In the movie Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation, Harold, the nephew of the hero from the first film in the series, arrives at his uncle’s alma mater, Adams College. Thanks to Uncle Lewis’s crusade for nerd rights, the previously jock-ruled campus has now turned the gym into a computer science center. There are cheerleaders, but these cheerleaders chant, “E! Equals! M! C! Squared!” Harold tells his friend, “Adams College is one of the first schools in the country to treat nerds with respect. It’s the Promised Land. Kind of like a nerd Israel.”
Ever since I started opening my morning e-mail to find two or ten or twenty postings from an e-mail group devoted to tracking the 2000 presidential election, that’s how I have come to regard the Internet. The Internet is the nerd Israel, a place to speak and listen to spectacularly specific concerns. According to a sex advice columnist I know, whenever he receives a letter from a lonely fetishist who wants to get in touch with others who, say, also enjoy biting the heads off of dolls, all my friend has to do to cheer up the advice seeker is type the words “biting off doll heads” into a search engine and have five Web links to other doll head biters appear straightaway.
The inherent specificity of the Internet made it the perfect forum in which to discuss the 2000 presidential campaign and postelection bedlam. From Bush and Gore haggling over pennies for senior citizens’ prescription drug costs before the election to Bush and Gore haggling over a few hundred votes in the state of Florida after the election, it was a year of minutiae. So what better way to evaluate those events than poring over statistics with your egghead friends? Especially Paul, our doting numbers cruncher. Interpreting polling data about the public’s perception of the legitimacy of Bush’s presidency, he wrote, “So assuming that those 39 percent of respondents all voted against him, that means that of the 53 percent of Americans who opposed him, three-quarters believe that he stole the election, and that his presidency is illegitimate.” I have no idea if that’s true because I’m not sure what it means.
The political e-mail group might be the all-time nerdiest thing I’ve been involved in, and I say that as a person who has been involved in public radio and marching band. All of us were Al Gore supporters of varying levels of enthusiasm—a bunch of nerds rooting for a nerd. Joel, a group member from Brooklyn, describes it as “this weird bastion of totally out of touch liberalism.” A typical message about a group member’s Saturday night begins, “Late Saturday evening, I finished reading about Inauguration Day in The Washington Post and the L.A. Times and ABC News on-line and MSNBC online….”
A few of us went down to Washington to watch the inauguration. Jack, a Connecticut father of two, drove down in his titanic dad van, setting off from his house in New Haven, picking up Deirdre and Paul in Milford, and stopping for Kevin and me in New York. We’re all friends, but this trip isn’t an act of friendship so much as the culmination of a laborious process.
On the eve of our road trip to the inauguration, I wasn’t sure I was going. It promised to be depressing. The forecast called for rain. But Kevin’s e-mail convinced me. A novelist given to grandiose electronic orations, Kevin is the group’s dinosaur, an old-school, Roosevelt-style Democrat out of fashion enough to go on and on about the fate of the poor, the unlucky, and the young. His e-mails are grand WPA murals commemorating the ordinary yearning to live and work in an honest, earthy republic. More than anyone I know, Kevin would make the best president. At the same time, he’s the least electable. He’s the biggest hothead in the group, which is saying something. We are not subtle people.
Kevin implores us to drive down to the inauguration “to be able to say to those of our children’s grandchildren’s generation that at least we were not willing to let American democracy—to let America—die without standing up and being counted.” No pressure. He continues, “This is the real crucible of being a true American now—to stand up for what we believe in without illusions, without any real hope that we will be able to change anything. There will be no great, new third party to rescue us; no grassroots revival of the Democratic Party. All there is—is us, willing to stand up and say no.”
He actually talks like that. In January 2001, it was hard to be a patriot without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.
Before joining the e-mail group, I had always thought of citizenship as a duty. For the group, citizenship became a sort of hobby. Some days it was a part-time job. The discussion of current events would follow some historical tangent, such as whether or not the early Clinton administration should have honored the promised middle-class tax cut instead of going for deficit reduction in 1993, and we would bicker about the findings of former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and blah, blah, Alan Greenspan, and the next morning I would wake up to find that in the middle of the night my friend Stephen had called me a “deficit hawk,” which, in his vocabulary is a synonym for “Republican.”
