With the kids home all day on a weekday and wine in the afternoon, the house had a perversely holiday feel, and none of our old rules seemed to apply. With the edge off our appetites, Wade and I got a late start on dinner. After all, what did any of us have to get up for in the morning? I didn’t head upstairs to fetch the kids to the table until 9:45 p.m. Zanzibar would be in Darwin’s room, and when I knocked and was granted admission after a slight delay, they were both still gathered around his computer, though the lid was closed.
“I assume you’re ordering groceries?” I said. “Because I told you. Unless it’s for logistical reasons, stay off the internet.”
“It’s bad, Mom,” Zanzibar said.
“Of course it’s bad,” I said. “Why else would I urge you to avoid it?”
“I mean it’s really bad, Mom,” my daughter emphasized. “And whether or not we see it doesn’t change the fact it’s there. Keeping ourselves in the dark doesn’t make it go away.”
“What have you been looking at, Twitter? Facebook?” I said. “This, too, shall pass. Next week they’ll be cutting somebody else’s head off.”
“Twitter and Facebook are awful enough, but—”
“You heard her, Zanzo,” Darwin interrupted. “She doesn’t want to know.”
“She has to know, and she’s going to know,” his sister said.
“She doesn’t have to know now,” Darwin said. They were talking as if I weren’t there.
“What’s the point of putting it off?” Zanzibar said. “Rip the Band-Aid.”
“I don’t know, maybe an aneurism will burst in her sleep tonight,” Darwin said in exasperation, “and then she can die in peace!”
“What’s this about?” I asked.
“Never mind!” Darwin said. “Forget about it! Let’s have dinner!”
“Darwin thinks he can protect you,” Zanzibar said. “I don’t think so.”
“Protect me from what?”
“If we tell you what we’re protecting you from,” Darwin said, “then we’re not protecting you anymore, are we?”
“YouTube,” my daughter said miserably.
“So some podcast went for the jugular?” I said. “I think I can take it.”
“It goes up a few minutes after the broadcast.” Zanzibar stared at the floor. “Every Thursday, a little after nine.”
At last they triggered a genuine dread. Though sensitive as children, these two had hardened into tough cookies. They were less given to hyperbole than to dry understatement. I asked warily, “What goes up?”
Darwin and Zanzibar looked to each other. Finally in unison they said, “Auntie Em.”
Funnily enough, in the CNN opener the kids then played a second time, the content was sufficiently arresting that for once I couldn’t tell you what Emory Ruth was wearing.
We like to think that we’re enlightened now—broad-minded, shed of the prejudice and Neanderthal misconceptions that for too long held Americans back as a people. We’re fair. We’re principled. We see the wit and wisdom in everyone. A whole vocabulary of bullying, vilification, and unfounded slander has been retired. But once in a while we’re presented with incontrovertible evidence that a battle we like to think we won long ago is far from fully fought. Evidence that we have a long way to go. Evidence that maybe the war we thought was over has barely started.
Voltaire, Pennsylvania, is a leafy medium-sized city in the southeast of the state whose citizenry consider themselves socially advanced, morally upstanding, and politically forward-looking. I should know, because I was born and raised there. My parents live in Voltaire, and I still maintain a home in the city. Though I’ve not been so blessed, I’ve always thought it would be a great place to raise kids. If burdened with as dire a history of brutal cognitive discrimination as most of our nation’s once disreputable educational institutions, Voltaire University was at least quicker than most to embrace Mental Parity, and to undergo a soul-searching of its disgraceful past. So I’m sorry to say that, as of yesterday, I’m ashamed to hail from Voltaire, which until a certain viral video finally fades from our country’s collective memory is sure to function as a byword for hate.
Furtively, many of you have already seen it. But some of you may not have, and I’m of the view that to combat deep-seated, virulently enduring cerebral supremacy, we have to look it in the face. While I commonly aspire to broadcast a family-friendly show, parents might usher their little ones away from the TV for the next few minutes. I’d also advise the viewership that the content we’re about to air violates a host of strict ethical guidelines at CNN. But our CEO felt as strongly as I did that editing this footage would unethically blunt its impact. Were we to bleep out the cognitive smears, all you’d hear is bleep this, bleep that—one long bleep, in fact. Apologies in advance for the obscenities you’re about to hear, but sometimes there’s no substitute for the raw, unvarnished ugliness of real life.
