Revenge On the Nerds
by Julia Lipman

David Brooks has a knack for reducing cultural phenomena to their simplest underlying structures, and in a recent Wall Street Journal article, he has done just that for the brouhaha over SUVs. The controversy is, he says, "a classic geek assault on jock culture." That's the crux of it. Devil-may-care, large-living jocks, trying to enjoy life to the fullest in their behemoth vehicles while the captain of the forensics team follows them around quoting out of "Unsafe at Any Speed."

He establishes his point by citing anti-SUV commentary by Peter Singer, who may be the most legitimately nerdy public intellectual going. Singer is the kid in the front row who smells vaguely like cheese, whom you don't want to get into a debate with because you know he's going to espouse some kind of rigid scientific determinism and insist on carrying every argument to its logical conclusion, and besides, everyone's kind of avoided him ever since he said that thing about eating babies, or whatever it was. Brooks goes on to lambaste geeks for feeling generally superior, for congratulating themselves on being "thoughtful, socially and environmentally conscious." And besides, he argues, jocks need SUVs because they (the SUVs) are "poetry made of metal." At this point, the piece veers from standard geek-baiting into dumb-adorable-Chris-Klein territory, and you almost want to root for Brooks. Klein's lovable jock character in Election did drive an SUV, after all.

Of course, the SUV isn't the only area of cultural contention that might benefit from Brooks' "High School Reunion" treatment. Think about the archetypical geek. Either chubby or stick-thin, he shuns physical activity and avoids his more boisterous peers. He's always running off to the nurse's office for treatment for one of his many chronic ailments — asthma, dust mite allergies, autism — but would turn a thousand shades of pink, and probably go running off to the nearest authority, if offered a cigarette. Or — whisper — a marijuana cigarette.

Well, there you have it — besides the SUV debate, possibly the four social issues on which cultural commentators have dwelled most of late. We've got obesity, smoking, the "overmedication" of America and the war on drugs. All delineated more or less neatly according to one's feelings about geeks.

The jock position on fat kids is obvious — they should stop stuffing their faces and be forced to run laps in gym class until they stop jiggling so much. (Wedgies and swirlies also help in this process somehow, although the jock isn't completely sure of the mechanism.) A wonky piece like Paul Campos' recent New Republic takedown of conventional obesity wisdom, which sifts through an impressive array of new and old studies to make the case that weight itself, independent of physical activity, is not necessarily a significant health risk, inspires one reaction in the jock: "Nerrrd!"

Here, though, we should stop and introduce a category apart from Brooks' geek-jock dichotomy. The chic drama snob hates geeks about as much as the jock does, perhaps because their square earnestness reminds him of his eighth-grade phase of writing Sartre quotes on the board every day before English. The drama snob wants to go to France someday to be a disaffected American expatriate writer, and he's heard that people there are much less disgustingly fat. He would find Zach Parsi's New York Press piece "Adipose Nation," in which the author recounts an experience heckling an obese man on a plane, to be a mordant bit of social commentary, and Parsi's description of a man on a bus as possessing "pseudopods of blubber radiating hot indignation" to be delightfully perverse.

Anti-smoking crusaders inspire the same kind of reaction among jocks and drama snobs alike. Jocks know it's not great for their 50-yard-dash times, but light up in the parking lot between classes anyway. Drama snobs look with alarm toward New York, where they've been dreaming of going to CBGB for years. They identify with the consternation expressed by restaurateur Elaine Kaufman in her New York Times article "It's New York. It's Elaine's. Let our patrons light up." How unsophisticated, how gauche it is of the geeks to sit there coughing and wheezing and reaching for their Zyrtec.

But perhaps nowhere is the jock/geek/drama snob dynamic more prominent than in the raging debate over the supposed overmedication of America. The two most controversial drugs, Ritalin and Prozac, affirm both groups' fears that the country is edging nerdward.

Ritalin is the bane of jocks. The media perception of a kid prescribed Ritalin as a loud, active, high-spirited boy sedated into feminine submission looks enough like jock emasculation at the hands of the geeks to arouse suspicion. Francis Fukuyama manages to assimilate Prozac into this Nurse Ratchet fantasy, coming to the bizarre conclusion that the antidepressant's main purpose is to give women "that alpha-male feeling" — together the two drugs foster an environment where "the two sexes are gently nudged towards that androgynous median personality, self-satisfied and socially compliant, that is the current politically correct outcome in American society." Michael Fumento, in a recent New Republic article, quotes both medical research and conservatives who once thought that ADHD was a made-up disorder but changed their minds when they personally encountered kids with the condition — Mona Charen and Christina Hoff Sommers among them — to bolster his conclusion that it's not the liberal brainwashing plot it seems. But we all know about those think-tank dweebs at the New Republic.

The drama snob, on the other hand, mainly deplores the influence of Prozac. "A gramme is better than a damn," he writes on the back of his notebook — could Huxley have been any more prescient? They're handing out these happy pills like candy, when everyone knows that all the great writers have been depressed. Kerouac, Kesey, Bukowski. And didn't Norman Mailer stab his wife or something? That was out there. The drama snob likes Tim Wise's AlterNet take on it: "That we demand quick and easy answers is indicative of our cultural attachment to instant gratification: got a headache, take an aspirin; overweight, get liposuction; upset about something, take Prozac. Don't think, don't analyze, just do it." The fat-people swipe is worth bonus points.

And that brings us to the war on drugs. That it is misguided, impractical or often unjust is something that one doesn't need to be a drama snob to agree on. But the drama snob takes it further. The war on drugs is a symptom of a sick society that sanctions certain drugs, like the above two, while forbidding others. It's "The War on Some Drugs." It isn't just that marijuana and Ecstasy should be decriminalized; it's that they are healthier, aesthetically and morally superior to the prescription stuff. In the Village Voice, Carla Spartos considers the possiblity that Ecstasy could replace current antidepressants as a form of therapy. "MDMA could be a tool to get you past drugs," she quotes a supporter as saying. "Prozac is a tool to get the pharmaceutical industry rich." And does it need to be said that it's much cooler to do E at the "Into the Woods" cast party than run down to the nurse's office during fifth period for your Prozac fix?

Brooks characterizes the geek as someone who tries very hard to justify himself. He is forever chasing after the indifferent jock, trying to make him envious of the inherent geeky superiority. "And so every few years the geeks pick on some feature of jock life (McMansions, corporations, fraternities, country clubs) and get all worked up about it. And you know what? The jocks don't care! They just keep being happy." But a unified theory of jock/geek/drama snob politics complicates this idea. Sometimes the jock is the complained-about, like when he drives an SUV. Sometimes he is the complainer, like when he has something to say about these lazy fat people who want a free ride and decide to sue McDonald's. And sometimes he's not even in the debate, like when that whiny Prozac-popping geek is having it out with the lead in "Pippin" over whether one good dose of Ecstasy at a rave would clear out his modern-medicine-brainwashed mind. Get away from me, he thinks. Freaks.

E-mail Julia Lipman at julia@flakmag.com.