At the last minute, Emory called me on what I was no longer, apparently, supposed to describe as my “smartphone,” although I was baffled by how I was meant to refer to it instead. (I’d remarked earlier that week in our departmental offices, “What is it now, a mediocrityphone?” A colleague quipped tartly, “How about ‘phone’? Is that so hard, Pearson? Is employing a usage that’s actually more succinct still too great a sacrifice, the better to show a little respect, a little sensitivity? How about phone?”) Was our menu sufficiently elastic to include Roger, Emory asked, this new fellow she was seeing? I could hardly say no, though I was annoyed. After the vexing business of Darwin being sent home from school, I was in no mood to make a show of interest in some stranger. I’d sprung for barely enough costly tiger prawns for six, and another guest would be a stretch. Roger would change the nature of the occasion from my best friend casually dropping by to join us for supper again to a “dinner party.” Besides, we hadn’t seen each other since the fall term commenced, and I wanted Emory all to myself.
Sure enough, they arrived with a pricey bottle and flowers, whereas Emory commonly showed up with box wine that privileged alcoholic ambition over refinement. If I even bothered with olives, we’d usually pluck them from the deli container while standing in my dark-wood kitchen, and now I had to put them in an attractive bowl, with a separate dish for pits. Lest the kalamatas seem paltry, I’d also put out beet and parsnip chips, though the plain old salt-and-vinegar potato kind were better.
Leaving Wade to finish the prep, I issued our guests with reluctant formality into the living room. Emory’s gear—leggings with sleek black boots, a silk tunic in saffron accented with a red scarf perhaps purposefully reminiscent of her sixteenth birthday present to me—was simple but flash. Just as unsurprisingly, Roger was handsome. He was trim in that perfectly cornered way, reliably the result of vigilant dietary stinting and fearfully fanatic adherence to fitness rituals. The styling of his clothes was sporty, but their fabrics were high-end. He didn’t say much at first, but his reserve didn’t come across as shyness so much as an arch holding back to observe, assess, and judge. Immaculate grooming cultivated an air of sovereignty, perhaps the mutual quality that had drawn these two to each other to begin with. Yet he didn’t say anything overtly boastful or patronizing, so maybe I just had a bad attitude.
It can be best to say what’s really on your mind in these settings, or chitchat can feel pointless and diversionary. Skipping the specifics, I explained that I was still a bit upset because Darwin had been suspended for employing a “slur,” and he wasn’t used to being treated like a troublemaker. “He doesn’t understand what the rules are anymore,” I said. “I can’t blame him for feeling confused.”
“Well, have you heard about Obama’s expansion of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’?” Emory asked. I had, but I was hazy on the details. “I only bring it up because it’s a social template that’s bound to apply beyond the military. So tell Darwin that these are the rules from now on: Don’t ask where anyone went to school. Don’t tell anyone where you went to school, even if you went to Yale—well, especially if you went to Yale! And that includes secondary schools: Never drop casually in conversation that you graduated from Andover or Groton. Don’t ever mention, or fish for, IQ, obviously, but also SAT and ACT scores or grade point averages. You’re even meant to keep your trap shut about how well you did on newspaper quizzes on the major stories of the week. And forget asking or telling about a performance on Jeopardy!”
Emory delivered this lowdown with an admirable deadpan, but her intention was clearly mocking. “You know, they canceled that show last week,” I said.
“No kidding,” Emory said.
“Gone, finito. It’s discriminatory. And it’s been on since 1964.”
“Wow,” Emory said. “So much for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, then.”
“I caught part of that program while I was shelling the shrimp for dinner, just out of curiosity,” I said. “They’re trying to stay alive, and stay relevant, by asking unbelievably primitive questions. Like, ‘What—is—your—name?’”
“Phone a friend!” Emory exclaimed. “Oh, and I almost forgot: the army has also banned Rubik’s Cubes in the barracks.”
“Chess has to be next,” I groaned.
“No, it can’t be next,” Emory said, her deadpan still impeccable. “They already banned chess. It creates a divisive and prejudicial environment, and it’s antithetical to the spirit of unity in the corps.”
“Oh, God, pretty soon this could hit where it hurts,” I said. “Boggle and Scrabble are doomed.”
“As they should be,” Emory said primly. “They make any number of entirely equal people feel unjustly inadequate.”