The best part about being a nerd within a community of nerds is the insularity—it’s cozy, familial, come as you are. In a discussion board on the Web site Slashdot.org about Rushmore, a film with a nerdy teen protagonist, one anonymous participant pinpointed the value of taking part in detail-oriented zealotry:
Geeks tend to be focused on very narrow fields of endeavor. The modern geek has been generally dismissed by society because their passions are viewed as trivial by those people who “see the big picture.” Geeks understand that the big picture is pixilated and their high level of contribution in small areas grows the picture. They don’t need to see what everyone else is doing to make their part better.
Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know. For me, the spark that turns an acquaintance into a friend has usually been kindled by some shared enthusiasm like detective novels or Ulysses S. Grant. As a kid, I never knew what to say to anyone. It was only as a teenage musician that I improved my people chops. I learned how to talk to others by talking about music. At fifteen, I couldn’t say two words about the weather or how I was doing, but I could come up with a paragraph or two about the album Charlie Parker with Strings. In high school, I made the first real friends I ever had because one of them came up to me at lunch and started talking about the Cure.
I have fond feelings for the people in the e-mail group. “A nice sense of community during wartime,” the low-key Paul says about the group’s exchanges during the postelection period of vote-counting-in-which-votes-weren’t-counted. Kevin amps up Paul’s wartime comparison by identifying with the Free French circa 1940, calling us “rudderless, leaderless, confused, and bitter.” While I find it flattering that Kevin would equate our computerized griping with battling Nazi collaborators, I don’t really feel like the French Resistance for two reasons—they looked cool and, with a soupçon of help, they prevailed.
Campaign 2000 was what a mail-order catalog might call a real conversation piece. Thanks to the Internet and the twenty-four-hour news channels, the kind of inside-the-Beltway chat that used to be quarantined in the Sunday morning network TV talk shows is everywhere, all the time. It’s Sunday morning every day. The political class has had this freakish population boom, as though that bitch George Will gave birth to a litter of bow-tied puppies and they all found homes. And all the commentators and columnists and party flacks and talk show hosts are hustling and spinning as much as, if not more than, the politicians themselves. For me, the novelty of the e-mail group was simply finding out what a relatively average, intelligent, home-owning, middle-class father like Jack thought about tax policy or campaign tactics. Our e-mails were different than just talking around a dinner table: We were a sort of homegrown talk show, where one person would state an opinion and then everyone else would go McLaughlin Group on his ass.
Looking back, it’s stunning how much of the political group’s e-mail was fueled by powerlessness. Especially during the up-in-the-air gray area between the election and the Supreme Court ruling that decided the winner. There was nothing we could do but come together and type loud.
Sending messages to the group “did change the way I followed things,” Stephen tells me. “Or not so much changed it as focused it. It was more fun coming on some info knowing you’d get to pass it on to someone like-minded. There seems to be no end to the satisfaction one gets in having one’s opinions confirmed.”
For instance, inauguration day coverage, a topic we scrutinized even more than usual because we were actually there. We’d been part of an uneasy national event. We had noticed plenty of jolly celebrants, but we’d been elbow to elbow with scores of enraged, sign-toting protesters too, one of whom—an acquaintance of Kevin’s—held up a sign directed at Bush that simply said, “I Hate You.” So the next morning’s press postmortem in the group was particularly thorough. Paul’s posting about the lead stories on the inauguration in The Washington Post and The New York Times shows how a typical reader of one or the other—a regular person who does not belong to a sarcastic Internet consortium of amateur media watchdogs—would have formed entirely different opinions of the event’s, for lack of a better word, vibe. Paul remarks that The Washington Post’s fifth paragraph mentions “thousand of sign-waving protestors” but complains that the Times’s lead story finally mentions the protesters in paragraph forty-nine, but that “there is no further word on who those protesters might be, how many of them there were, or what they might have been protesting.” Stephen forwards a London Observer piece that reads, “The Observer considers [Bush’s] election an affront to the democratic principle with incalculable consequences for America and the world.”
