The Death of the Nerd

I think part of this rant stems from the fact that there is no risk in being a nerd these days. I'm 46 and I read Lord of the Rings four times before I my nineteenth birthday (and four times since). I bought those tabloid sized re-issues of Actions Comics 1 and the Spiderman and Superman team-up. I read so much that I had the vocabulary of a high school graduate when I was in the seventh grade. When my seventh grade teacher asked if any of us knew any theories about the origins of the universe, I explained the Big Bang Theory so well that he didn't have to add to what I had said. He then told the class that, despite the fact that Grantley wasted all his time reading comic books, he could still surprise him with that kind of knowledge. I was literally too afraid to tell him that I had learned the Big Bang Theory from reading comic books. See that? Even my teachers made me think poorly of myself for being a nerd. And bullies? I got stories. All you need to know is that at my age, I am one of the more muscular people at my gym entirely because of those bullies (and a desire to look like either a Mike Grell drawing of Green Arrow or a Boris Vallejo Tarzan –  there, I said it).

These days very attractive girls declare themselves nerds because that they have read the latest book that tops the fiction best seller list. And guys think that watching The Big Bang Theory gets them “geek cred.” Seriously, is that really a thing? To be clear, I am glad that reading has come back in such a big way and I don't care that it was Harry Potter and Bella who saved it. I enjoyed the Twilight Books, and my Master’s Thesis was on the use of the word “entente” in the Canterbury Tales. One hundred pages on the use of one word used one hundred and fifteen times in a six hundred year old poem. So I can appreciate the hell out of elitist academic obscurity.

There is zero risk in claiming to be (or even actually being) a nerd in the 21^st century. When I was a kid, a scrawny nerdy bookworm, I was actually told I would be killed for being such an easy, obvious target. I wasn't killed, but I was beaten up and I genuinely believed those threats. When I was twelve I took my copy of Huckleberry Finn to church and got ridiculed by what I will generously call my peers. I made the unpardonable mistake of taking a copy of The Lord of the Rings to class in the ninth grade in one of the worst schools I ever attended. In the seventh grade, my teacher, that same teacher who thought I knew about the Big Bang in spite of, rather than because of, my love of comics had a contest. The prize was a Bee Gees 45 with (Nobody Gets) Too Much Heaven on the A side and Rest Your Love on Me on the B side. What’s that? You don’t know what a 45 is? Basically it was an early form of compact disc with only one song on each side that you played by dragging a diamond around its surface. The contest? To see who could find the most number of words with either “gram” or “graph” in them. The kid who came in second got around thirty. I went through my Dad’s dictionary from cover to cover and found well over four hundred. I think Mr. Spurgeon thought I was nuts. But I won that 45 and we played it over and over at that dance we had that afternoon. I still have that 45. It may be the only time that being an ubernerd worked for me instead of against me, but I think I have made my point about what a nerd I was.

I still am, by the way. I really enjoyed a book called Salt.  Know what it was about? Salt. The history of salt. For years I had a secret stamp collection. It was secret because nobody cared to hear about my stamp collection. Does anybody reading this even know anyone who collects stamps? Today, after I dropped my oldest son off at a Choir rehearsal, I went to the downtown branch of the St. Catharines Public Library and signed out four graphic novels about the Justice League and the Justice Society. Just so you don’t forget that I am a well-rounded reader, I was also looking to find books on the First Temple worship of Asherah in and around Jerusalem and Ugarit before the violent reforms of King Josiah and the Deuteronomists.

I guess nerds have come into their own. Even Peter Parker is no longer really an awkward outsider. It’s cook. I wouldn’t wish the life of pre-Google nerds on anyone. I just wish that people would stop “confessing” their nerdiness as though it were some kind of guilty pleasure (If you HAVEN’T read Harry Potter you face weird looks). I am glad there is still a New York Times Best Seller List. I am glad that even many people I know who never finished high school are avid readers. But we early nerds paved the way for nerdiness to be cool. We were lonely and awkward. We paid that price and it wasn’t because we were brave; we just didn’t know how to be anything else.