I was reading today’s New York Times and I spotted this in a review of The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth by Alexandra Robbins, a book that sees former high school nerds triumphing in today’s adult culture:
The teen-to-adult turnabout theme isn’t particularly novel. One of its latest incarnations is a forthcoming Warner Brothers film, “Revenge of the Jocks,” about middle-aged former athletes struggling under the yoke of the nerds, their onetime victims.
OK, first of all, I don’t fully agree with the thesis of the book under review — sure, being an ex-nerd is good training for working on drool-inducing Apple products, being a game designer, creating summer tentpole movies, writing bestselling fantasy novels, or devising exotic, mathematically complex ways for Wall Street to be even more parasitical than it already is. If you’re the kind of ex-nerd who can take advantage of any of those opportunities, life is good; if not, your adult life is probably pretty much like your high school life.
But the notion that nerds now run the world is appealingly high-concept to media types who write trend pieces (and trend books) — and now, if that forthcoming movie is any indication, there could be a shift in what’s considered zeitgeisty.
Revenge of the Jocks? Yes, the movie really is on its way; it’ll be directed by the guy who directed Jackass, and a couple of its writers worked on Tropic Thunder. So it could be a hit. And it’s coming out in, um, 2012.
Do you see how well this could fit into media talk about a “man-cession” (male nerds aren’t really men, after all, as every high school bully will tell you)? Do you see how it jibes with statistics showing that the unemployment rate for blue-collar workers is horrendous, while the rate for the college-educated is not that bad? Do you see how it could fit into the tale of Barack Obama the “elitist” — in an election year?
Never mind the fact that the biggest brainiac in the punditocracy — as defined by the fact that he has a Nobel Prize and no other regularly scheduled pundit does — is constantly railing against policies that keep blue-collar people unemployed. Never mind the fact that MSNBC prime-time viewers are well-educated people who want unions to thrive even if they’ll never belong to one. If this movie is a big hit, pundits will see its success as the public’s way of expressing outrage at effete, technocratic, cerebral types like those in the Obama administration (as if the problem is smart people rather than the wrong smart people), and as a certain harbinger of the triumph of the GOP in 2012 (yes, that’ll be true even if Romney is the nominee — maybe he’ll start eating pork rinds or something).
The David Brooks and Maureen Dowd columns will write themselves.
I see an analogue to this in the past: Bruce Springsteen’s song “Glory Days.” Yeah, Bruce is a lefty, and the lyrics to that song are bleak, but the sound of that song, and of “Born in the USA” (despite its skeptical, downbeat lyrics), helped them fit perfectly into the Reagan “morning in America” moment, with its narrative of flag-waving anti-intellectuals with simple notions of heroism triumphing over wussy effete rootless-cosmopolitan nuance-loving liberals.
Springsteen’s mid-’80s jock-gone-to-seed could be 2012’s jock-getting-back-at-Obambi. And if that happens, once again we’ll be warping the real class war to fit a right-wing frame.
Jennifer
And the demonization of using your brain continues apace…
I’ll have the “Gentleman’s Latte” with “Full Release,” please.
Davis X. Machina
The reality of class war in America was summed up by Jay Gould a hundred and forty years ago: “I can always hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
chopper
“This bra bomb better work, Nerdlinger.”
Xecky Gilchrist
This is just what the world needs – a wank story about bullies triumphing over nerds.
chopper
also:
mah nishtanah?
Frankensteinbeck
If they’re trying to bring back traditional masculinity, they’re screwed. Thanks to My Little Pony, that ship has finally sailed. The younger generation has been forced to choose between their insecure masculinity and something they love, and for the first time they’ve broken en masse and chosen the pink ponies.
Thank you, Ms. Faust.
EDIT – Oh, and the pundit ‘Obama is out of touch with the common man’ columns always write themselves. Since when do pundits need actual justification?
Joey Giraud
The “geeks” may be in demand, but their bosses are the jocks. Jocks rule management.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
I suspect this movie will be about as credible and full of depth as Bad Teacher… But it probably is emblematic of the right-wing “Might makes right” approach to life. Besides, those bad ol’ puddy-tats (educated people) hurt our widdle fee-fee’s!
Rick Massimo
Yeah, it’s been almost THREE WHOLE YEARS since the Bush frat-boy administration. I don’t know how they endure the oppression.
Loneoak
It really depends on who you consider a nerd. If you adopt the Patton Oswalt model of nerd you see that nerdosity requires an obsessive attachment to something countercultural, a la otaku. If you happen to channel your otaku powers to something very useful, you have a shot at ruling some small corner of the world. But you’re more likely to end up as Comic Book Guy. Anyway, does anyone really believe that Sergey Brin or the VPs of Goldman Sachs are otaku?