Walking to the inauguration, we duck into the National Archives to look at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, just to see if they’re still there. Jack chats with the guard about the nuclear-proof underground vault the documents are lowered into every night. Then it’s on to the police checkpoint. The inaugural parade route is completely blocked off, and the only way in is through checkpoints where the authorities search all bags. It’s all over the news that, thanks to the healthy number of expected protesters, they’ve banned fruit, as well as sticks attached to protest signs. Also, giant puppets. Those things could be used to hit another person. Never mind that my club-shaped umbrella is admitted without a word, or that a president endorsed by the NRA is so apparently worried that a cantaloupe or marionette might put out some spoilsport picketer’s eye. The police search of my backpack is anticlimactic, no big deal. I was actually hoping for a little more cop interaction, because I thought it would be amusing if I had to account for the Abraham Lincoln paper dolls I’m carrying in my backpack that Jack bought at the archives for his two little girls. Maybe the cop and I would even share a brief but lighthearted moment of communion, agreeing that Mary Todd Lincoln sure had dumb hair. The cops must be humoring us to check our bags, as we are the least threatening-looking group of people here. Even elderly Republican ladies are more menacing than we are, because they have the guts to wrap themselves in controversial mink pelts.
We get to the muddy Mall just as Chief Justice William Rehnquist is swearing in Dick Cheney as vice president. From where we stand, the men are faraway specks. But, thanks to the CNN JumboTron, their faces are bigger than the Capitol dome. Rehnquist, as one of the five Supreme Court justices who effectively gave Bush the presidency, was a particular object of the group’s e-mail scorn. We all boo him. Then we boo Dick Cheney. Or rather, I would like to think that it’s nothing personal, that we are booing the fishy process that got him here. Staff Sergeant Alec T. Maly of the United States Army Band sings “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” I’m stunned when Kevin boos him too. I ask him, “You’re booing the army guy? You’re booing ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’? Are we against everything now?” Yes, he answers, we’re against everything, and boos louder.
George W. Bush places his hand on the same Bible that George Washington placed his hand on in 1789 and repeats after Rehnquist that he will “to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” I’m sure he means it, if he’s actually thinking about it, but it’s reassuring to have that underground vault at the National Archives as a backup.
I told myself I came down to “protest.” But I choose to display my dissent by bursting into tears as Bush finishes up his oath. Alas, my tears are my picket sign.
It’s happened. It’s over. He’s it.
Once, I was prepared for this, even looking forward to it. Because before I am a Democratic nerd, I am a civics nerd first and last. Back before election day, there was a part of me—the part of myself I don’t like—that harbored a secret, perverse desire that Bush would defeat Gore. Because a Bush victory, I thought, would offer me four illustrious years of taking the high road. I would be dignified. I would be wise. Unlike my Republican brethren, who pooh-poohed Bill Clinton’s legitimacy from the get-go—Texas Congressman Dick Armey, speaking to Democratic colleagues, referred to him as “your” president—I would be a bigger person. During the Clinton era, being a civics nerd of any political stripe was like having the school bully paste a “Kick Me” sign on your back every day year after year. In my preelection daydream of what a Bush presidency might be like, I imagined that I would criticize his policies and lambaste his statements with a civic-minded nobility. All my venom, spite, and, as long as we’re dreaming, impeccable logic, would be directed at our president. As in “Look how our president is wrecking our country.”
Making my pompous little fantasy come true, however, hinged on one thing—a majority of people voting for Bush. Not only did he lose the popular vote by more than half a million ballots but he essentially won the electoral college by a single vote—that of the fifth Supreme Court justice who decided to halt the Florida recounts. So now what?
The CNN camera pans around the dais. Seeing Bush embrace his ex-president father, seeing him shaking the now ex-president Clinton’s hand, seeing Gore clapping like a sad, good sport, all makes me cry harder. About the only person up there I find myself happy to look at is the former Republican senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole. I’ve developed a soft spot for Dole because he symbolizes a simpler, more innocent time in America when you could lose the presidential election and, like, not actually become the president.