This version of the video picked up at “Specialness is an empty concept without a baseline to rise above,” that opening line alone conceptual anathema, rapidly accelerating to all those more betters, better-ers, and most bestests, which had felt cleverly cutting at the time but on television appeared deranged. I hadn’t watched any of these clips before. I hanged myself even more unequivocally than I’d remembered. (This notion I’d nursed that I hadn’t directly abused my own students didn’t hold up.) It’s always unnerving to see yourself objectified like any old somebody, and the spectacle is reliably devastating; we’re never as attractive, articulate, funny, or charming as we imagined, and this performance heightened that shock. My hair was disarranged, my eyes were bulging, my hands out of control. More than once in the harangue my voice broke. I hadn’t realized I’d used the word “retarded” quite that many times. Though I always kept the word mentally to hand, sequestered in my private lexicon if only for the purpose of referring to myself when I’d done something exceptionally silly, on-screen over and over it made me wince.
Well, Emory continued, that was an instructor to whom countless parents have entrusted their offspring—young people on the cusp of adulthood, ideally confronting their futures with hope, optimism, self-confidence, and a nonjudgmental openness to others unparalleled in any previous generation of Americans. Are these the qualities their teacher cultivates? Hardly. In a shrill, berserk lambaste, she promotes self-doubt, chagrin, and a retrograde impulse to ridicule other people. Here the invective we thought we’d buried once and for all has crawled from the grave, like an especially grisly scene from The Walking Dead.
The administration of Voltaire University assures us that this woman, one Pearson Converse, has been fired. About time. But the school should have acted on glaring warning signs three years ago that this faculty member harbored alarming far-right views. Converse had assigned a Dostoevsky novel with a title so offensive that Amazon now refuses to stock the book. As for which novel, I will spare you one more slur. I think you’ve been bludgeoned enough for one night.
There were other red flags. Voltaire’s Child Protective Services were put on notice in 2014 that Pearson Converse was a danger to both the community and her own children. She had abused her youngest, a pretty, delicate thing then only seven years old, by smearing the little girl to her face as cognitively deficient. What punishment did our civil servants mete out? A mandatory course in etiquette. A course. Meanwhile, numerous friends, relatives, and ex-colleagues of the disgraced former English instructor have testified to reporters that in private conversation Converse routinely employs cognitive slurs and pillories Mental Parity as “kooky,” “self-defeating,” and “delusional.”
But perhaps the brightest red flag is also the oldest. Converse was so committed to our rigid, fallacious, arbitrary, and now blessedly anachronistic mental hierarchy that she selected a sperm donor exclusively for his, ahem, “genius level” IQ. We might feel sorry for such a mother, who was sold a bogus product: sperm that could produce only children with the same intellectual abilities as everyone else’s children. Except that her older two kids have been raised to believe that they are the product of vastly superior genes, and that their mental capacities tower over those of their classmates. The results have been tragic: kids living out a fantastical version of themselves that has inevitably turned them both into outcasts at school. Let’s call a spade a spade: Pearson Converse is a eugenicist. And a failed eugenicist is still a eugenicist.
Is merely losing her job sufficient—a job that I gather Converse never took very seriously to begin with? Is public shunning sufficient—since the chances are that Pearson Converse’s dinner invitations will from here on be few and far between? This case is so extreme that mere social and professional exile seems inadequate.
I would encourage the students Converse traumatized to seek therapeutic help. Following their psychiatric recovery, I’d also encourage her victims to pursue justice in civil court. Surely those poor kids are due compensation for emotional damages. Yet I also think a larger social gesture is called for, the better to put this wretched episode behind us, and to signal to the remaining troglodytes creeping out from under their rocks that we’ve had enough of their bile.