We were leaving Roger out of the fun. After passing around the olives, I asked, unimaginatively, how they’d met.
“Roger was a guest on the show,” Emory said. “Though I’m not sure who was doing whom the favor. I had to warn him that no one, and I mean no one, listens to it.”
Emory was not given to self-deprecation to make herself more likable; she spoke from genuine frustration. From high school, she’d nursed a single-minded ambition to make it in television journalism (by contrast, my sole driving ambition from my teenage years was to be left alone), but for a decade she’d worked at WVPA, an NPR affiliate. For six of those years, she’d hosted a minor early-afternoon arts program that sponsored local up-and-comers and B-listers, and she felt stuck.
“How relaxing for you, then,” I told Roger. “If no one’s listening, you can say anything.”
“No, Pearson,” Emory said. “These days, you most certainly can’t say just anything.” I wondered if she was giving me a personal warning.
Roger, it seemed, was a playwright. I wanted to say, “Does anyone even go to plays anymore? Everyone I know hates them. It’s yesterday’s form, don’t you think? Who wouldn’t rather see a movie?” But I didn’t.
“It’s an interesting time to be working in the theater,” he said.
“Interesting?” I said. “I wouldn’t have thought that’s quite the word. Tricky, maybe. Or dangerous.”
“Great theater is always dangerous,” he said smoothly. “But I meant it’s exciting to work in the arts when the culture’s tectonic plates are shifting. The last couple of years have seen an utter upending of a hierarchy that goes back millennia. Back to forever, really.”
“Yes, I haven’t been living in a cave,” I said sweetly, nodding at the coffee table.
But then, I worried that Roger might misinterpret the tome on display as occupying pride of place, whereas this household’s exhibition of The Calumny of IQ: Why Discrimination Against “Dumb People” Is the Last Great Civil Rights Fight was pointedly ironic. As I’d felt the need to get in on the political ground floor in 2010, ours was a first-edition hardback, so the cover still pictured a little boy on a stool staring shamefacedly at his lap while wearing what no one would now dare call a “dunce cap.” Later editions eliminated the hat, the image too harsh a throwback to a barbaric past, while rendering the subtitle as Discrimination Against “D— People.” As “calumny” soon joined a host of vocabulary deemed ostentatiously “brain-vain,” the last paperback I’d glimpsed at a supermarket checkout had simplified the title to The Crime of IQ.
If I’d never finished Carswell Dreyfus-Boxford’s game-changing, era-defining magnum opus, that just made me like most people. It was one of those commonplace doorstops that everyone bought and nobody read. At best, the ambitious got through the set-piece introduction of forty pages, full of heartrending anecdotes of capable young people whose self-esteem was crushed by an early diagnosis of subpar intelligence. Once you digested the thesis that all perceived variation in human intelligence merely came down to “processing issues,” you could skip all the tedious twin studies, cohort graphs, and demonstrations of IQ scores being raised or lowered by fifteen to twenty points depending on whathaveyou. Initially, the “cerebral elite”—academics, doctors and lawyers, scientists—lampooned the notion that stupidity is a fiction as exceptionally stupid (whatever they say now). Yet as the drive for intellectual leveling gathered steam, it was the sharpest tacks among that elect who jumped on the fashionable bandwagon first.
“You know, it’s easy to forget, but that book was widely ridiculed when it first came out. You and I made merciless fun of it,” I reminded Emory, hoping to stir her memory of a certain unruly, drunken late-night twosome at her apartment in the spring of the previous year. “Basically everyone agreed that the poor professor had published a howler. Then suddenly—you could probably pinpoint the pivot to a single day—Dreyfus-Boxford’s proposition wasn’t hilarious but irrefutably true: there’s no such thing as you-know-what.”
“Well, any day now I expect another blockbuster to make a splash by claiming there’s no such thing as a beautiful woman,” Emory said slyly to her date, extending her shapely legs to prop them on the coffee table. “Everyone is as beautiful as everyone else. And if you beg to differ, you’re suffering from a processing issue.”
If there was indeed such a thing as a beautiful woman, that would be Emory Ruth. Tall and slender with close-cut raven hair, she was old enough at thirty-nine that if she were going to get hippy, the broadening would have shown by then. By that night I’d lost numerical track of Emory’s boyfriends and broken engagements, which had long provided me a subscription streaming service akin to Hallmark Movies Now sans the $5.99/month. Her surfeit of male attention was boringly down to looks. But none of these guys was ever good enough for her, and it was more than possible that none of them ever would be. I thought, Somebody oughta tell Roger.
