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January 25, 2006 |
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Impossible but true. Geeks rule. That’s right, the American way of life is under attack and who’s going to save us? None other than the Dungeons and Dragons crowd. Who knew? Six months ago every American girl or boy wanted to grow up and be Lindsey Lohan, Shaquille O’Neal or Ashton Kutcher. Now Bill Gates has become the new American idol. I blame Thomas Friedman. His best selling book “The World Is Flat”, possibly the best read of the past twenty years, postulates the USA is falling behind in the brain race. Friedman is adamant we have to do a better job convincing today’s youth to choose a career path in math, physics, science or computers. The main tenant of his tome, if one can boil 400 pages down to a central thought, is America desperately needs more biotech specialists and fewer art history grads. And that caused the light bulb to turn on. Friedman thinks the future success of the good old USA is in the hands of people who actually studied in college, you know the kind of person I went out of my way to avoid in academia for fear their slave like industry toward getting an education could infect my body like some communicable virus. But a geekier world it is today. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and The Chronicles of Narnia rule the movie world at the box office. On television there’s Freaks & Geeks (or used to be, the show was cancelled by NBC after winning an Emmy), Beauty and the Geek, best described as a reality show where beautiful girls are matched up with guys whose shirts sport a pocket protector, and on ESPN we find the finals of the National Spelling Bee. Speaking of spelldowns, geekdom extended it’s influence to the “Great White Way” where last year’s The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee played to packed houses on Broadway while winning two Tony awards. The problem with today’s “geek is in” society is what happens to those of us left behind. We were jocking it up at the ballyard or chasing members of the opposite sex while today’s new role models were off playing Doom or actually learning something in chemistry lab other than how to make hydrogen sulfide. How do those who used to be “cool” blend in to today’s “get geeky with it” world.
Based upon my one time up close look at uber-geek Bill Gates, a bad haircut is key. It’s also true Mr. Gates, while being the world’s richest dude, isn’t dumping a ton of dough on wardrobe. A sport coat that doesn’t come close to matching the pants being worn seems essential to nerd-vana. The icing on the cake to achieving a “geeky joie de vie”, at least for men, would be copying the moustache sported by the afore mentioned Thomas Friedman. One downer of “geek” life is limiting the social life to Instant Messaging. Geeks have less face time with the opposite sex than a Trappist monk. On rare occasions, when nerd guy actually speaks to a nerd skirt, the conversation is along the lines of, “Have you ever programmed in any of the dead languages like Fortran?” or “Who do you think is the greatest person in the history of the world, JRR Tolkien or Linus Torvalds? And if you aren’t familiar with either when it comes to enlisting in the geek army there’s a really long way to go. |
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