The agent of MP’s undoing opposes the very progress she enabled.
I begin with embarrassment. I never imagined that my memoir, Mania, would reach even a handful of misfits, much less become an enduring bestseller. The memoir’s success was a zeitgeist thing. A critical mass had had enough. Widespread horror over the rolling effects of the Pfizer “vaccine”—still with us today—produced a social sea change, gradual at first, which gathered into a tsunami right when my first-person pleading that we all get a grip hit a host of laptops in 2023. The rest is history. Not only was I lucky; we’ve all been lucky. The proverbial pendulum has swung back.
I worry that The Atlantic intended to commission a self-aggrandizing look back at how I single-handedly returned the Western world to rationality. Yet I doubt we need any more theatrical expressions of relief that we once again expect a leader like President Andrew Yang to be knowledgeable and intelligent—indeed, to be more knowledgeable and intelligent than the abundance of the population he governs. Yes, we now enshrine competence as a quality both real and requisite for a variety of positions whose remits can affect the well-being of millions. Yes, there is such a thing as dumb, and rarely have we employed the word and its affiliates with such gleeful, and I would say excessive, abandon. To my surprise, the insults we dispensed so casually before 2010—and now employ with relish—have retained to my ear a degree of the unutterable quality they acquired during the reign of MP. I’m inclined to use a word such as “idiot” sparingly and reserve it for the rare cretin who truly deserves the label.
For I’m bound to frustrate my loyal readers here. I am deeply uneasy with a regime grown overcorrective. It’s one thing to return to standardized examinations for university admissions, quite another for administrators to so ruthlessly weed out underperforming students as they adjust to college life. Most of these poor kids spent the bulk of their school years in the educational desert of Mental Parity. Let’s cut them some slack. Furthermore, it’s one thing to restore IQ tests to public schools, quite another to elevate the test’s results to the exalted position they enjoy today.
Lodging students’ IQs in their transcripts is reasonable enough. But why boldface IQs at the top of every tax return? Why should employers be required by law to hire the statistically most intelligent job applicant when IQ takes no account of other qualities, such as affability or punctuality, that might recommend a candidate for the position? What’s the justification for putting a consumer’s IQ on the upper-right-hand corner of every credit card? Smarter people aren’t necessarily better credit risks. Clever folks can be unconscionable, as well as crafty at escaping their obligations. Yet higher IQs now qualify home buyers for larger mortgages and raise customers’ credit limits. I can’t be the only one who finds the current proposal in Congress that all Americans get their IQs tattooed on the inside of their forearms to have a forbidding historical precedent.
Socially, too, I much preferred the days when we met someone new and quietly appraised for ourselves whether this acquaintance seemed on the ball. To me, the modern convention at parties of introducing your IQ along with your name seems terribly gauche. The very first mandatory input on dating websites is those two or three indelible digits. But pairing participants whose IQs are both 122 is surely less likely to end in romance than the old algorithms’ matching of shared hobbies and who likes spicy food.
The Mania readership may recall that I don’t regard myself as all that bright. My friend (or so I imagined) Emory Ruth once pooh-poohed this claim as an inverted vanity: I’m so smart that I know I’m not smart. Well, this isn’t in my interest to publish, and I’m sure to disappoint my admirers here, but I took that test in 2024—not that I had any choice—and the result was stark: 107. Pretty crap. Pretty middle-of-the-pack. Having for years advertised my run-of-the-mill intellect, I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t. I was stung. I’m even dumber than I thought.
That 107 score put my employers at the Old-School New School in an awkward position. According to the Texas university’s bylaws, the administration was forbidden to keep me on the faculty. It took a snowstorm of paperwork to exempt me, then another snowstorm to award me that honorary doctorate. But being something of a celebrity at OSNS, I got special treatment. Less notable employees across the country haven’t been granted such indemnity. I can’t look on these mass layoffs as a legitimate source of national pride.
Granted, I selected the father of my older two children for his high IQ. In our recent past, that damned me as a eugenicist, a charge I’ve come to see as fair. Yet my once eccentric determination to bear clever offspring has grown standard, and we milk genetically intelligent men like cows. Indeed, we’re in danger of regarding the highly intelligent of both sexes as a precious communal resource. At what point do we decide that people whose IQs lie in the right-hand tail of the bell curve don’t belong to themselves?
Many qualities distinguish us besides mental endowment. Generosity, loyalty, kindness, and common sense. The capacities for wonder and joy. A sense of humor. A sense of honor. Grace, clemency, and candor. Diligence, conscientiousness, and a willingness to sacrifice for others. Smart people can be intolerable, while many a buddy with a middling intellect is still great company and may go to the ends of the earth to save your bacon. Whatever I have to offer, it wasn’t measured by that test.