Keith G
Nerds v Jocks. Ho hum. I think the dawning ‘new normal’ is that such status positions are very fluid and that type of labeling is increasingly passé.
Next.
Southern Beale
Here’s my view of the Zeitgeist.
Based on having to go to a company picnic yesterday and being shocked that people seem to have all lost their minds.
srv
If K-thug would go out and drink a few beers with the common folk, he might be more popular. Railing against his fellow Yale-ies at Hampton’s parties isn’t going to win you prom king.
NobodySpecial
Most likely this thing will gross somewhere between The Fountainhead and Battlefield Earth and will leave no visible scar on pop culture.
In the meantime, there will still be 8 million accounts on World of Warcraft and almost 300 million iPods loose in the world. Nerddom’s here to stay, gentlebeings. You have Martin Sheen in your video games and Morgan Freeman narrating science programs. That’s a tipping point.
Brachiator
This isn’t much different from standard TV or movie fare, which typically pitches to the sweet spot of American anti-intellectualism.
The ideal TV show is about a Jim Belushi regular guy with a hot wife who disdains everything effete and elite.
But the entertainment industry is more venal than political. The may not hire Charlie Sheen (for now), but they have no problem developing a movie about squandering your talent and blowing all your money on drugs and hookers and living happily ever after, if it will sell tickets.
Which reminds me, anyone see “Bad Teacher” this weekend?
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
motherfuck john hughes in fiery hell.
and all the idiotic melodramatic 80s movies that made everyone and everything so archetypal.
Frankensteinbeck
NobodySpecial:
I haven’t seen their sales figures, which will remain artificially inflated right up until the gold farmers realize they’re trying to sell to each other, but I think WoW has started it’s death spiral. I’ve played the game on and off for a few years, and the newbie zones are empty now. If you’re not bringing in new players you’re slowly bleeding old ones.
Spaghetti Lee
a wank story about bullies triumphing over nerds.
Damn, and I thought they already released Atlas Shrugged.
Like some have said, I don’t think this matters much anymore. The “jocks” all own laptops and ipods and go see superhero movies and take their kids to see Harry Potter. Maybe the sort of completely clueless meathead who thinks all this internet business is just a passing fad will take some comfort in this movie, but is that guy even voting for Obama in the first place?
Southern Beale
Sorry, corrected link on my blogwhore is here.
ice9
Robbins’ work is shoddy. She’s half ethical–some cits and stats and method–but the rest is popular fluff, trend-story leaps and weasel words and a very high number of suspiciously perfect episodes in which she was there when uncorroboratable things happened, first-name subjects, etc. “The Overachievers” crosses that line a bunch of times. I read it with other high-school teacher colleagues, all of us teachers of very similar kids to the ones she studies, and came to a long-run conclusion that she’s another one of those modern fake-sciency trend-whores. Ignore her.
ice9
NobodySpecial
@FRankensteinbeck: Yes, it’s finally on the way down. (As an old EQ player, I still don’t see how it ever got that big to begin with.) Even if we assume 25-30% of the accounts are fraudulent though, you’ve still got enough people to sell mulitple platinum albums with enough left over to fill a dozen football stadiums. I expect a lot of them will move to new games, and their kids will probably get the MMO habit as well, if they haven’t already from Farmville.
Ghanima Atreides
pardon for the OT, but i’d rather not append this to a libertarian-licker post.
13-D chess rules.
Obama slips DREAM Act amnesty past Congress
bring on the poutrage.
patrick II
“Wag the Dog”, released in 1997 was a movie that I have always thought was underestimated for the affect its cynical view of the president had on the American public. It’s basic premise was that the president was trumping up minor foreign bad guys to start wars that would distract voters from the fact the president was having an affair.
The bad guy the real president was going after at the time was Osama bin Laden, who turned out not to be such a minor bad guy after all.
cat48
Relax, Steve! They started writing crap like this during the campaign. They usually say “cerebral”. Besides, the stereotype that the Right uses infers he can’t speak without a teleprompter, remember? Also, he’s always on the basketball court or golf course, instead of doing his job they say. It is difficult to label him or they already would have.
Katie5
Most of these books stereotype nerds by focusing on one subset: the libertarian Silicon Valley successful computer nerd (geek? I forget the exact way John Hodgman characterizes them). But there’s lots more types.
I think we need a typology of nerds.
(going to see if the site supports embeds and try it with the Hodgman video:)
(guess not)
AAA Bonds
I kept seeing one of those content-share “headlines” saying “Coke is about to cost a little bit more”, but I clicked and it was the soda so no probs!!