“So how’s it going at VU?” Emory asked. “Are the babies behaving themselves?”
I’d been eager to talk to her about the tribulations of teaching English even at the erstwhile august Voltaire University, but now I felt constrained. If Roger was dating Emory, I was inclined to assume he was one of us, but he hadn’t tipped his hand and remained an unknown quantity.
“Well, this fall is the first open-admissions intake,” I said. “A few of the more conservative schools have held out, but the writing’s on the wall for standardized tests; everyone expects that by this time next year they’ll be just as illegal as IQ tests. Now that K-through-twelve has stopped giving them, colleges won’t be able to use grades, either. The conceit—I mean, the understanding—is that everyone’s the same level of . . . So the whole idea of letting in one applicant and not another is unacceptable. I’m not sure if they pull names from a hat or it’s first come, first serve. But there’s really no point to having an admissions office anymore. A janitor could do the job: unlock the door.”
“An economy, then,” Emory said.
“When I didn’t get into VU myself,” I said, “I guess my feelings were hurt. At the same time, I knew in my heart of hearts that I wasn’t really . . . good enough . . . qualified enough . . . But if I had been admitted, I’d have been over the moon. I wonder if we’re denying young people a rite of passage that can be exhilarating. That letter in the mail. That burst of joy, that feeling of being chosen, of having made the grade, of being recognized and lifted up, that sudden giddy rush of being seen as special and finally believing that maybe you have a future.” I said this last bit in an animated torrent, then caught myself. “I’m only saying that ‘getting in’ to Voltaire, to Cornell, to Harvard—it doesn’t mean anything anymore. That seems like a loss. An emotional loss, if nothing else.”
“But you said your feelings were hurt,” Roger said. “From the sound of it, a sense of inferiority from that rejection still lingers, what, twenty years later? Wouldn’t you estimate that far more young people have been devastated in the college admissions race than the few who’ve been ‘exhilarated’? Isn’t that an awfully big price to pay, collectively, for a few crack highs?”
I tried to take his measure. Roger’s tone was tentative, if still on the politically acceptable side of neutral. Were he a Mental Parity true believer, he might be gentling his fervor from romantic savvy. After all, he’d have discovered after going out with Emory even once that she subjected the current catechism to wicked ridicule. Should they fall on opposite sides of this issue, it was only a matter of time before the clash destroyed the relationship—an advent that, assuming he was smitten, which Emory’s swains always were, he’d have every motivation to put off. Alternatively? Maybe he chose to air views that fell safely within the Overton window (which had collapsed to a slit) out of caution. He was in an untested social setting where mouthing the shibboleths of cognitive equality might risk dreariness but at least would never get his head cut off.
“You do realize you’re among friends,” I said.
“Indeed,” he said lightly, with an air of not understanding what I was getting at.
“I’m astonished by how fast this new way of thinking about human intelligence installed itself,” I said. “And I’m not quite sure who installed it. The pace of ideological change has been dizzying.”
“Funny,” Roger said, “that’s not my experience at all. I’m always shocked when I remind myself what a short time it’s been, because to me it seems as if we’ve banned cognitive discrimination for years and years.”
I was perplexed why Emory had yet to jump in—say, right here, maybe along the lines of “That’s because when something horrendous is happening, time slows to a crawl.” But she just sat there, submitting to her new boyfriend’s many claim-laying touches as he sat encroachingly close to her on the couch—a stroke of a cheek here, a brush of a shoulder there, three fingers on her knee.
“As for my experience in the classroom this fall,” I said, “if it were only the open admissions, that would be . . . difficult . . . challenging enough. But something else has changed.” I was sick of walking on eggshells in my own home, especially after picking bits of shell from my feet on return from the university multiple days a week, so I raised the frankness quotient a tad. “The students, especially the freshmen, display an inexplicable pugnacity. They all wear those ‘IQuit’ badges, which are now as ubiquitous as smiley-face buttons when I was a kid. Because the badges are almost a requirement, they don’t distinguish the zealots from more passive students just swimming with the tide. Still, the zealots have ways of making themselves known. They choose desks toward the front of the room. They sit there glaring, often with their arms crossed, positively daring me to try to teach them something they don’t know—as if they’re sure they know it already, or if they don’t, it’s not worth knowing. They’re smug, and they’re surly. Also very touchy and on the lookout. Darwin told me the . . . that certain students display this same cunning, predatory watchfulness even in his primary school. It’s as if the purpose of going to college is to test the faculty and not the students.”
