by Sarah Vowell
I was delighted to take a brief, poetic break from the tax breaks to sit there in Lincoln Center and ask, What is a president supposed to say? What should he sound like? Should he sound like Lincoln? We think we think so, forgetting Lincoln’s actual voice, which was reportedly about as squeaky as a six-year-old girl’s. Because his words were so eloquent, we imagine he had the stentorian boom of Gregory Peck. He did not. I personally suspect that Abraham Lincoln sounded exactly like me. Stereotypes die hard, and Americans have a deep desire for their president to sound, look, and act “presidential,” which is to say flawless, verging on bland.
In Al Gore’s first presidential run, in 1988, he knew so much about the greenhouse effect that one of his opponents accused him of “running for national scientist,” But in the beginning of George W. Bush’s term, I couldn’t help but wonder if he were running for national gym teacher. He should just go through life with a whistle around his neck. A couple of weeks into his administration, a gunman from Indiana took a shot at the White House. However, Bush was not in danger, because the would-be assassin assumed Bush was working in the middle of the workday. Bush was in the gym of the White House residence, exercising.
I immediately turned on CNN and started calling Stephen from the e-mail group, gurgling updates into the phone: Someone’s shooting at his office but he’s okay because he’s somewhere else on the StairMaster! Then, on March 30, 2001, the Associated Press reported, “Creating his own field of dreams, President Bush pledged Friday to help revitalize interest in the national pastime with regular T-ball games on the White House South Lawn. ‘We’ve got a pretty good-size backyard here,’ said the baseball team owner turned president.”
Kevin’s e-mail: “Maybe, if we’re lucky, W. will also plant a cornfield out by the outfield of his new White House diamond. Then maybe the ghosts of William Howard Taft and Grover Cleveland will emerge and fall on him.”
If Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter is correct, Bush’s jockish disdain for highbrow thought is the very origin of his White House bid. “In a 1998 New Yorker piece [about Al Gore],” Alter claims, “the vice president talked about the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French existentialist. Bush read the article, and later told friends it was one of the reasons he ran for president—to keep intellectual pretentiousness out of the White House.” In his campaign, Bush promised to restore honor and dignity to the White House, but the promise to keep intellectual pretentiousness out is one that is likely to be kept. I think the happiest moment of Bush’s presidency was the day he hosted his first T-ball game. According to The New York Times, “Mr. Bush laughed and laughed, and seemed particularly amused by the antics of a man in a furry chicken suit who put one baseball down the mouth of his costume and then dropped two from the rear.”
Adolescent nerds across the country must be shuddering now that a jock is in charge of the dreaded President’s Physical Fitness Exam. Anyone who thinks the president has no effect on an average person’s life should corner a teenage girl and ask her about the “flexed arm hang.” I mentioned the President’s Physical Fitness Exams to Kevin and, after supplying historical context—“Actually, you have Jack Kennedy to blame for them, who first publicized them with the help of the comic book Superman”—Kevin admitted, “The real humiliation for me was pull-ups. I could not for the life of me manage to pull my (then) seventy-pound body up over that bar, and instead would end up hanging there, grunting pitifully.”
My friend Doug, like most nerds, never got over high school. His nerd cred includes being able to name every Best Picture Oscar winner since 1950 off the top of his head, as well as maintaining a terrifyingly detailed recall of specific issues of X-Men comics. Doug is a writer and producer for the television program Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy, aside from being the smartest, funniest, most consistently pleasurable drama on television, uses nerds and explores nerdiness in a way that is both intricate and appealing. I bring it up because Al Gore could have learned something about being a public nerd from watching this show. If only he had ditched the professional politicos who fumbled his 2000 campaign and hired the Buffy creator Joss Whedon to tell him how to sustain credibility by making fun of himself.
Buffy tells the story of a teenage girl in California, the “chosen one” who was born to fight the forces of darkness and save the world. Buffy’s town hosts a lot of vampires and various extracurricular demons to keep her busy. Her high school was built on top of a vortex of evil, the Hellmouth. And whose wasn’t? The executive producer Joss Whedon once told an interviewer that he was intrigued by “the idea of telling horror stories about high school, since high school was pretty much one long horror story in my life.”
High school is the most appropriate metaphor for the 2000 presidential campaign, since high school is the most appropriate metaphor for life in a democratic republic. Because democracy is an idealistic attempt to make life fair. And while high school is the place where you read about the democratic ideal of fairness, it is also the place most of us learn how unfair life really is. Who you are now is informed by who you were then. And every nerd has an anecdote or two to tell about how Nerds versus Jocks is not just some epic mythological struggle but a pesky if normal way of life.
To clarify, playing sports or being a sports fan does not necessarily make person a jock per se. Great athletes are no different from great artists. To me, Reggie Miller shooting a perfect free throw is as beautiful to look at as the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin’s Egyptian Museum; watching John McEnroe stirred up the same feelings as listening to the Ramones, and the sportscaster Howard Cosell had one of the great American voices, along with Humphrey Bogart and Snoop Dogg. Also, there’s a certain kind of statistically minded sports fan that’s an actual subspecies of nerd. Not that they will admit it, as best lampooned in the Onion headline “Walking Sports Database Scorns Walking Sci-Fi Database.” When I talk about jocks, I’m talking about the sorts of sports enthusiasts that the writer and hockey fan Dave Bidini once described as “dull-witted, chick-baiting dickheads.”