Accordingly, I oppose the new electoral dispensation, whose innocuous tag “the Fitness Proviso” makes it sound like some healthy nationwide commitment to jumping jacks. Still whizzing through the last of our state legislatures, the constitutional amendment requiring all registered voters and all candidates for state and federal office to have a minimum IQ of 115 will eliminate 84 percent of the population from participating in the democratic process. That’s not democracy as I understand it, but benevolent dictatorship—and I challenge whether dictatorship is ever benevolent, really. Yes, I get the stock line. Stupid people elect stupid leaders who make stupid decisions. But intelligent people may elect intelligent people who still make stupid decisions. This is one of them. Even more do I oppose the extremist campaign spearheaded by the elite-of-the-elite to raise that 115 limit to more like 130—whereby 2 percent of the American population would control the whole shebang.
Many of our betters in the cognitive elect dismiss dissenters like me as merely embittered. My self-respect has suffered a body blow because I didn’t make the cutoff. Members of my generation with quantifiably poor judgment are accustomed to having a say, so I’m naturally disgruntled that my tiny electoral power could be taken away. But I’ll get used to being disenfranchised in time, and I’ll grow to appreciate the rationality of the system when it results in a country that runs so much more smoothly. Children growing up under the new protocol will take it as a given that if their IQ is below the threshold, they simply don’t have the goods to exercise authority for the benefit of all. Aldous Huxley got here way back in 1932: the proles will know their place, and they will love their place. Tyrants are always trying to convince the peons how lucky they are to be spared the onus of control over their own fate.
But I prefer chaos, uncertainty, and dysfunction to any order that works too well. Historically, elites reliably confuse “the benefit of all” and their own interests. We are about to install a high priesthood. I grew up with a high priesthood, and “the elders” to a man were creeps.
Mind, my opposition to the Fitness Proviso is a thorn in the side of my employers. The OSNS law faculty helped draft that amendment, which the administration expects me to champion. But it’s my nature to be a thorn in the side. I was uncomfortable with yanking my compatriots toward my way of thinking only to find myself drowning in the mainstream. The more I face into the prevailing winds, the more I feel like myself.
Acquainted with my family, readers of Mania might appreciate a brief Christmas-letter-style update. Be assured that even if the 28th Amendment is fully ratified, my two older children will be allowed to vote and hold elective office, though I’d be surprised if either of those kids runs for president. At twenty-seven, Darwin—whose IQ turns out to be 144, about what I expected—has joined a group at the reconstituted MIT who are chucking all the politically manipulated computer models and rebuilding climate science from the ground up. He tells me they have absolutely no preordained conclusions about CO2, anthropogenic influences, fossil fuels, or anything else. The group will be as delighted to confirm current orthodoxies as to overthrow them. That means his colleagues are, he assures me, real scientists.
Do I suffer from an unconscious sexism or a prejudice against the arts? Because I was surprised that Zanzibar tested as even brighter than her brother at 151. That doesn’t mean she’s happy. Oh, the art world is her oyster, and the first play she’s finally pleased with is on its way to Broadway. But beauty has proved a curse. The fact that young men with dazzling stats on the upper-right-hand corner of their credit cards throw themselves at her feet has had a detrimental effect on her character. Between these lavish attentions and her elevated status as a member of the “.1 percent” with an IQ of over 145—the traditional threshold of “genius,” as which even her brother missed qualifying by a whisker—she’s become quite the prima donna. This is a terrible thing for a mother to admit, but in my darkest moments I sometimes debate which would improve my daughter as a human being more: a cerebral hemorrhage or an acid attack. (Sorry, Zanzo. Only joking.)
As for my third child, the restraining order barring me from contact with Lucy wasn’t lifted until she was eighteen anyway. I’ve come to appreciate how many other parents were also separated from their children over some minor infraction of MP doctrine. These social services interventions were most common among the well educated. The media have already gone to town on the scandal of genetically bright children denied the nurturing not only of gifted-and-talented programs but of their own credentialed parents (themselves often demoted or sacked). Although not in the gifted category, Lucy is yet another MP casualty. When she finally took the test, she came in at a respectable 112—considerably above average—but she squandered her intelligence on not learning to read, which unfortunately she got very good at. A doting father but never much of a reader himself, Wade tells me that she’s finally absorbed the rudiments despite herself, but her comprehension is still weak.
Lucy is suffering from psychic whiplash. Her strict adherence to MP principles and her overeager policing of her peers now count as strikes against her. Her schooling, if you could call it that, was criminally deficient. Her brain was bound much as the Chinese once bound feet. Beyond our limited tutoring sessions, she has never experienced rigor, and her stunted version of aspiration was to fixate on becoming a Mental Parity Champion.
There are no more Mental Parity Champions. Worse, at the very point she finished high school, barriers to university admission were reerected like fury. Suddenly, the SAT was back, and Lucy had never taken a pop quiz, much less a three-hour exam. The few high school seniors covertly tutored at home could take their pick of the Ivy League. Everyone else who’d relied on the pandemonium of formal education was screwed.