“Are you giving grades anymore?” Emory asked.
“All courses are now pass-fail,” I said. “But that won’t last. Already, for an instructor to give any student a failing grade would be suicidal. It would look like discrimination. Gosh, remember when being ‘discriminating’ was a compliment? So they’ll all pass. The thing is, I don’t understand what college is for anymore. Are students supposed to master a body of knowledge, acquire new skills? They don’t seem to think so. What are we doing, then? Am I just meant to entertain them? They don’t do the reading; there are no consequences for not doing the reading; so by implication the reading doesn’t matter. Half the time, they pay no attention to me whatsoever, talking among themselves as if they’re in the food hall. I’m the first to admit that I went into teaching university English because it was a soft, relatively undemanding job that gave me plenty of free time. But now the job is getting hard. Really hard. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I feel like an—” I stopped myself just in time.
Emory shot me a sharp look and curved the conversation. “Have you followed the foofaraw over this new novel—My Brilliant Friend?”
“Of course,” I said. And that’s when I decided to jump in with two feet. I would declare myself. I was the host here, and it was up to me to set the tone. “This so-called controversy is dumb.”
The D-bomb landed like Little Boy. Nobody said anything.
“‘Brilliant’ doesn’t only mean smart,” I continued. “It also means fab, terrific, swell. I gather for a while there, the Brits chirped ‘Brilliant!’ every time you bumped them on the sidewalk.”
“True,” Emory said, again with a peculiar impartiality. “And it also means shiny or dazzling. But the weird thing about all the boycotts, the bookstores refusing to stock it, Amazon taking it off the site—it’s all so unnecessary. The novel was written in Italian. They could have translated the title however they wanted. How culturally tin-eared can you get?”
“My Swell Friend doesn’t have much of a ring,” I said. “Much less My Shiny Friend.”
Emory laughed, which was a relief. “In any case, that novel’s going to sell, like, five copies.”
“Uh-huh,” I grunted. “And all to activists for their book burnings.” I was getting irritable. After I’d shared how impossible my job was becoming, no uptake. Wade must have finished the onions and zucchini long ago, too. Socially recessive, he used the kitchen to hide.
I’d fed Lucy earlier and put her to bed, but I never shooed off Darwin and Zanzibar to eat in the den with the TV. When my mother had an elder and his family to dinner, my brothers and I being exiled with the visiting kids to the “children’s table” always felt humiliating. Thanks to our inclusivity, Darwin could already hold his own with adults.
Once we were all seated, then, I encouraged him to bring us all up to date on Fukushima, which he had followed as avidly as he had the Deepwater Horizon debacle the previous year. He was clearly headed for a career in science. Just as he’d kept up with every stage of BP’s frantic efforts to close off the surging oil leak in the Gulf, he could now give a cogent, up-to-the-minute precis on the radiation levels at various distances from the disabled Japanese power plant and the amounts of cesium-137 still being released into the Pacific. Clued up enough to avoid monopolizing the dinner by letting his enthusiasm run away with him, he neatly concluded his presentation with a warning about Germany’s horrified about-face on investment in nuclear power. (Thrillingly for his mother, he didn’t actually say “about-face” but “volte-face”—a point of nostalgia, as foreign phrases would soon be spurned in common discourse for being brain-vain.) With a moderation unusual for the time, Darwin pointed out that major meltdowns at nuclear plants had been rare. Germany’s overreaction was bound to leave the country heavily dependent on imported fossil fuels: “Pretty soon they’ll have to get their natural gas from Russia. And Russia’s a bully.”
“There,” I said to the table. “Now tell me there’s no such thing as unusually high intelligence.”
After which, everyone busied themselves with passing the bread and making sure they’d all gotten butter.