Once he’s back home in his apartment, Kevin sends an e-mail to those in our group who didn’t come with us, describing what being on the Mall was like:
Nearby, a pro-Bush family prayed with their heads down, holding hands, while the chaplains gave the invocation and the blessing. I found myself looking down, too, at all the mud on the Mall, and thinking about how young the country was. This was, after all, the primeval mud of our soggy capital, sunk into a Maryland swamp that everyone—diplomats, presidents, congressmen—used to complain about in the early decades of Washington’s existence. There were plans in the mid-nineteenth century to really landscape the Mall—to turn it into some ingeniously planned English-style facsimile of nature, much like Central Park. But the landscape architect they hired died in a spectacular steamboat crash on the Hudson, and they never did get around to putting his plan in place. Instead, the Mall remains an intriguingly blank, muddy expanse, a sort of parade ground of democracy, and we all just stood out there to hear the speech.
The colossal head of Bush—President Bush—delivers his Inaugural Address on the JumboTron. It is not terrible. I find myself begrudgingly agreeing with most of it, though it will be weeks before I feel adult enough to admit that out loud. He says that the story of America is “the story of a slave-holding society that became a servant of freedom.” I can’t stomach unquestioning jingoism today, so I’m relieved that he refers to the slaves. That’s where my head’s at right now—that mentioning the slaves would cheer me up. It’s a reminder that, hey, we enslaved people, we deserve to have this guy be our president.
This part of Bush’s speech isn’t bad:
While many of our citizens prosper, others doubt the promise, even the justice, of our own country. The ambitions of some Americans are limited by failing schools and hidden prejudice and the circumstances of their birth. And sometimes our differences run so deep, it seems we share a continent, but not a country.
That line about not sharing a country is about the only time Bush even halfway alludes to the warring throng before him. After he finishes, Jack and I will trudge to the Lincoln Memorial to read the Second Inaugural Address carved into the wall. Bush thinks he’s got problems? In his speech of March 4, 1865, Lincoln asked his countrymen “to bind up the nation’s wounds.” He recapped the still raging Civil War in point-blank terms, as if to say, “Don’t think I haven’t noticed how much we loathe each other.” The speech’s bravery derives from its very honesty. I think it’s a mistake that Bush doesn’t similarly come clean. How many furious citizens might have given him the benefit of the doubt if he just said that he sees us, if he just buttered us up a little, pronouncing that he knows he didn’t get our votes but he will try to earn our trust? Well, Kevin wouldn’t have bought it, but the rest of us suckers might have cut the new president some slack for a day or two.
On inauguration day, when Jack and I were walking down the Mall toward the Lincoln Memorial, past all the giggling Republican faces, it felt like being stuck inside the cover of that old Frank Sinatra album No One Cares. It’s the one where there’s a party going on and all the partygoers are smiling and dressed up and dancing, but Sinatra sits all alone at the bar, sighing into his whiskey glass. He has his coat on and he looks like he’s remembering better times.
I was once a Washington intern, back when being a Washington intern was a goody-goody, model-citizen thing for a young lady to do. It was during the Clinton administration’s bubbly first year. I moved into my new Adams-Morgan apartment the night before Yitzhak Rabin shook Yasir Arafat’s hand for the first time on the White House lawn. I thought I could feel the world being saved a few Metro stops away. Looking at all the gleeful partisans on Bush’s inauguration day took me back, that feeling of, Washington is ours! Oh, how my friends and I once cooed with excitement in the fall of ’93 when we were seated at brunch a couple of tables over from George Stephanopoulos. All the other nubile New Democrats were smitten with George, though I myself had a little crush on the sad-eyed economic adviser Robert Rubin.
I had looked forward to Gore’s Washington. With Gore running the country, it would be different. I would feel even more at home. Clinton had appealed to the rock ’n’ roller in me, the part of me that went to Graceland and cried when Kurt Cobain died and thinks about James Brown’s hair. But Gore appeals to the real me, the one who can still sing a song from college German class about which prepositions to use with the accusative case—“Durch, für, gegen, ohne, um: Akkusativ.”