Lucy and her peers have reason to feel resentful. I’ve heard all too much snide talk about “Generation Moron,” an appellation that’s grossly unfair. Those young people didn’t conceive this ideology. Lucy and her ilk are its victims.
Lastly, there’s one character who played a dominant part in Mania whose circumstances I’ve failed to update here. I intend to keep it that way. So I’m keeping a recent chance encounter to myself. Though not much happened, this crossing of paths feels intensely private.
I’ll take refuge in generalities, then. Since my memoir’s publication, I’ve heard from countless others who’ve lost lifelong comrades due to a blowup over Mental Parity—always entailing a repudiation of doubters by true believers. If you’ve been disavowed over politics only to find that the pain of betrayal has lasted well past the demise of the doctrine itself, you’re not alone. For me, anyway, winning the ideological war (and then some, I’m afraid) hasn’t ameliorated in the slightest my sense of injury over Emory Ruth’s denunciation of my character, my motives, and my morals, as well as her disavowal of thirty years of what I used to think was a friendship.
Pearson Converse is the author of Mania (HarperCollins, 2024) and the current occupant of the Old-School New School’s Benedict Cumberbatch Chair.
Well, that’s the edited copy; I’m told the article is scheduled for next month’s issue. While I gather that having one’s text rejigged if not mangled is par for the course in freelance journalism, wrangling with The Atlantic has been frustrating enough that I doubt I’ll accept one of these assignments again. The original was far more scathing about the Fitness Proviso. At least I held the line and refused to go on and on about how much better things are now (I’m not so sure). I also resisted Pat’s urging that I be more personally confiding. (That penultimate para drove her crazy.) I’ve confided my butt off. I’ve earned the right to my own business.
As for confiding in this journal, I just idly combed through the files for early 2025 to discover that I never recorded how it went when I finally visited Wade and Lucy’s apartment two and a half years ago. I must have found the evening too saddening to rehearse once I got back home. A few details I can still dredge up, then:
Overall, the occasion was strained. It was hardly my idea to absent myself from Lucy’s upbringing, but I could see how her subjective experience was one of abandonment. She didn’t seem happy to see me, and I suspect she finally agreed to the meeting after refusing to see me for some eighteen months only under heavy pressure from her father.
If she’s decidedly not thick in a mental sense, she is a bit thick in the physical one. Her body still has that bluntness, the quality of an immovable object, and I guess that made me the irresistible force. In her spirit of wariness, suspicion, and belligerence, she’s more my daughter than she knows.
“So I guess you wrote some sort of book?” she charged. A book was an enemy.
“Yes,” I said. “Mostly telling the story of our family.”
“What would you know about the story of our family?” she said. “You haven’t been here.”
“I wasn’t allowed to be here, Lucy,” I said. “If anything, that was even more terrible for me than it was for you.”
“It hasn’t been terrible for me,” she said. “I haven’t missed you.”
“Lucy!” Wade exclaimed. “Lots of Lucy’s classmates in her community college have heard of Mania, and some of them have even read it.”
“I haven’t. I don’t plan to read it, either.” If my younger daughter was being offered a degree of cachet through her mother’s celebrity, she didn’t want it. “Books are . . .”—in her hesitation, I recognized a deeply ingrained mental stop, which gave the word great brute force when she got it out—“dumb.”
That can’t be the sum of our interchange after mother and daughter were coercively parted by the state for seven years, thanks to which we were personally alienated even longer, but it’s all I can recall. I didn’t hold out much hope for the flowering of our relationship at that time, and sure enough, Lucy has never answered my breezy emails or texts since, much less thanked me for my ignorant birthday presents every July. That’s not only CPS’s fault but mine. I’ve sometimes wondered whether I beat myself up too much over this, but the truth is that I haven’t beaten myself up over it nearly enough. I deserve Lucy’s scorn. I gave D&Z preferential treatment because they were smart (and now we’re systematizing the same discrimination in the whole country). I can’t blame her for being hostile.
I was glad Wade and I had kept in sporadic touch with all those emails we scrupulously deleted, but I hadn’t seen Wade in person for almost eight years. He seemed to have aged more than that. He’d broadly maintained his figure, but his physique had lost its chiseled quality; now careworn, his equine features recalled less the racing stallion of yesteryear than a gelding at pasture. He was still kind, though. When we allowed Lucy to excuse herself to her room, he said, “Maybe I was wrong, always urging you to keep your mouth shut. Look at you. You’re famous.”
“Well, that ‘to thine own self be true’ stuff doesn’t necessarily pay off. I came within a hair of being a dumpster-diving bag lady in perpetuity.”
“You hung tough. You stood your ground. You made a difference.”
“It wasn’t just me and my ‘dumb’ book. The time had come. Maybe a few months later, but the tide would have turned without me. Besides, I didn’t have any choice, did I? You know what I’m like. I don’t know how to be otherwise.”
