I WAS GLAD to provide a short quote for Joel Stein’s recent piece on the “Urkel Effect,” wherein he confesses his fear that, no matter what anyone tells the polls, a great number of Americans simply will not be able to bring themselves to vote for the nerd.
I FELT HE COULD NOT BE MORE WRONG, and said so in my typically longwinded (and atypically UNCAPPED) fashion.
My rant was far more than he could use, and I trust many will disagree with it passionately, for we are on the Internet, and that is our job. BUT HERE IT IS, all the same, for what else is there to say today?
Dear Joel:
I am not a nerd. I am a geek. The former is a subset of the latter, but don’t be concerned if you don’t know the difference. You will learn it all when the reeducation begins.
Far more than red vs. blue, or “real America” vs. Massachusetts, geeks vs. jocks is the culture war that defines our times.
Palin’s winking attacks on intellect, science, and fruit flies represent pure jockdom: a suspicion of complexity and egg-headedness, a rejection of credentials and education in favor one’s own personal gut instinct, and the conviction that, in the last quarter, hard realities may be denied, and a come-from-behind victory may be magically conjured through inspiring cliches.
There is lots to be admired about jockdom: often the best decisions come from the gut; and some of history’s worst crimes have been founded on the impersonality of science and pseudoscience.
But I do not believe that people will reject Obama due to his geek signifiers: his gangly frame, goofball ears, and har-dee-har-har insistence that we must live in the world that EXISTS, not in the world we WISH existed (on the left or the right.)
Rather, I think after 8 years of jock-like bluster and “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” reality-denial, Obama’s pragmatism and technician’s calm seems extra attractive.
But even if Obama loses, and this may well happen, I believe jockdom, which was rightly the dominant mode of being American back when we used our hands and brawn to fight and farm and build things, is necessarily on the wane.
The world is now driven by knowledge economies. Certainly China and India and Dubai do not make “BIG BANG THEORY” sitcoms marginalizing THEIR geeks and engineers.
(Unless they actually do, in which case: awesome).
Whatever you may think of the above, PREPARE TO VOTE.
And also, if China really does make a version of BIG BANG THEORY, I need to see video ASAP.
That is all.