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The Vanishing Nerd

Whatever became of them, those awkward cerebral creatures with the taped eyeglasses, pocket protectors and oversize teeth? When the randy, rap-crazed youth of the Western world started coupling with each other and piercing their bodies at fourteen, what happened to the stamp collectors and model builders, the amateur microbiologists and Mad magazine aficionados? Does anyone out there under the age of fifty still build ham radio sets or join the local astronomy club? Where, outside of Mensa, can you still meet a compulsive punster? If I went to a convention of high school math teachers, might I still find a few choice specimens of nerdhood solving quadratic equations on a dusty blackboard? 

I'm concerned, you see, about the state of the nerd in American culture. I'm convinced they're a vanishing breed, along with manatees and giant anteaters (to name a few nerds of the animal world). The sweeping sexualization of youth culture has left little room for anyone who wears white socks with black pants. The nerd is a romantically backward creature, fidgety and tentative around the opposite sex. He shuns sports and contemporary pop music in favor of contemplative pursuits like mineral collecting. He favors the mind over the body, the timeless over the fashionable. For these reasons and others I love him and find him indispensable. A world without nerds would be an even sadder place than it already seems to be.

Nerds and sex seem almost to be mutually exclusive phenomena, like jocks and philosophy. The nerd's own romantic ineptitude is partly to blame, but I'd say the true hobgoblin here is the ruthless screening process known as Natural Selection. Darwin's favorite theory is the nerd's worst enemy. Comely women rebuff his most innocent advances on the spot, claiming to have other commitments while they chuckle inwardly at the goggle eyes and buck teeth. They conveniently overlook the extra IQ points, forming their judgment on prehistoric criteria like the ability to bring down a woolly mammoth or fix a leaky faucet. Nobody, it seems, wants a nerd's gangly genes entering the family bloodlines, with the possible exception of another nerd. (The unfortunate female nerd probably merits a column of her own.) 

It was probably easier for nerds to score in the 1950s, when even Buddy Holly wore the signature eyeglasses of the nerdish class. Probably half the young men in America qualified as nerds back then. They were so numerous that we didn't even have a name for them. In fact, I don't even recall nerds being identified as a distinct subspecies until the late 1970s, by which time they were already endangered by the successive triumphs of hippies, soft-rockers and disco-dudes. Only then did the popular caricature of the nerd -- the gawky fellow with the plaid polyester shirt and already obsolescent slide rule -- seem to gain currency as a comic stereotype. 

But the nerd wasn't quite finished. In the early '80s, the rise of the personal computer heralded the first appearance of the nerd's alter-ego, the cybergeek. If the old nerd was Clark Kent, the new geek suddenly emerged as a caffeinated Superman. Today we have geeks aplenty, thriving abundantly on computers and jolts of java, despite the recent collapse of the cyberbubble economy. The geek is of nerdish stock, but more at ease in his body, more aggressive and reckless and convinced of his own pimply sex appeal. After all, geeks were the superheroes of the new technology. They learned to bask in the golden glow of public awe while the acne still flowered on their youthful hides. We marveled at their ability to crunch code for eighteen hours straight, or to turn a flashy website into a multibillion-dollar enterprise funded by drooling venture capitalists and money-generating IPOs. 

No, a true nerd could never achieve worldly glory; it goes against his introverted and pacifistic Clark Kent nature. So when Bill Gates emerged as the model of the plutocratic new Ubergeek, it signaled the death knell of the harmless old nerd culture as we knew it. After all, part of the essential nerd mystique is his wallflower status in the great dance of life. Once the nerd becomes the life of the party, he's no longer a nerd. 

Cynic's Pick of the Week
You cardiac-conscious folks thought you were doing yourselves a favor by taking those cholesterol-lowering drugs? One of them was pulled off the market last week after being held responsible for more than 40 deaths, and now a report tells us that taking those 'good for you' vitamins C and E will blunt their effectiveness anyway. Don't take my advice, but maybe the key to reducing our risk of heart disease is to stop worrying about heart disease. Let your doctor do the fretting for you.

© 2001 by Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by permission of the publisher. If you'd like this column to appear regularly in  your own site or publication, write to UPBEATmag@aol.com.

Profile of a Cynic...

Bayan, who claims to be a "kinder, gentler cynic," currently lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His weekly column, "Some Cynical Guy," is published and syndicated by Upbeat Online. 

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