“You mean, you don’t know how to be stupid?”
I laughed. “I think we can restore ‘otherwise’ to its lowly grammatical status of yore. And I definitely know how to be stupid.”
“Pigheaded, more like it,” he said. “Listen, I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time about going ballistic at VU. Maybe I could have been more understanding. More supportive.”
“I put us all in a dreadful position. That temper tantrum cost us our house, you two of our three kids, me all three kids. Given the circumstances, you were remarkably temperate. So how’s your ankle?” I’d noticed his limp when he answered the door.
“It hurts.”
“In the end, you paid a bigger price for that nonsense than I did.” Wade was involved in a tree-planting operation for a new green belt around Voltaire, but his role was advisory: which trees are hardy, grow fast, are native to the region, and play well with others. He no longer got dirt under his fingernails or surveyed a landscape from the treetops. “Hey, I’m curious,” I added. “Did the heavies ever bully you into taking an IQ test?”
“Yeah.” He sounded sheepish.
“I picture you hauled off hog-tied and screaming.”
“Came close to that. I threw the test, first time. They noticed. So many of the answers were wrong that it was, like, statistically impossible unless I was giving wrong answers on purpose. Like, picking at random with my eyes closed would have given me a higher score.”
“They made you take it again?”
“Yup. Second time, I guess they convinced me that if I crossed the magic number, it would come with perks that could be useful for Lucy. And, you know. She’s gonna need help.”
“Did you? Cross the magic number?”
“Uh.” More embarrassment. “Yeah.”
“So, out with it. What did you score?”
“Come on, scout, you know I don’t like this stuff.”
“We lived together for thirteen years. Don’t be coy.”
He shrugged. “One twenty-nine.”
“Ha! I find that incredibly satisfying. I’m not sure why.”
“Doesn’t mean anything.”
“It sure means something nowadays. You know, I didn’t cross the magic number.”
“That’s impossible.”
“It’s more than possible. What makes me who I am has nothing to do with smarts.”
I caught Wade up on D&Z. I wasn’t going to hold my breath for Zanzibar’s honoring of an old familial tie, but I assured him that Darwin would gladly get back in touch (he has). We didn’t need to address it directly, but it was clear the moment we saw each other that we weren’t happening as a couple. It had been too long, we were going different directions, I was living a good part of the year in Austin, and although I hadn’t told him yet, by then Sam Nilsson and I had already become an item.
As for the story I cruelly withheld from Pat and The Atlantic readership, it’s still super-fresh, so maybe I should get it down while I can still lay hands on the particulars.
It must have been three or four months ago when I agreed to participate in a panel in Philadelphia before a large live audience—you know, that big hall with the weird chandeliers. As usual, it was easier to agree to the appearance way in advance, because I’m always indulging this fiction that distant commitments never arrive. Rule of thumb: never agree to do anything you wouldn’t be willing to do tomorrow. Or five minutes from now, for that matter.
After doing dozens and dozens of these events following the release of Mania, I think I started turning them down at last because I’d gotten sick of making the same points. As time went on, too, those points began to sound self-evident—since that’s what happens when a house of cards falls. (“Look! It was only a house of cards! Why didn’t we notice before that it was only a house of cards?”) Sure, at the outset there was a big battle to wage. But once the fight was won, beating up on the last of MP’s beleaguered defenders started to feel a little mean.
Yet this Fitness Proviso business is so upsetting that lately I’ll sometimes say yes, so long as the subject up for discussion isn’t how awful the old regime was but whether all these new measures to restore intellectual meritocracy go too far. Back in the days when I was doing three of these events a week, I was good about remembering to ask who would appear alongside me, but I was rusty, and this time I didn’t vet the other participants in advance. Which was idiotic. Don’t do that again.
So the “distant commitment” did its inexorable thing, until I was obliged to show up three nights ago. I wasn’t in the mood. But I don’t crap out on people. My only passive-aggressive gesture was walking into the greenroom way less than the requested hour in advance.
I swear Emory turned toward the door as if we’d only just finished off another box of merlot last week. Fair enough, Emory being Emory, she probably had asked who else was on the panel and was therefore girded for my arrival. That didn’t wholly explain the smoothness, the mildness, the untroubled pleasantness with which she met my eyes, after having ripped my guts out the last time we saw each other eleven years ago. But then, her trademark has always been unruffleability.
Boy, was I ruffled. I broke out in a sweat. My heartbeat soared, and I knew without checking that if I held out my hand it would shake. I also knew that anything I might say in that moment would be incoherent. It wouldn’t remotely resemble whatever I might have contrived beforehand had I any warning that you-know-who was on the panel. By the way, I can always summon exactly how I felt three nights ago, because it’s the same way I feel when I spot my mother.
Christ, Emory didn’t miss a beat. Not a beat. Lightly touching my shoulders, she gave each cheek an airy European kiss. “Pearson!” she exclaimed. “How nice to see you.”