Gore’s pencil neck tugs at my nerdy soul. I think the most lovable thing he has ever said can be found in a sentence in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. On page 67, he asks, “What happened to the climate in Yucatán around 950?” Something about the specifics of that query lit me up. For the first time, I could see casting my ballot for a man who would pose such a question. It was just so boldly arcane. The kind of mind that would wonder about temperature variations on a Caribbean peninsula a thousand years ago might have the stomach to look into any number of Americans’ peculiar concerns. Paradoxically, this fervor for scientific facts—the thing that alienates him from voters because they see him as cold—requires no small amount of passion. You don’t write a four-hundred-page book about ecology unless you have the heart.
Of course, Gore being Gore, he doesn’t write just about what he knows. Gore being Gore, he is compelled to confess the dweebish details of how he learned what he knows. Earth in the Balance features countless hints that his life is an ongoing study hall: “Since that time, I have watched the Mauna Loa reports every year” or “Beginning in January 1981, I spent many hours each week for more than thirteen months intensively studying the nuclear arms race.” January 1981 he says—I bet it was his New Year’s resolution. Every other member of Congress was vowing to cut back on the hookers, but then-Senator Gore probably French-kissed Tipper at midnight and made a mental pledge to really get a handle on those ICBMs.
This is the Gore of the first presidential debate with Bush, the sighing, eye-rolling, eager beaver, buttinsky Gore, interrupting Bush to ask the moderator, Jim Lehrer, “Can I have the last word on this?” Ross G. Brown commented in the Los Angeles Times, “Gore studied hard and was thoroughly prepared for the televised civics and government quizzes each debate provided. A teacher might have given him an A. But much of the rest of the class just wanted to punch Mr. Smarty-Pants in the nose.”
“I didn’t think of Gore this way,” my friend Doug told me on the phone one day, “but he was widely perceived as arrogant. If you know something, you’re not smart. You’re a smarty-pants. It’s annoying. People get annoyed with knowledge. It goes back to high school, to not doing your homework. Everyone knows what that’s like. ‘Time to hand in your assignments.’ And that dread of ‘Oh, shit, I didn’t do my assignment.’ It calls that back. It’s this feeling of ‘There’s something I should know. I don’t know why I should know it but someone knows it and I don’t. So I’m going to have to make fun of him now.’”
Before and after the election, I found myself having versions of this conversation again and again. “One of the frustrations about Al Gore,” explained my friend John not long after the election, “is that he’s uniquely qualified to be president by having the actual equivalent of street knowledge. He knows how the system works. I remember seeing an interview with him on TV, it might have been a Nova episode on global warming in the mid-eighties. It was basically the first time I had ever heard of global warming. And Gore was the young senator from Tennessee. He very articulately explained what politics is. Politics is people worrying about next year and right now. The problem you have when the more you know about global warming as a politician is the more you realize you can’t do anything with it. Experts bombard you with cold, hard facts about what’s going to happen fifteen years from now. You look at your children. You know they’re going to be living in that world. You can see the train coming down the track. Gore said one of the most frustrating things is that you can’t run on that because the public is not interested in wisdom and the public is not wise. The public is actually reactive. So unless you can create it as a scenario that’s going to work for them right now, it’s just something you have to do behind the scenes. You have to figure out how to sell your idea to people within the system. And I just thought that’s the most thoughtful assessment of the nature of that kind of political problem. He was a young guy. He was really casual and super savvy about it. I just thought, Wow, that guy should be president! Later on, this election, he couldn’t even be who he was. He couldn’t say, ‘I know a lot about this shit!’ Because you can’t say that you know a lot about something or people will think you’re uppity.”
This is the subtext of the Gore campaign’s press coverage. Writing about a man who knows so much and who isn’t shy about sharing his knowledge must have gotten on a lot of journalistic nerves. Recalling Gore’s press conferences, Eric Pooley of Time wrote, “Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some helpless nerd.” Right after the election, a search on the Nexis journalism database for the following terms revealed these results. For “Al Gore and nerd,” 804 articles. For “Al Gore and geek,” 826 articles. For “Al Gore and dork,” 136. For “Al Gore and Poindexter,” 110. For “Al Gore and homework,” 966. Searches for “George W. Bush and” the words dumb, stupid, and idiot were unable to be completed because those queries “will return more than 1,000 documents.” All of which was distilled perfectly in the election day headline in the London Daily Mail, “The Nerd Versus the Nincompoop.”