Zanzibar wouldn’t embark on a similar recitation, and I wouldn’t coax her into one, either. She was supremely self-possessed. She spoke when spoken to, and not in obeisance to a dated axiom. She responded to Roger’s guesty questions politely while looking him in the eye. She betrayed no exasperation that children get very tired of a grown-up’s pro forma inquiries about their favorite subjects in school, when they can tell their interlocuter has no interest in the answers and isn’t listening. For a nine-year-old, her table manners were faultless. She sat still, hands and napkin in her lap. She waited patiently for dishes to be passed, and quickly surveyed the other plates before helping herself to the scarce tiger prawns, not wanting to take more than her share.
Nevertheless, Zanzibar was on autopilot. Like many creative children, she lived in a parallel universe. Our friend Roger had no idea what she was thinking, and neither did I.
Hoping I wasn’t putting Darwin on the spot, I filled in the details of his ejection from school that afternoon. “So what’s the verdict?” I threw upon the waters. “We know about the kid wearing it. But can a T-shirt still be ‘stupid’ or not?”
“‘If you’re so smart, why aren’t you smart?’” Emory said, shooting me a wary look. “It’s closer to opaque. Maybe it means: good luck clinging to an antiquated label now that we no longer acknowledge the category.”
“Pretty tortured,” I said. “My chips are still on ‘stupid.’” I wasn’t sure, but I thought I saw Roger wince.
“Maybe, Darwin,” Roger said, “it’s best to avoid that kind of charged language as a general rule. That way, you’re not only considerate, but probably more eloquent, too. Ugly names for—for what we now call ‘alternative processing,’ a term you may have heard your teachers use—well, they tend to be broad, lazy, and inexact. You could have called your friend’s T-shirt slogan ‘unclear,’ or ‘strange,’ or, as Emory said, ‘opaque’—meaning, hard to understand. Maybe you should push yourself to choose adjectives like that, which add more value, more content, than just being cruel. I’m sure you didn’t intend to hurt your friend’s feelings. But when you use words that can also be used as slurs, even if you’re only referring to a T-shirt, you run the risk of misinterpretation.”
All that worthiness was weighing down this occasion like low barometric pressure. If Roger was pandering to present-day sensitivities purely to protect himself, he was suspiciously convincing.
“A couple of years ago,” Darwin said, “I could have called Stevie himself . . . that same word, and he might have punched me. Maybe the teacher would have told us to try harder to get along. But I’d never have been sent to the principal’s office. No one would have called my mom to take me home. I want to know what changed. Why we never take tests anymore. I was good at them.”
“Sometimes the grown-ups all get together,” Roger said, “and decide we’ll do things differently from now on. We come up with a way of thinking about things that’s better.”
“Or worse,” I said. “You know, they study a little history, even in primary school.”
“Listen, pal,” Wade told Darwin, “our friend Roger here is making this way too complicated. Just don’t use that word.”
“Because it’ll get me into trouble,” Darwin said.
“Yup,” Wade said. “And don’t use a bunch of other words, either, and you know what they are. They’re not worth it.”
“So what’s our son supposed to call something that’s blatantly styoopid?” I exploded. “‘That’s so alternative-processing’?”
“He’s not supposed to call it anything,” Wade said. “Because there’s no point in creating problems for yourself when you don’t have to—Pearson.” He used my name seldom. When he did so, it was to be pointed.
“I’m in our own house, among our own family,” I said. “I’m under no obligation to watch my language.”
“Zambia?” Roger shamelessly turned to our daughter to dial back the tension. She seemed to regard his mistake as amusing. “What do you make of all this? I bet you don’t have to worry about being smartist in third grade.” A bigger mistake. She was in fourth grade.
“I don’t make anything of it,” she said calmly. “I don’t care. When you draw a picture, or play a song, or act in a play, it isn’t smart or not smart. It’s only good or not good. I try to do stuff that’s good.”
“An arts purist!” Roger exclaimed.
“Obviously,” Emory said, “a whole range of vocabulary is now more radioactive than Fukushima. So I’ve been training myself to avoid it, even when I’m around colleagues I’ve worked with for years; in fact, even when I’m alone. Just to groove my habits. So that when I’m in public I don’t put my foot in it and accidentally ruin my career. I’ve been surprised by how often I used to say ‘S-word’ that, or ‘Oh, that S-word I-word.’ Roger’s right. If nothing else, it was linguistically lazy.”
Emory never used to say “the S-word” and “the I-word” in my presence, and I met her gaze with an expression of Are you kidding me? She looked back at me steadily: no apology. She had the whole Western world on her side.