Rewinding this, I should have said, Is it? Is it “nice”? Is it really? Instead I said, “Yes.” Which didn’t make any sense. But that’s the way these things go.
Menopause may have put a millimeter on her midsection, but otherwise at fifty-five Emory hasn’t changed much. Her hair hasn’t thinned as much as mine has, and she must be doing okay financially to afford yet another short, high-maintenance do. Those few crinkles around the eyes just make her look a little slyer, more game for anything, more mischievous—as if she’s chortled her way through the last decade-plus because poor Pearson Converse never cottoned on to the fact that the over-the-top earful in her living room was a practical joke. As ever, she was wearing a sleek monochrome dress whose styling drew attention not to the talent of its designer but to the faultless figure underneath. Likewise the smashing heels: they made you look not at the two-tone leather but at Emory’s legs.
I could see her quickly appraising the situation: Pearson’s white shirt, perfectly crisp only minutes before though Emory couldn’t have known that, was wilted and clinging wetly in patches. Pearson looked paralyzed. It was therefore up to the eternally poised Emory Ruth to take charge, ease the situation, and make this greenroom encounter and subsequent public debate flow as gracefully as possible.
“Hey, I never got a chance to congratulate you on the book,” she said.
Imaginary response: You never got a “chance” because you walked out of my life forever, you fucking cunt.
Real life: “Oh, that. Yeah, it’s been out for a while.”
“I gather it sold pretty well!”
It didn’t sell “pretty well,” it sold tens of millions of copies, pal.
“Uh-huh. Nothing to complain about.”
“Come over and pull up a chair. We’ve got half an hour to kill. Honestly, the only reason we have to show up so early is to keep the event managers from getting hysterical.”
She introduced me to the three other people around the table. Abstractly, yes, yes, of course I know it’s canny to show up for a panel on the early side, the better to ingratiate yourself with the opposition (get your foes to see you as a lovely person with feelings) and especially with the moderator, whose biases (“Why don’t I call on that charming Pearson Converse, who was so warm and unpretentious in the greenroom!”) can sway the course of a discussion. Having always been an ace at this stuff, Emory had duly buddy-buddied the trio, all three of whom already acted as if she were their long-lost cousin. Me, I’d arrived as late as I could get away with, and beforehand I never give these appearances a moment’s thought. (I don’t think I wing it out of arrogance. I think the problem is not giving a shit.) But I was suddenly so incapacitated—I could almost hear the synapses in my brain shorting out, as if someone had just poured milk on a bowl of Rice Krispies—that I wished this once I’d lined up a few killer points ahead of time. I had no idea how I was going to get through the evening without throttling this woman in front of fifteen hundred onlookers.
On reflection, it’s noteworthy that Emory didn’t dwell any further on Mania, in which she features so prominently. With anyone else, I might infer a sense of discomfiture, or maybe a silent acknowledgment that the memoir tangles so intimately with our relationship that we could hardly get into any of its nitty-gritty in the company of strangers. With Emory, I infer instead: she hasn’t read it. I daresay that, just like Lucy, she has no intention of ever reading it.
For I’ve had to accept that one charge in Emory’s bonfire of my vanities in 2016 contained an element of truth: there was always a hierarchy to our relationship, sometimes subtle, sometimes more glaring. During the prolonged leisure she herself generously provided me for contemplation of the matter, I concluded that, whether consciously or instinctively, Emory tried to maintain that hierarchy, because who wouldn’t rather remain the one on top? She sheltered me in high school and extended her popularity to me like an umbrella. She took me into her family as an orphan. She found me my first adjunct jobs, and it was her father who greased the wheels at VU for my instructorship. Of us two, she was socially the far more agile, and her looks have always held universal appeal, while mine are more of an acquired taste. She was the one who became a media darling. What was fascinating in that greenroom: I am now far more famous than she’s ever been, and it didn’t make any difference.
I mention this scrupulously preserved power disparity because it explains why she will never so much as sample that memoir. Reading is an act of submission.
Given Emory’s perfidy, Zanzibar would have counseled that I should have either walked out on the event (thus doing myself reputational damage) or at least assumed the far end of the oval table and buried myself blackly in a magazine. But the rules of common courtesy exert an astonishing influence even on us famed contrarians.
“So—what have you been up to?” I asked.
“Well, I went through a period of downtime,” she said, breezing over what must have been years of ignominy and unemployment. “But believe it or not, I’m back at CNN.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s still a junior position, no screen presence, but I should be able to move up the ranks quickly enough. Funny, I have you to thank for that.”
“How do you figure?”
“As you must be aware, there’s been a huge sorting of the sheep from the goats in the post-MP years. Plenty of folks high up the food chain have been tainted.”
“Only to a point,” I said. “Nowadays, everyone claims they never believed any of that drivel in the first place. You’d think the whole country was one big scheming fifth column for a generation.”