When you use the word jock around a nerd, the nerd can put a face on it. For my twin sister, the face belongs to the football player who punched her in the jaw in tenth grade. For me, it’s a certain gym coach who, during the gym class in the swimming pool, noticed that I just kept walking to the back of the diving board line instead of jumping in the pool. I can’t swim. Rather than talking to me about it or spending ten minutes teaching me to swim, the coach blew his whistle and stopped the class. Seventy or so other kids watched him scream me out onto the diving board. He yelled—this is such a gross thing for a grown man to bark at a young girl—“Kneel down! Kneel down! Kneel down!” Trying to decide whether I was more afraid of him or of drowning was a real brainteaser. Finally, I just crumpled to my knees and rolled off into the water, flailing my arms until I made it to the side of the pool, gasping. (Two years later, I had the coach as a typing teacher. He taught typing like it was gym for fingers, yelping the command to hit the space bar as though our thumbs were doing push-ups. I like to think of it as real-life Revenge of the Nerds when he assigned the class to type a story and read it aloud and I typed up the swimming pool story and read it to my classmates.) The coach was your basic, cartoonish P.E. teacher fascist. And, as we all know, every democratic republic needs the fascists skulking in dark rooms—be they locker rooms or boardrooms—plotting to humiliate the good people. Even though we will crush their sticks and stones with the punishing blows of our avenging Microsoft Word 6.0.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is uniquely useful for nerd studies in general and the Gore problem in particular because it includes two nerd characters. Testing any hypothesis requires a control group. Here, the “before” nerd is Giles, Buffy’s “watcher”—her protector, teacher, and guide in the ways of demon fighting. He’s the school librarian and very, very British. When we meet Willow, Buffy’s best friend, she’s an A student, a tutor, and a computer whiz. During the show’s high school years, the library was the center of Bu
ffy and friends’ social universe. Vampire slaying requires an astonishing amount of research. And since Buffy is more of a kick-boxing Valley Girl, Willow handles the necessary Web searches while Giles always has his nose in a moldy old demonology book. Willow is nerd future; Giles is the ghost of nerd past.
Giles is often the butt of Buffy’s nerd jokes. When she accuses him of being no fun, he replies,
“I’ll have you know that I have very many relaxing hobbies.”
“Such as?”
“Well, I enjoy cross-referencing.”
She might as well have been taunting Al Gore. Once, Giles was talking to Buffy’s mother and bemoaning the girl’s lack of interest in history. “She lives very much in the now,” he says, “and, well, history, of course, is very much about the then.”
Doug the Buffy writer, talking about Giles, says, “He’ll be disdainful of these young Americans for not knowing this stuff. They should know this stuff, Buffy in particular. It’s her job, and it will save her life to know this, and she doesn’t half the time. She just doesn’t do the studying.”
In the show’s third season, a new Englishman named Wesley showed up. Wesley was even more uptight, even more English than Giles. I was talking to Doug about how the humor regarding the two Englishmen tends to revolve around the way they make no apology for knowing things. I asked him if it was intentional that the two fonts of adult knowledge were British.
“Yeah,” Doug says. “Originally, I wanted to make Wesley American. I wanted to base him on George Stephanopoulos. I wanted this obnoxious American know-it-all. And Joss [Whedon—Doug’s boss] said, ‘No, he has to be British.’ You could have gotten some laughs out of an obnoxious, go-go American watcher. But it is off. It doesn’t work. The Brits don’t apologize for being knowledgeable. In fact, they’re a little disdainful of you for not doing your homework. And in America, doing your homework is the most uncool thing in the world.”
American democracy is tough. When one of a culture’s guiding credos is that “all men are created equal,” any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself through mental excellence, is a nuisance. And anyone, especially a presidential candidate for crying out loud, who doesn’t accept this and start falling all over himself to beat everyone else to the punch line, can just go ahead and move to England. In England, even the archconservatives get to be obvious nerds; the Conservative Party’s 2001 candidate for prime minister was William Hague, whom Slate’s Michael Kinsley has described as a “right-wing dork.” “Nevertheless,” Kinsley wrote,
It speaks well of British politics—and the British electorate—that an odd duck like Hague should be leading the ticket of a major political party. It shows that the British still have a long way to go if they aspire to the shallowness and professionalization of American politics. It also shows a cultural tolerance for human diversity that is in some ways more valuable than the legally imposed racial consciousness that goes by the term diversity in this country.
In the presidential campaign, the way Gore tried to feign shallow and professional normalcy was by denying his innate nerdiness. Remember all the “alpha male” shenanigans, in which Gore hired a feminist who told him voters would think he was less of a wimp if he wore cowboy boots and khakis? If there’s one thing non-nerds hate more than a nerd, it’s a nerd pretending to be more virile than he is. Kevin thinks that Gore “should have just made a virtue out of being square. I remember thinking that about Dukakis, who came off very well in Massachusetts when he was just the nerdy guy who got things done. The minute he decided to get in the tank with the Snoopy headgear, he was done.”