“You should listen to Emory,” Wade told me. “You’re constantly taunting people, dancing back and forth across a line. I know you didn’t draw the line, but tough luck. It’s there. Don’t step over it. This is totally about watching your back, because no one else is going to watch it for you, capisce? You run your mouth like it’s still 2009 and accomplish absolutely nothing.” For Wade, that was a long speech.
“Sticking up for myself isn’t accomplishing nothing,” I fired back. “Besides, you have no idea what it’s like now. You work mostly on your own. All day, you hardly talk. And there’s no such thing as a stupid tree.”
It was bad form to have domestic squabbles in front of guests. Accordingly, Wade got up and cleared the plates. I followed him mutely to the kitchen with the serving dishes.
“If you keep up with your different-drummer thing,” Wade muttered, “our kids will copy you, and they’ll be persecuted, too. You’re not a lone wolf, you’re a mother. You have to protect them. Set an example that will keep them safe.”
“It’s my job to teach them more than how to be safe,” I hissed.
“Can it,” Wade said. “Not now, if ever.”
I collected myself. Leaving Wade behind to clean the kitchen, to which he was relieved to withdraw, I came back out with dessert, served the kids, and released them. After I settled back in my chair, maybe it was lame to resort to current events, but they had to be good for something.
“Well, it looks like the Arab Spring has fizzled for keeps,” I said.
“Pretty inevitable,” Emory said. “Those protesters might have had a chance at international support, but staging sit-ins to bring back university exams and graduation requirements? Big turnoff. Came across as retrograde. Given the passions of the moment, they made themselves look like cerebral supremacists.”
“Those countries are incredibly corrupt,” I said, determined to remain even-tempered. “With huge cohorts of underemployed, ambitious young people. Earning credentials in an education system that still had some standards was the only way people without connections had a chance at a life. Governments in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya—they embraced the Mental Parity fad raging across the West out of rank opportunism. That way they could plug their underqualified, dull-witted cronies into every position imaginable. The system was nepotistic to begin with, and now it’s worse—brazenly, self-righteously arbitrary.”
“Come on, Pearson,” Emory said. “You have to admit it was terrible PR. To on-trend Americans, they didn’t look like bold revolutionaries but like right-wing holdouts trying to drag their countries back to the brutal morality of the past. Those placards in Tahrir Square? Restore Merit! Mubarak is a— Well, let’s just say, ‘Mubarak’ is a word that combines ‘more’ with ‘on.’ I don’t know why they wrote the signs in English, because they hopelessly alienated their Western audience.”
“I’ll tell you the protest that’s effective,” Roger said. “That’s Occupy in downtown New York. Not only is the encampment in Zuccotti Park getting bigger and more entrenched, but the movement is already spreading to other cities, even going international. I’d love to own the merch rights to ‘We are the 99 percent!’ I don’t know about ‘If you’re so smart,’ but that T-shirt is going places.”
The protest that had started the month before was partially fired up by the financial crisis of 2008. But what really gave the movement legs was new research revealing that 58 percent of America’s wealth was owned by people with a “perceived” IQ of over 135—or only about 1 percent of the population.
“I don’t trust that statistic,” I said, taking another slug of wine, though any further disinhibition wasn’t likely in my interest. “In my experience, smart people do plenty of dopey things, and that includes making lousy financial decisions like everyone else.”
Roger placed his ice cream spoon deliberately on the table, looking pained.
“Besides,” I continued. “That new book The Cognitive Pay Gap? Which also argues it’s ‘perceived’ intelligence that overwhelmingly explains income inequality? I think the author’s dismissal of discrimination by race, sex, and sexual orientation is outrageous. He’s fundamentally making a category error. Racial discrimination is not only real but genuinely unfair. Skin color bears no relation to ability. But the reason you don’t hire a dummy for an intellectually demanding job is that he can’t do it.”
“Excuse me.” Roger placed his palms flat on his thighs, eyes drilling down at the table. “I’ve been trying to keep my own counsel, because I’m aware that I’m in your home, and I don’t want to overstep. But I’m starting to feel complicit here, and I’m afraid I can’t sit quietly and listen to smear after smear without objecting. If only as a favor to me, Pearson, I wish you would rein in the hate speech.”