“I know!” she said lightly. “I ghosted an editorial for Anderson Cooper about that. Anyway, turns out your uploading of our ‘retard’ video was the best thing that ever happened to me.” (Now that “retard” has been refurbished—I never thought I’d say this—I’m getting tired of the word.) “The Calumny of IQ has become a modern-day Mein Kampf. So our ridicule of that disgraced masterpiece is a badge of honor. As you said, these days everyone pretends they always thought MP was claptrap. I’d never have wowed CNN by just claiming I’d always thought MP was claptrap, too. You shored up my bona fides. I can’t think how I can ever repay you.” Yeah, she said this with a straight face—though the corners of her mouth twitched.
“But CNN bigwigs would know better than anyone what a cheerleader you were.” I was flabbergasted they’d rehired her, and Emory’s gratitude was taunting.
“We settled on a market view,” she said. “Supply and demand. I was the supply.”
“Meaning,” I said, “journalism is purely in the business of telling people what they want to hear?”
“Can we take a moment to discuss the seating?” the moderator, Gail Something, interrupted gently. “I know this event is loosely structured as a debate, but I’d like us to maintain a convivial tone. I thought it would look less adversarial to seat both Emory and you, Pearson, on the same side of the stage.”
“Hold it,” I said to Emory. “You’re defending the Fitness Proviso? And all this singeing of IQ into everybody’s forehead with a branding iron?”
“A tiny, tiny number on the inside of the wrist,” Emory brushed off. “Totally discreet. And conditioning enfranchisement on high IQ beats only letting people vote who own property. Or just men, or just white people. I only draw the line at nitwits.”
“Now, ladies!” Gail intervened. “Let’s save the sparring for the audience—”
“But on both radio and TV,” I said, “you got up on your high horse for years—!”
“Oh, so what,” Emory dismissed. “It’s a new day. Cultures evolve.”
“Never mind culture. We’re talking about you, doing another dizzying one-eighty—”
“It’s called rolling with the punches.”
It’s called being a hypocrite. Or it’s called having no real convictions to begin with, which conveniently precludes failing to live up to them. It’s called having no soul.
“Pearson, I’m sorry to have to bring this up,” Gail intruded again, sounding pained. “It’s delicate. But I’m afraid it may arise in the Q and A, and I’d hate for you to feel put on the spot. There’s an atrocious rumor online that you didn’t make the Fitness Proviso cutoff. Might it be judicious to lay that charge to rest right up front? Otherwise, you’re sure to be accused of merely being resentful that you wouldn’t personally be able to vote. You can make a stronger argument if you make it clear that you’re over the threshold, just like the rest of the panel. In fact . . . if your test score is especially strong, you might cite it exactly. That would shut critics in the audience right up. That’s what I’d do if I were you.”
For three years I’ve kept this scandalous factoid under wraps, and this was the first I’d heard that word had finally leaked from OSNS admin. Though Pat urged me strenuously to delete that paragraph, outing myself in The Atlantic next month will nip the foofaraw in the bud. There’s no better way to kill the momentum of a rumor than to announce it’s true.
So I told Gail cheerfully, “My test score isn’t especially strong. I didn’t make the cutoff. Not by a long shot.”
The whole table went quiet.
“And I am resentful that soon I could not be allowed to vote anymore,” I continued. “Why shouldn’t I say so?”
Also gung ho about the Fitness Proviso, Emory’s male debating partner inserted nervously, “Can she even appear in this event? In this venue? Under the auspices of Intelligence Squared?”
“I’m sure we can make an exception,” Gail said hastily, if with little confidence. “But meantime, maybe on reflection, Pearson, it would be better if you didn’t announce your IQ.”
“One hundred and seven,” I said, too loudly.
“My, my,” Emory said with a smile. “You always said you were dumb.”
“Never you mind, Pearson,” Gail said, patting my hand. “You’re a public figure with gazillions of fans. Everything will be fine.” She didn’t believe it for a minute.
Emory effortlessly dominated the whole event. On the rare occasions when she allowed the other four of us to talk, she came across as terribly gracious. She made the Fitness Proviso seem rational, fair, and sensible by reiterating these qualities in her voice, manner, and presence. With feigned modesty, she deflected the matter at first but still managed to insinuate that she herself had made the cutoff and then some at 134. Since it’s looked for ages as if we opponents of the 28th Amendment are fighting a losing battle, she was therefore slated to become one of the audience’s new overlords. During the death grip of Mental Parity, she’d embodied the intelligent face of stupidity; now she embodied the affable face of tyranny. She was funny. She was relaxed. She was engaging, lighthearted, and self-possessed. The subtext ran, Look, if the likes of me will be making the decisions from now on, obviously life under the thumb of an intellectual illuminati won’t be so bad. Though the content of what she said constituted the polar opposite of what she espoused eleven years ago, stylistically nothing had changed. Maybe for Emory, style had always been the point—though the substance of what she tossed off just as winningly in the 2010s ruined my children’s education, destroyed my lover’s health and livelihood, and exiled me to living out of trash cans for two years, so I might have expected to be undercharmed. Instead, I’m ashamed to record that I chuckled at her wisecracks along with everyone else, just as I did in high school.