To be clear, I believe Al Gore technically won the 2000 presidential election. What baffles me is how close an election it was considering the simple, gaping chasm between the two candidates’ qualifications. Compare their résumés. Gore served in the Congress, as both a representative and a senator, for sixteen years. As vice president, he helped mastermind the country’s most successful economic expansion. He is an expert on environmental issues, foreign policy, military technology, and the digital communications industry. Before Bush was a two-term governor, he was a late-blooming, failed oilman who lucked out owning a baseball team.
In the televised presidential debates, Bush did well enough on general questions from his platform, but on a complicated question about what the United States should do if ousted Serbian President Milosevic refused to leave office, Bush said he would ask the Russians to lead the charge. Vice President Gore replied,
Now I understand what the governor has said about asking the Russians to be involved, and under some circumstances that might be a good idea. But being as they have not yet been willing to recognize Kostunica as the lawful winner of the election, I’m not sure that it’s right for us to invite the president of Russia to mediate this dispute there because we might not like the result that comes out of that. They currently favor going forward with a runoff election. I think that’s the wrong thing. I think the governor’s instinct is not necessarily bad because we have worked with the Russians in a constructive way in Kosovo, for example, to end the conflict there. But I think we need to be very careful in the present situation before we invite the Russians to play the lead role in mediating.
BUSH: Well, obviously we wouldn’t use the Russians if they didn’t agree with our answer, Mr. Vice President.
GORE: Well, they don’t.
I don’t understand why Gore didn’t secure a landslide right then and there. On knowledge alone, it was a no-brainer. So why couldn’t Gore carry his own home state of Tennessee, much less sweep the rest of the country? Clearly, it has something to do with who he is as a person, and who he is as a person is a big honking nerd. Nobody minds this in a vice president. The vice presidency is actually a nerd’s perfect job. A sidekick is supposed to be a bigger geek than the star. Like in the teen TV drama My So-Called Life, when the dreamboat boy Jordan Catalano gets the telephone number of a girl he doesn’t know in two seconds flat, the nerd Brian Krakow asks him, “This is, like, how you live?” How many times Gore must have wanted to ask that question of Clinton, with the sidekick’s tone of disdain mixed with awe.
The one time I ever saw Al Gore in person was during the 2000 primary. I attended his performance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait with the American Symphony Orchestra at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall. Gore narrated Copland’s piece, which sets Lincoln’s writings to orchestral accompaniment. It is possible that easily a third of the audience was there to have some fun at Gore’s expense. But there was something quaintly reassuring about the way the crowd clapped—some even stood—out of respect for his office, which, lest we forget, is only respect for the electorate and its judgment. Even in cool New York, Americans are not above a little “He’s here!” excitement, even over the then—vice president, a man who once joked about himself that Al Gore is so boring his Secret Service name is Al Gore.
The Lincoln Portrait has a long instrumental introduction, which provided ample opportunity to watch Gore wait and wait and wait for his turn to speak. It was like watching the institution of the vice presidency in action. This must be what it’s been like for him all these patient years, listening to someone else’s noise until it’s finally his cue.
Gore, who sat in profile next to the conductor, Leon Botstein, looked like the head on a coin. Which is to say he never looked more presidential. It’s an easy trick to come off dignified while wearing a nice blue suit in front of tuxedo-clad violinists and orating the words of Lincoln. Then again, orating the words of Lincoln is itself a gamble. Who could begin to compare? The music on the stage wasn’t coming from the woodwinds. It was coming from the page, from the grave, from the rhythm of “new birth of freedom” and the melody that “we cannot escape history.” Hearing words like that spoken by a presidential candidate was especially striking in the primary season. The practicality of the campaigners, Gore included, was mind numbing. They seemed to think of the American people as a bunch of penny-pinching misers who hoard their precious votes for the candidate who might save us forty bucks a year on the 1040EZ.
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 Buffy 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.