Davis X. Machina
@ katie5:
You’re lucky if the site supports ASCII.
ML
Geeks, jocks, movies, 2012, and Obama?
What the hell are you talking about?
AAA Bonds
By the way, one of the best predictors of both happiness and earning power later in life is how many friends you had in high school. Even one additional friend makes a big difference. (This study controlled for demographics such as wealth of the kid’s parents.)
I’m surprised at how easily it gets tossed around that the popular kids in high school grow up to work for the unpopular kids.
The usual case is the opposite: those who were socially in charge in high school end up REALLY in charge after high school.
Southern Beale
“Bob Roberts” was the same way. That movie so accurately predicted the Tea Party that I’d almost accuse Tim Robbins of being a time traveler. Funny thing is, I remember seeing that movie when it came out and thinking it was too over the top. Revolutionary War costumes? Hilarious!
I went back and read some archived reviews of the film and sure enough, everyone else said the same thing. Way out of bounds, wow, this movies just goes to show how outrageous satire has to be in 1992! Ha ha!
And now not even 20 years later we have the Tea Party.
Damn I’m not old enough to be seeing this kind of shit going on. Shouldn’t I be in my 90s or something railing about the know-nothing whippersnappers?
AAA Bonds
@Keith G:
LOL, so you’re a nerd, then, and one with bad memories of high school. Good to know.
MikeJ
Katie5, the way I distinguish them is a geek is someone who does something stupid for money. Originally geeks were the guys who worked in sideshows biting the heads off chickens. I tell people I bite the heads off computers.
Nerdism is more social dysfunction than skill, at least in my usage. Often geekism and nerdism go hand in hand.
Corner Stone
Don’t know about “happiness” but the single biggest indicator of future SES is the SES of your parents the day you were born.
Katie5
(@Davis X. Machina, @MikeJ–I managed to eradicate my “reply to” with that attempt at embed).
Who knew there was a subculture of nerd typologies? You could even take a test to see if you’re a nerd, geek or dork.
I just took it and scored as 96 % Nerd, 74% Geek, 35% Dork
AAA Bonds
Alexandra Robbins’s book is a COMMERCIALLY brilliant combination of fantasy and bad methodology, designed to feed a world of neurotic, lonely college graduates the same fiction that the Republicans give the working class:
“You will some day be rich.”
She follows a group of people who she picks as being extremely successful in high school achievement, a small and privileged subset of “nerds” . . . and ONE, count, ONE person she considers “popular” but who ends up with a not-so-great life.
Her actual message is: if you start the descent toward workaholic behavior at a young age, you’ll do financially better for yourself.
If she’d actually used any sort of criteria for choosing her sample and included more people, my guess is that the “popular” kids would, on average, report greater happiness, more earning power, and more social status later in life, even controlled for demographics like parents’ wealth.
Steeplejack
@Katie5:
Your YouTube link fixed.
Katie5
Okay, just found a Venn Diagram to help distinguish between a nerd, geek, dork and dweeb. That probably makes me a real nerd.
Thanks, Steeplejack
kuvasz
I refer to the current era of politics as “the Revenge of the C-minus Student.” Those of which most of us recall as the precocious and lazy brethern who thought that whatever came into their empty heads was sufficient and spent more time arguing their position than ensuring it was correct.
AAA Bonds
Defining “nerd”, “geek”, etc. was a way for bitter nerds/geeks/etc. (all the same thing) to exercise some good ol’ high school fascism in their own ranks.
“See, I’m the kind that knows important stuff, the kind that’s gonna make a ton of money one of these days. That guy over there who acts exactly like me, he’s the bad kind, sort of a peasant, and I despise him.”
“No, don’t steal my ambivalent girlfriend out from under me with your exercise-toned good looks and casual social skills! I’m a NERD, dammit, not a GEEK, THIS ISN’T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN TO MEEEEE”
AAA Bonds
I refer to the current era of politics as “HAVE MONEY, GET MONEY”.
The current era of politics extends back a few thousand years.
Corner Stone
Can someone please bigfoot and give us an Open Thread ?
patrick II
@ Southern Beale
Not to be impolite (read your link) but aren’t “Bob Roberts” and “Wag the Dog” pretty much opposites? Wag the Dog was an essentially inaccurate concerning of the importance of a presidential blowjob compared to the threat foreign terrorist, while “Bob Roberts” turned out to be an accurate prediction of the direction of right wing politics? Bob Roberts seemed outrageous but in the end wasn’t, “Wag the Dog” didn’t seem that outrageous in 1997 (republicans were using the phrase “wag the dog” in speeches at the time, it was a pretty common right wing meme), but in the end the film was outrageous in its tragically wrong estimation of the seriousness of bin Laden.