One crowd-pleaser was a set piece, and I’m sure Emory had delivered it before:
“Honestly, you guys must have seen some of those Times Square clips, in which a videographer offers American passersby a dollar if they can name a single continent. And they can’t. I mean, these poor chumps can’t name a single continent, not even for money. Or they’ll answer ‘Alaska’ or ‘New Jersey.’ Then the interviewer asks, ‘What’s Obama’s last name?’ One woman is stumped, while her friend thinks Obama’s last name is ‘Care.’ Then there’s the wracking brainteaser, ‘If you travel sixty miles per hour for one hour, how far do you get?’ Answers include ‘I don’t know, I’m not good at math’; ‘A mile’; and ‘Two hours.’ Talk about not being good at math? Asked, ‘What’s the biggest number you can think of?,’ another duo chimes, ‘A hundred.’
“Well, until and unless we fully ratify the Twenty-Eighth Amendment, these are the Americans we’re allowing to vote. We even allow them to run for, and God forbid sometimes win, elective office. People who, when you ask who fought in the Civil War, say, ‘America and France’—they’ve been choosing our government! People who, when asked to cite a country that begins with ‘U,’ come up with ‘Yugoslavia,’ ‘Utah,’ and ‘Utopia.’ Or they can’t think of a single country beginning with ‘U,’ when they live in the United States! People who imagine that the U.S. won its independence in 1776 from Korea. Do we want to put determination of our foreign policy in the hands of folks who think Hiroshima and Nagasaki are most famous for ‘judo wrestling’? Who think Israel is Catholic? Who think that the currency of the United Kingdom is the ‘Queen Elizabeth’? Do we really want the most important decisions in this country—about who runs things and how, who goes to prison and for what, even whether we go to war, for pity’s sake—to be made by citizens who think a triangle has four sides, or one side, or no sides? Who, when asked to locate Iran on a map, point to Australia? Who believe that Al Qaeda is ‘a wing of the Masonic order’ and that a ‘mosque’ is some kind of animal? Who can’t tell you the state where Kentucky Fried Chicken was invented? Come on, folks! I mean, I don’t think these dolts should be taken out back and shot, but I sure don’t want them picking our president.”
Wild applause.
I paid especial attention when Emory was called out on her previous MP advocacy. I really ought to have been the panelist who brought her philosophical about-face to the audience’s attention, but Gail got there first.
Emory held up her hands. “Mea culpa! Though the video that Pearson here was kind enough to make public in 2016 testifies that I came full circle—back to a long-standing perception that some folks start out with more marbles than others. Besides, if we didn’t allow ourselves to change our minds, we’d all still be back in that gray egalitarian soup, wouldn’t we?
“On the other hand, I do think we can be overly harsh about Mental Parity, even if it was a mistake with dire repercussions. It was a nice idea. It would be great if its premise were true. It’s awfully unjust, even if the injustice isn’t our doing, that some people are born with smarts and others aren’t. I think I fell in love with the idea of a level playing field. I fell in love with a world in which we’re all blessed with the same talents. In the back of my mind, like a lot of people, I thought if I wished hard enough, like squeezing my eyes before blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, that world would come true. If I acted as if we’re all the same, and chastised people who claimed we weren’t, we would magically be the same. The impulse was anything but malign. It was generous.”
“It was the Inquisition!” someone shouted from the audience. “It was the fucking French Revolution, guillotines and all!”
“Now,” Gail chided, “you’ll all get a chance to contribute during the Q and A.”
“I’ve looked into myself,” Emory went on, “and I think I found MP appealing because I felt guilty. My father was a distinguished academic, my mother a high-flying lawyer. So my considerable genetic heritage is double-barreled. But not because of anything I did. I didn’t earn my gifts. So it seemed only fair to disavow them. In recent years, though, I’ve come to realize that a sharp mind isn’t just an undeserved blessing. It comes with responsibility. Responsibility that I didn’t ask for, either. I wonder if I might be a happier person with a lower IQ—”
“Oh, no, not the ‘happy dope’ trope!” The same heckler.
“Intelligence is a burden,” Emory continued, unruffled. “Sometimes a torture. It entails an obligation to put it to good use. I hope I’m mature enough now to meet that obligation. I’m the first to accept that I have a lot to make up for. And I’m really glad you asked about this, Gail. It’s therapeutic for me to explain my personal journey in public.”
Journey? I thought. You didn’t go anywhere. You set up shop on Carpetbagger Avenue, and you’ve kept that address ever since.
“You are a piece of work.” It took a moment to realize that I’d said that out loud.
