Sorry about the delay in blogging — I’ve been completely snowed under what with packing up/graduating/getting ready to move to San Fran on Saturday. More stuff to come soon. In any case, caught this article a little while back and it seemed worth posting.
Even though it’s poorly researched and all in all a pretty jankity crank bit of analysis, I think the point about Prez Bush being “against nerds” is a pretty interesting one.
I wonder how much of nerds vs. jocks social divisions (among other stereotypical middle/high school cliques) replicate themselves on successively larger and larger scales as a generation ages. I think it at least sounds like a reasonable argument: people develop profiles for friendship early on, and then use this profile for what they look for in potential friends in the future and, alternatively, for what they don’t like. These probably tend to be reinforcing, such that early preference setting events might have a large impact on future assessments of subjects.
Does the middle-school wedgie from a thick-necked, violent lacrosse player turn the budding young nerd into a crusading adult activist against war or gun ownership?
Is national politics just a dressed up version of high school prom?
