetitive real fast (punk, reality shows).
Thus, the same
pattern
happens
again backwards (conservative
adept schemer replaced by liberal inept Christian replaced by
conservative
soaring-rhetoric guy… liberal adept schemer replaced by
conservative inept
Christian replaced by liberal soaring-rhetoric guy), and Obama stands
poised to
become the liberal Reagan.This
means
it’s about to become okay for things to become
“big” again — but since Obama is
the liberal
Reagan, it’s
gonna be big
brains instead of big business, buildings, and hair.
Not that Obama caused
this, although his example will certainly help it along.Obama
is just the most
potent symbol of the
fact that America
has finally become sick of idiots.Near the beginning of Bush’s presidency, the
most popular shows on TV
showcased morons falling drunkenly into pools, marrying midgets, and
eating
horse rectum.By
the end of Bush’s
presidency, the most popular show on TV was about a guy who limps
around
calling people stupid.
…and
it’s
about time, too.
By
the end of the Bush
era, America
didn’t just want smart people to come back — we
wanted smart people to come back and
be dicks
to us.
We wanted to
be punished
for electing that fool
twice.
Barack Obama
is a damn smart guy, but he is
also a nice
smart guy.
The tire-pressure and
light-bulb cracks are
more aggressively smart than past politicians have been able to get
away with,
but still pale in comparison to what is dished out on House
every week, and House
is a big giant hit, even among people who aren't smart.
Sure, there have
been
uncommonly smart characters on TV
before: Columbo, for example, a variation on the Sherlock
Holmes template, just
as House is.But
Columbo was a lovable,
unassuming schlub, not a dick (okay, he was a dick in the sense that dick
is slang for detective, but you
know what we mean).In
any case, what
types of character can get away with being uncommonly smart provides us
with an
insight: people want
doctors and
detectives to be smart, because jealousy goes out the window when you
desperately need someone to figure out why you’re sweating
blood or who
murdered the famous cellist.These
smart people are seen as necessary
smart people.
In the cases of
smart
people
who do things that people don’t
necessarily want them to do, like
correct their grammar or prove that their religion is stupid,
it’s a different
story.These smart
people are also necessary,
but are
not seen as such, because they are not immediately
necessary.
So which type of
smart
person
is a smart president
seen as?Logically,
he should be
seen as the necessary
kind, since the president makes decisions of immediate consequence
on a daily
basis.But the
conservative makeover of
the president into an ideological symbol — a figure who embodies
the character
of the people, in
the manner of a classical
European monarch — means he risks being seen as the second.The
Symbolic President
doesn’t necessarily need
to be smart, just to get
photographed doing “normal” things a
lot. So a smart first-term president who
wants to become a smart second-term president needs the country to see
him as
the guy who figures out why they’re sweating blood, not the
guy who corrects
their grammar.
But this
shouldn’t be
too hard to do.Thanks
to stupid people, there actually are
a bunch of problems right now that we actually do
need a smart person to start fixing right away.The
trick will be keeping up the image of smart
people even when we’re no longer in a shitload of immediate
trouble.Is it
inevitable that the pendulum will swing
back the other way?Perhaps
not.Throughout
most of history, smart people have
been at least a little bit cool (even if, as Bertrand Russell
pointed out, we
are usually not as cool as bullshit mystics).It
was only in the last half of the 20th
Century that smart
people started to be downright openly despised.
And Obama has a
shot at
closing
the door on that aberration
for good.
Because it’s
not just that Obama is both
cool and
smart. That
has been accomplished before, from time to time.Clinton
was both cool and smart, and so was JFK.But
with Obama, it is much more the
case that he is cool because
he is smart.When
Obama fans want to see
him do something cool,
we
don’t mean
bang Marilyn Monroe or play the saxophone; we mean disprove
a Republican talking point in an efficient, accessible manner.
This might not be
that surprising if we saw Obama as
fundamentally a cool guy who later got smart.But
we don’t.We see
him very
much as having been smart the whole time, which has not been the case
with
other cool/smart presidents.Try
to
imagine JFK in college, and you picture him doing kegstands and
organizing
pantyraids.With Clinton,
you know
he got good grades, but it
still seems correct
somehow to
picture him sliding by on charm, or even changing shit over a computer,
Ferris Bueller style.Obama
you picture
studying his ass off.And
yet he is cool not despite
this, but because
of it.
Plus he’s
married to the hottest First Lady
since Jackie
Kennedy, and landed her before he was a State Senator or even had any
money,
just by being an earnest, intense, fascinating guy, even though she
reportedly
wasn’t interested in him at first…. which makes
him less the Black John Kennedy
than the Black John Cusack.
"As
your President,
I will not sell anything,
buy anything, or
process anything..."
As
a
biracial
nice-intellectual liberal-Christian cool nerd, Obama is in a position
not
to win
the Culture War, but simply
to make it
go
away, like
Henry VII
uniting
the houses of York and Lancaster. Watch for Sarah Palin as
the
figurehead of a
decreasingly relevant minority who want the War to continue, a Bonnie
Prince
Charlie figure inciting pointless delusional government-in-exile
skirmishes
from her remote northern lair…*.
*(I
realize that was 300 years
later.They are two
separate analogies.)
The
de-insularizing
of
Anglo culture will help close the
book on the Culture War (seeing as how it was only ever really the white
Culture War anyway).The
concept of the Nerd
is
fading away.Religiosity
is becoming less literal and less
automatically associated with far-Right politics.The
ascendancy of nonwhite sexy pop stars
like Beyoncé and Rihanna is making it less politically
problematic to be a sexy
pop star.It is
going to become
increasingly difficult for the traditional Right-wing side of the
Culture War
to avoid being explicitly associated with white xenophobia, if not
actual
out-and-out white supremacism.It’s
entirely possible that Sarah Palin will soon post a YouTube video of
her
crashing through somebody’s fence.
And it’s
finally
starting to be scripted shows that are
outcompeting reality shows faster than the oaks do the maples in the
stupid
Rush song — which makes a lot more sense, since in the actual
stupid Rush song
it’s the oaks that represent exceptional people and the
maples that represent resentful
normal people.And
if you noticed that
and were ready to complain about it the first time we used the joke,
what’s
wrong with you?Rush
sucks.Why do you
know so much about what their
terrible songs mean?