Lojasmo
OT: I love this place. Anybody have any idea why I can’t link replies, or use the control panel on my iPad?
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
some one should really study shirts vs skins and who really wins in life
Steeplejack
@Lojasmo:
Don’t know about your iPad control panel, but the Reply-mo-tron has been broken on this site for over a week. Hopefully it will come back soon.
You can make your own Reply function with this:
Replace NUMBER with the database number of the comment (usually visible in the message line at the bottom of your browser when you mouse over the Link button). Replace PERSON’S NAME with the person’s name.
Example: To reply to this message you would use:
Scribe9
One of the co-screenwriters, Etan Cohen, also wrote “Idiocracy,” so I’m going to assume that “Revenge of the Jocks” will be very tongue-in-cheek.
Cat Lady
Lojasmo: Cole’s punishing us for calling Tunch fat so we’re on our own for the Reply function. You can blame Obama for the iPad fuXX0ring.
Re the nerd/jock post – too meta. I’m going to watch Ferris Bueller again.
Valdivia
@45 steeplejack
since you seem to know how these things work–I tried adding a web site to my comment name/nym. It worked for a few comments then all my comments would disappear into the ether. Once I took it out my comments started showing up again. Any thoughts?
Lojasmo
This site makes me quiver with glee. Sreus.
Mr Stagger Lee
Chris Hedges makes the point that the last time the intellectual left and the working class were joined at the hip was the 1930’s with the rise of the New Deal and the unions. If you wish for a progressive future, this has to happen again, but the RW I feared learned that lesson, so you have talk radio and Fox, to spread the GOD,GUNS and Gays meme.
Shalimar
Finally, a movie Ben Shapiro can be proud of seeing.
Steeplejack
@Valdivia:
I know that when you change your personal info (“name,” e-mail, website) your comments go into moderation until a front-pager releases them, after which your comments with the same information go through automatically (unless you offend in some other way, e.g., socialism). If you change your nym (commenting name), the same process happens again.
But you said you successfully added the website link, it worked for a while and then disappeared. I have had the experience occasionally where FYWP just eats my comments. It doesn’t drop them into moderation; they just don’t go through at all. But if I try to repost the exact same comment I get a message saying that I am trying to post a duplicate. As far as I have been able to tell, the messages never show up later.
I have had some success with closing my browser (Firefox) and restarting it. Then my messages seem to start going through again. Also–although I can’t say this for absolute certain–I seem to remember cases where I had a number of Balloon Juice pages open in different tabs and I could comment successfully on some but not on one. Very frustrating. So there may be some variations in something going on under the hood in FYWP that is causing the problem.
To your problem: I would try to isolate the variables individually. It may be that you were just getting the random FYWP “eating comments” thing and that it wasn’t related to your website link. You said comments were working with the website link included, then they weren’t, then they were working again after you took the website link out. Did something else also occur in the transitions between those states, e.g., did you close/reopen your browser, turn off/reboot your computer, etc.?
See if you can add the website link in again now. You said it worked before, so apparently that “Valdivia information set” was approved by FYWP. If you add it back in and your comments appear, then you might just have been bitten by the “eating random comments” thing.
If you add it back in and your comments suddenly start disappearing–and you take it out and your comments start reappearing–then it definitely is something with the weblink: either it’s malformed or it requires some higher/different level of approval from the front-pager gods.
One final point: I do know that FYWP is really finicky about wanting website links to include “http://” at the start. You can’t get by with just “www.whatever.com”.
Valdivia
@steeplejack:
you’re the awesome. thanks so so much for the detailed answer. I will do as you say now and try it out again. I am using chrome and the only thing that seemed to work yesterday was taking out the site link but maybe I was doing something else wrong.
Since I am empirically driven I will go about doing some field testing and get back to you! :)
Valdivia
let’s see if this works out…
ha! it worked. though I am not betting on this lasting….
Yutsano
YAY!! And a pretty kitteh to boot. :)
Valdivia
@55 Yutsano
thanks, he is one of the 2 overlords of the household. very talkie and sweet.
Citizen_X
Open your eyes, Colebot. Cole could get it fixed, pronto, if he’d bother using the bully pulpit. He and FYWP are like TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN.
Corner Stone
BULLY PULPIT!!
Amirite? I mean, Inorite? Amirite??