Voltaire the “philosopher” was a figure from the Age of Arrogance who fancied himself preeminent in every way. His written work celebrates mockery. In particular, he had it in for the otherwise. I never thought much about it growing up; “Voltaire” was simply the city I lived in, and I wasn’t keenly aware of the man to whom that name paid tribute. I’m aware now. A student movement at the university is demanding that we rename my birthplace after someone or something we can be proud of. I’m throwing my support behind this crusade. Let’s stop memorializing self-anointed brainiacs who held so many of their contemporaries with perfectly comparable talents in contempt. Let’s emancipate the lovely place where I grew up from its misguided genuflection. This program has a large, invariably smart, creative viewership. You can contribute suggestions for the city’s rechristening on CNN.com/RIPVoltaire, or via #NewHometownforEmoryRuth on Twitter.
Lastly, lest the tip-off be leaked later as some sort of scandal, yes, Pearson Converse is an acquaintance of mine, and has been for some years. So on top of being socially concerned for all of us, I find her outburst personally disappointing.
Um, yes. Talk about personally disappointing. I’d been braced for an onslaught of opprobrium from strangers. Not for this. D&Z saw me downstairs to the table, each taking an arm, as if their mother had become an invalid. They left it to me to bring it up, and I didn’t. We talked, haltingly, of other things. Lying wide-awake that night, I told myself I should be angry, and I kept groping for my fury as I might have searched for a pair of reading glasses I’d mislaid in the sheets. The anger wasn’t to be found. Sorrow alone sat on my chest, crushing my breath like a stone.
By the next morning, with Lucy still abed, the moratorium on the subject was lifted. Clumping about the kitchen in his surgical boot, doggedly organizing breakfast, Wade, typically, tried to remain neutral. D&Z were anything but.
“I don’t see why you’d ever speak to her again,” Zanzibar said.
“We’ve been friends for thirty years,” I said.
“Acquaintances,” Darwin said.
“Don’t,” I said.
“Sorry,” Darwin retreated. “Here. Zanzo made you some toast.”
They were tending me. They were parental.
I was sitting before my cup of coffee, my phone resting on the kitchen table. The device was an instrument of torture.
Zanzibar noticed that I kept staring at it. “You don’t actually think she’s going to call, do you? ‘Oh, it’s ten a.m.! More than anybody, I totally feel like talking to the one person I just trashed for fifteen solid minutes in front of millions of people!’”
“No, obviously she’s not going to call,” I said glumly. “But the prospect of my calling her makes me ill.” Too clearly, I could hear Emory’s cool, indecently collected voice on the other end, in contrast to my stop-start gibberish—since often, when you have too much to say, you can’t say anything. “Besides, what would I tell her?”
“‘Fuck you!’” Zanzibar supplied.
“What good would that do?” I may have instinctively been consulting children on how to proceed because, although Emory and I were middle-aged, our rift was reminiscent of seventh grade.
“I think Zanzo means unloading on her might make you feel better,” Darwin said.
“It wouldn’t,” I said.
“You know perfectly well,” Wade said, bringing me the all-fructose strawberry jam, “she’d see it was you and let the call go to voicemail.”
“Probably,” I said.
“Definitely,” Wade said. After all, my partner was the expert on sidestepping conflict. Satisfied with my cryptic thumbnail, he hadn’t even listened to Emory’s diatribe on CNN—in defiance of my usual instruction to composition students that whenever possible they should rely on original sources.
“And then I’d leave, what?” I said. “Some flustered, babbling message that’s unintelligible.”
“No message,” Wade said.
“If she’s not going to pick up and I’m not leaving a message, there’s no point in making a call in the first place,” I said irritably.
“Maybe you should leave a message,” Zanzibar said. “Write it out first, so you can’t trip over your words. Like I said: ‘Hi, Emory, I just wanted to tell you I’m never speaking to you again.’”
“You don’t phone people to inform them you’re not speaking to them,” I said. “That’s a contradiction in terms. Clearly, you don’t mean it.”
“Text, then!” Zanzibar said in exasperation.