But the audience laughed and then burst into an applause punctuated by the odd “You go, girl, Em!” They agreed, all right, but they loved that Emory was a piece of work. My aside only redounded to her glory.
As for my performance, I don’t think I humiliated myself, but I didn’t shine. I kept my head down, while praying for this event to please be over. My observations were plodding. I was too earnest. (Despite the appearance of seriousness at political gatherings, their audiences are the same as audiences everywhere: they want to be entertained. You don’t win by landing a trenchant point but by making the mezzanine laugh.) My boosters would have been disappointed, which helped explain the anomalously short line of people at the end waiting for me to sign Mania. Through the whole event, despite my medaled status as the general who’d led the charge against Mental Parity, Gail turned to me, when she turned to me at all, with a hint of condescension, or pity, or both. She hadn’t forgotten about that 107.
Obviously, I’ve done tons of these appearances, and now that no one’s going to read this but me, I can stop pretending to be so humble. Most of the time, I’m pretty damned good. I’m hardly ever such a wet blanket. But that night I was continually distracted by my utter incredulity that here I was sharing a stage with none other than Emory Fucking Ruth. I was distracted by wanting to impress her, which is an impediment to successfully impressing anybody. I was distracted by being disgusted that I still wanted to impress her. And I was especially distracted by this puzzler: Emory was messing with my head. Why wasn’t I messing with hers? Did she even remember some of the things she’d said to me? That below-the-belt accusation about my attachment to her having always seemed “erotic”? Sure, I retaliated with that YouTube upload, but she went for me first, and she asked for retaliation. Still, I found myself marveling, look at her! Emory wasn’t distracted. Rather than sitting next to a woman she’d torn to pieces and left emotionally for dead—or to “get some help”—she could have been perched beside nothing more distressing than a glass and water pitcher. In the final ten minutes, when nearly all the questions from the audience were addressed to Emory, I was trying to formulate something to myself about shamelessness. The power of it. The advantage.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject of advantage? Deeply held convictions are a ball and chain. Ask Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The only reason my own story came right in the end was lucky timing, because most people who stick by their guns in a merely metaphorical sense end up in debt, in jail, or dead. Maybe I should tell my son, given his namesake: believing in absolutely nothing aside from what everyone else believes in the present is a huge evolutionary asset. Honestly, I found myself—admiring Emory, in a backhanded way.
The book signing being so dismally brief, I arrived back in the greenroom to collect my stuff only a few minutes later than the other panelists, who were chatting vivaciously with Emory, carrying on the discussion we’d had onstage and getting in a few points that Emory’s having totally taken over the whole “debate” had precluded. Once I grabbed my backpack, I guess I could have slunk off, but that would have seemed rude, or anticlimactic, or something; I knew I’d kick myself back at the hotel and order room service for dinner purely in terror of running into Emory again, when, as Darwin pointed out so long ago, Emory should be afraid of running into me. Also, though you’d never guess it from the way the event went, I was supposedly the main draw of this panel, right? I was the one person most of the audience had come to see, and these other four filler figures were riding my coattails. But I sure didn’t feel like the center of attention, and when I committed to at least saying a civil goodbye to a woman with whom I went back four decades, that meant waiting patiently on the outer edges of the garrulous quartet, meekly hoping for an opening with the star of the hour.
At least those few minutes provided me a moment to inspect Emory unobserved, and maybe most of all to inspect myself while observing her. Railing privately against her for years (I’m embarrassed by how many such diatribes rage through this journal), I’ve often imagined what I might say to her face-to-face. It seems the answer is: not much. If I’d found her original conversion to MP confounding, presumably this latest reversal was no less so. But there’s nothing mysterious about Emory as a type. She’s adaptable. She’ll always land on her feet. Had I never uploaded that “retard” video, she’d still somehow have capitalized on the nationwide renunciation of Mental Parity, just as she’d capitalized on its slavish adoption.
What I really pressed myself on was more basic. I wanted to know if I hated her. I sure had reason to. But it turns out you can’t drum up an emotion of that intensity just because you ought to feel it. To my consternation, I found her as disarming as ever. She was striking for a woman in her midfifties, and despite several long years in a discreditable exile that would have put a serious dent in the self-regard of any normal person, she still had that inexplicable and, or so you would think, unjustifiable sense of superiority and entitlement that in the end it’s impossible to fight. Thinking you’re superior and being superior—well, it can be difficult to tell the difference, and the one may be a precondition for the other. The truth was I still liked her. And I still wanted her to like me.
“Say, Pearson,” Emory said, folding her notes into her bag and slipping its strap over her shoulder, “I think they booked us all at the Hyatt. Care to join me for a drink at the bar? Talk about old times?”
“That depends on which old times,” I said pointedly. Over the last three hours, that constituted both the sole allusion to our vicious falling-out and my only good line.
Emory just laughed; rather than undermine me with a comeback, she let me have my moment.
“Merlot, then,” I said. “Sure.”