“What, is this because I said ‘dummy’?” I said. “I’m sorry, but ‘the D-word’ doesn’t do it for me as a euphemism, because, maybe because of that thudding, thick-sounding onomatopoeic ‘duh,’ there are too many words it might refer to: ‘dumbbell,’ ‘dunderhead,’ ‘dummkopf,’ ‘do-do’—”
“Enough!” Roger exclaimed. “Look, I inferred from early this evening that you harbor a subtle antagonism toward MP—”
“Not subtle,” I said. “Straight-up antagonism.”
“Which we can discuss, tolerantly and respectfully, but only if you put a lid on the terms of abuse.”
“Is this personal for you?” I asked. “Have you been showered by all those unpronounceable words that begin with ‘D’?”
“No, not really,” he said with noticeable embarrassment.
I was surprised. It was de rigueur to advertise the many occasions on which classmates or colleagues had pilloried you as a pinhead, as well as to claim that the trauma had permanently crippled your psyche and stunted your prospects. Ever having been called a nincompoop was a Get Out of Failure Free card.
“Like Emory,” Roger went on, “I benefited from the selective education that’s rightly become such an anathema, since I was in truth no more ‘gifted’ than anyone else. I think the onus is especially on those of us who’ve profited from this nasty stratification to fix the system.”
“Doesn’t that mean you stay in control?” I said. “‘Fixing the system’ means more than one thing. What’s staggered me about this movement is how it’s the intelligentsia that’s led the crusade. You’re on the cultural front lines as a playwright, so that would include you. What do you get out of it?”
“Maybe a better question is what harm does it do—to me or anyone else. In what way is your life marred by treating other people as if they’re just as on the ball as you are?”
“It pleases me to treat some people as if they’re more on the ball than I am,” I said. “And thank God for that. As for the harm this obsession is doing? Emory mentioned what’s happening in the military. But it’s not only that soldiers can’t play Mastermind anymore. The top brass is consumed with promoting the so-called otherwise and hauling up the cognitively subpar—is that all right? You’ll let me say ‘subpar’?—to positions of command. They put one of these newly promoted cretins—”
“Hey!” Roger barked.
“They put one of these fellows with alternative processing,” I revised, “in charge of the Osama assassination in May, and that’s why the murderous motherfucker got away!”
“Lots of other things went wrong—”
“Everything went wrong! Thanks to which, asshole lived to fight another day and blew up the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum!”
“With a long history of extolling the cerebral elite,” Emory said. “Good riddance.” She was using that same deadpan delivery again, but any intended irony was too subtle by half—which I might have taken her up on if I hadn’t been on a roll.
“And what about Jared Loughner?” I said. “Everyone fell all over themselves to be sympathetic, because he’d so clearly suffered from cognitive discrimination his whole life—and rightly so, I might add. Not only did he kill six people, but he grievously wounded a congresswoman, and thanks to all these new special rules, the new decency, we can’t even say what happened to Gabrielle Giffords, can we? The woman can hardly string three words together anymore, but according to the prevailing doctrine she’s mentally the same as everybody else and therefore the same as she’s always been! Basically, Loughner didn’t do her any lasting injury in the slightest!
“Or Anders Breivik, who’s become such an international icon and cause célèbre, all because of that ludicrous manifesto of his, bemoaning the ridicule he’s suffered for having—how should I say this, Roger?—less than spectacular intelligence. The poor puppy was even rejected by the Norwegian armed forces—which shows extremely good judgment on their part. So he only murdered those sixty-nine young people on that island out of understandable envy and private pain, because those kids had been designated as ‘promising leaders of the future,’ while no one ever made the mistake of calling him ‘promising.’ If he’d only been diagnosed as having dangerous narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders, they might have at least put him away in a loony bin for years, but no! He’s bound to get off with a slap on the wrist because instead his court-appointed psychiatrist diagnosed him as tragically damaged by having been shunned from childhood, for good reason, as a fucking idiot.”
“Okay, that’s it,” Roger said, standing and abandoning his melted Rocky Road. “Emory? I think we should leave. I can’t sit still for, and implicitly condone, this barrage of bigoted bilge.”
I’d have assumed that after her escort had made such a posturing ass of himself, they were finished as a couple, and Emory would stay behind. We’d open another bottle and make pitiless fun of his sanctimonious alliteration. Instead, I watched in incredulity as my best friend stood from the table, too. She turned her back. In rigid silence, they both fetched their coats.