“Right, and then I can text, ‘I’m not texting you, either.’”
“No,” Darwin said, “how about adding ‘and thanks a lot for telling the whole world that my stuck-up kids have delusions of grandeur.’”
For me, the passages of Emory’s treacherous speech that induced rage rather than catatonic depression were the ones about my children. But indulging that wrath would only exacerbate my son’s own sense of personal betrayal. I noted tritely instead, “Dependence on texting is one reason your generation is so ham-fisted at conducting relationships.”
“Don’t you oldies have a thing for email?” Darwin said. “So send a long one. Get it out of your system. Lay it out. Take your time. Have your say. Get in all the one-liners that most people think of only after it’s too late.”
“Trust me, email is the road to perdition,” I said. “I’ve seen it at the department repeatedly. The first party bashes out one version of events. The other party bashes out a different version. The back-and-forth accelerates until what started as a small disagreement blows up into all-out war.”
“Seems to me you and Auntie Em are at all-out war already,” Zanzibar said.
“But this isn’t only about right now,” I said. “It’s about a lifetime. I’ve known her twice as long as you’ve been alive, sweetie. You keep pushing me to walk away, but never speaking to each other again would leave a ragged edge. It would afflict me like one of those scratchy care labels at the back of the neck, and not only for a week or two, but for years. Possibly forever. And I’d always be afraid of running into her.”
“Why shouldn’t she be more afraid of running into you?” Darwin asked.
“Because I’m not a hundred percent sure she’ll think she’s done anything wrong,” I said. “I can’t think of a time she’s ever thought she did something wrong. It’s a certain kind of person. Hell, it’s most people.”
“Are you any different?” Wade said, topping up my coffee.
“Maybe not,” I said. “Like, I still don’t think what I said in that creative writing class was wrong. It wasn’t wrong; it was stupid.”
Having finally gotten up, Lucy was clambering into her chair to pour milk on her cereal. “Mommy said the S-word!” she declared. But her heart wasn’t in the admonition. She didn’t understand why, but she could tell we weren’t afraid of her anymore.
“That’s right, Lucy,” I said wearily. “Get used to it.” Reputational oblivion had a liberating side. I was impervious.
“If you did talk to her,” Wade said, “wouldn’t you risk getting another earful? You don’t want to have to go through that CNN thing twice.”
“As usual,” I said, “your solution is avoidance.”
“I just don’t want her messing with your head any more than she’s messed with it already, sport,” he said, placing a warm hand on the side of my neck. “There’s a place for avoidance. You don’t walk through the middle of an oil slick.”
“Only one option is off the table, folks. And that’s doing nothing.” I tapped the phone case pensively. “After thirty years, there has to be a way to the other side of this.”
“You’re not seriously considering forgiving her, are you?” Zanzibar asked.
“Forgiveness of the unrepentant is meaningless,” I said. “One hand clapping.”
“Who knows,” Darwin said, “maybe she’ll surprise you and be super-sorry. Maybe she figured she was just doing her job, and she expected you’d understand that, like always. Maybe the whole thing was tongue in cheek, like, a performance, a fake-out. Maybe she thought you’d see she was playacting. Sucking up to her bosses at the station. I mean, she doesn’t actually believe this shit, does she?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“She’s been into this humoring the head honchos for years, hasn’t she?” Darwin said. “So maybe she had no idea that this time you’d take it seriously and she’d hurt your feelings.”
“Calling for the students to sue?” Zanzibar said incredulously. “Never mind hurting Mom’s feelings. Em set the dogs on her! As if we aren’t broke enough already!”
“Okay, okay, point taken,” Darwin said. He’d always adored Emory, and this situation was hard on him, too. “I only mean—maybe she didn’t realize she was going too far.”
We’d knocked out an unavailing phone call, a halting voicemail message, a texting tit-for-tat, and an escalating email feud bound to end in nuclear holocaust. One form of communication remained, looming above the others as maximally terrifying.
you owe me this much, I texted quickly before I could chicken out. meet me face-to-face.