Steeplejack
Okay, here is my FYWP rant for the day: The back-office add-on programs are breaking my balls. Balls. Breakin’ ’em. Google-Analytics.com, e.change.org, i2.ytimg.com, etc. One (or more) of them takes forever to load every time I hit refresh on a Balloon Juice page. This seems different from usual, where they seem to take a long load maybe once a day (or session) and then back off for the rest of the session. I did upgrade to Firefox 5.0 a day or two ago. I hope that has not contributed to this. Shudder.
Valdivia
@steeplejack
though I only have a vague notion of what you’re talking about I have noticed everything is running/loading much much slower for me too on this site.
Steeplejack
@Citizen_X:
So then logically we should primary him with Jane Hamsher, right? Since he has failed us so completely, this blog couldn’t be any worse off with her running it. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Steeplejack
@Valdivia:
Glad to hear it. Steep got to suffer, everybody should suffer.
Yutsano
Or Steep could get a program like NoScript, block all that crap, and have the page load much faster with almost no issues. Except when the gerbils strike. Then we’re all fucked.
Valdivia
@ Steeplejack–I like how you think :)
@ Yutsano–I iz doing it wrong?
Mike M
Stereotypes endure, but they are no more true today than they were back in the day. As I recall from high school, the kids at the top of the class tended to be good at multiple things: academics, sports, music, debate, etc. I’ve known a lot of smart people in my life, but very few — perhaps none — are the one-dimensional nerds of TV sitcoms and movies.
Of course, if you really are a “dumb jock” your athletic skills alone probably won’t get you very far in life, but it is difficult to achieve success at most sports without some sense of drive and discipline. Playing sports can offer many benefits, including learning how to be a team player, instilling confidence and in the best of circumstances, building leadership skills.
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
I do use NoScript or something similar to cut down a lot of the advertising underbrush, but I have been loath to unleash it on the engine-y stuff for fear that I would neuterize some obscure but crucial part of the Rube Goldberg contraption that is FYWP.
ETA: “[ . . .] have the page load much faster with almost no issues.”
Heh. That speaks volumes.
Corner Stone
@Steeplejack
I’ve heard something about “hardening” ? I can only imagine that would make some of us happy.
Steeplejack
@Corner Stone:
I got yer* hardened identity right here.
* h/t Just Some Fuckhead for unauthorized use of personal pronoun.
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Well, now the slow loads have perked up considerably. Apparently Google has analyticked everything it wants from me.
Yutsano
“Are you frightened?”
“Yes.”
“Not nearly frightened enough.”
Valdivia
and now it happened again, so I had to take the link out. bizarre.
Steeplejack
@Valdivia:
Okay, check your variables one at a time. It appears that when you took the link out you were able to post comments again. Did you try putting the website link back in without changing anything else? That is what I would try first.
2. Then I would close any Balloon Juice pages in your browser (Chrome, I believe), then reopen one and see if you can put the website link back in.
3. If not, I would close Chrome, restart it and then see if I could put the Website link back in.
4. Honestly, if that didn’t work, at that point I would launch into a few FYWP epithets and see if someone more knowledgeable weighs in.
P.S. There’s not a timeout function associated with the website you link to, is there? I.e., if you go to that page and don’t do anything for a while it logs you out or something. I don’t see how that would have an effect, but I have seen stranger things happen.
Steeplejack
@<a href=#comment-2647386>Valdivia:
One final point: You aren’t by chance triggering the too-many-links thing, are you? You can only have three, and if you have a reply link to someone, that’s one, and I believe your website link might also count as one. Might have to check with asiangrrlMN about that. (Or someone else who has a website link and also puts a lot of links in her messages.)
Evolved Deep Southerner
I haven’t read any of the comments yet, but if no one has yet pointed this out, you are way overthinking this movie, bro.
slightly-peeved
I always thought that the way a nerd’s life changed after high school wasn’t that they necessarily made more than the jocks, but that they got the freedom as an adult to hang around with people who they found interesting rather than simply the people who lived near them. Jocks can do badly in these circumstances because their position of donminance disappears overnight. Reducing the state of ‘bulllies vs. Bullied’ to purely fiscal terms seems to buying in to a whole heap of that conventional wisdom.
dude
Let me try to break this down a bit…
JOCKS GO TO COLLEGE.
Any high schooler who has the time and money to work out and practice goes to college.
Shit. This movie isn’t about ex-jocks. It’s about their fat loser wannabe friends who go to all their stupid high school games in hopes of being friends with jocks, or at least get invited to their parties to catch any sex runoff.
These fat fucks tend to not go to college (“it’s for fags” = not smart enough to get in and no talents or interests to perfect anyway), marry the only person they’ve had sex with, and relive the glory days of when they didn’t play sports.
anyway. what was my point? I don’t remember. Fuck high school, and acid fuck anyone who still defines themselves with it.