So how could Gore have become more likable and yet remained true to his wonky self? By taking a few cues from the Willow character on Buffy. Willow is not a self-hating nerd. She is a self-deprecating nerd. While Gore, like Giles, is the butt of other people’s dork jokes, Willow, a postmodern nerd, peppers her cerebral monologues with one-liners that make light of her own book learning. For instance, substitute-teaching a computer science class she said, “For next time read the chapter on information grouping and binary coding. I bet you’ll think coding is pretty cool. If you find two-digit multi-stacked conversions and primary number clusters a big hoot.” See what she did there? She neither hid her knowledge nor annoyed anyone. She made knowing arcane specifics seem funny and fun.
When I was talking to Doug the Buffy writer about how Gore had missed out on the usefulness of the postmodern nerd’s self-deprecating impulse, I couldn’t put my finger on what to call it. But at the end of the conversation, I mentioned that I had just finished watching all the Revenge of the Nerds movies on videotape. (If you want to up the nerd ante, watch those films and take notes.)
Revenge of the Nerds II is the one where the nerd fraternity attends a frat convention in Florida and all the jock frats want to get rid of the nerds. The jocks dress up as Seminole Indians to try to scare the nerds away. One of the nerds, Poindexter, shouts some gibberish at the “Indians,” but nothing happens. He turns to his nerd friend and says, “I don’t think those guys are Indians. When I said ‘bite my crank’ in Seminole, no one responded.”
I told Doug, “I was sitting there taking notes and actually yelled at my television, ‘Hey, there’s no such language as Seminole! The Seminole speak two dialects—Creek and Miccosukee!’”
Doug reflects on this admission for a moment, then asks, “Did you notice that when you told me that story, you did a voice? See? You even did it to yourself. You used the nerd voice!”
The nerd voice. That’s what it should be called, that self-deprecating impulse that Gore lacks. Doug’s right. I apologized for being a nerd, even when talking privately to another nerd. It was organic, unconscious, I didn’t know I was doing it. According to Doug, that’s how he and the other Buffy writers fashion Willow’s nerd voice dialogue. He says there’s not “a lot of conscious thought behind it, like, ‘Let’s put in a disclaimer here.’ I think that’s just the way we talk. I think everyone on the staff is a recovering nerd. When you declare your genuine passion for something, you are so setting yourself up. You just automatically take the shot before anyone else does. It’s this preemptive mockery.”
While the preemptive mockery software is automatically included in most nerd brains under the age of forty, it still needs to be installed in Gore. Self-deprecation is not standard baby boomer operating procedure—they were the most aggressive self-aggrandizing generation of the twentieth century and aren’t particularly good at making fun of themselves.
Any politician tricky enough to get elected to the House, not to mention the vice presidency, must necessarily have the kind of postmodern mind which thinks simultaneously about both what he is saying and the way he is saying it. As a national Democrat, Gore has had to frame his arguments about, say, energy policy, remembering that his support base includes both the United Auto Workers and members of the Sierra Club. So he already has the cerebral capability required to give a proper name-heavy speech about the China conundrum followed by an icebreaking wisecrack about not going to the prom. It’s silly, demeaning, and time-consuming, for sure, but for a nerd, what part of driving a tank or pulling on cowboy boots is not?
Any person who wants any job, who knows he would be good at the job, knows he has to fake his way through the dumb job interview before he’s actually allowed to roll up his sleeves. I asked Doug what he thought would have happened in the campaign if, instead of donning khakis and cowboy boots and French-kissing his wife on TV, Gore had been truer to himself and said what he thought and knew and believed using the nerd voice. Doug didn’t hesitate: “Oh my God, he’d be president for life.”
I wish it were different. I wish that we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn’t have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his
party’s nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael’s “Two Sleepy People,” Johnny Cash’s “Five Feet High and Rising,” and “You Got the Silver” by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the history of the world—poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Secret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes.
Rosa Parks, C’est Moi
According to Reuters, on January 20, 2001 in Washington, the special guest at the Florida state inaugural ball was introduced by the country singer Larry Gatlin. He said, “In France it was Joan of Arc; in the Crimea it was Florence Nightingale; in the Deep South there was Rosa Parks; in India there was Mother Teresa, and in Florida there was Katherine Harris.”
I leave it to my Indian, Crimean, and French colleagues to determine how the Florida secretary of state is or is not similar to Teresa, Florence, or St. Joan. As for Rosa Parks, Katherine Harris can get in line. Because people around here can’t stop comparing themselves to Parks. To wit:
The mayor of Friendship Heights, Maryland, has proposed an outdoor smoking ban because, according to The Washington Post, citizens “with asthma or other illnesses ‘cannot have full access’ to areas where smokers are doing their evil deed. The mayor compares this horrific possibility to Rosa Parks being sent to the back of the bus.”