Odd man out…

“I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-rate second-rate composer.”

Thus spake the creator of Zarathustra’s epic musical paean of the Romantic Era, Richard Strauss, in a moment of intensely honest (and perhaps excessively pessimistic) self-criticism. And yet there are far more who would argue to the contrary rather than agree with a man who also famously stated “Never look at the trombones: it only encourages them.”

As someone who played the trombone in band and orchestra during high school and college years, I probably have a closer understanding of exactly what Strauss was implying in that second quote, given that the sonorous trombones do have a tendency to drown all the other instruments out if the players’ enthusiasm is at a peak. If control is what being a good musician is mostly all about, trombone players often fail that benchmark!

But I digress (as usual). My thesis here echoes more the first Strauss quote appearing above, about being perhaps not quite peerless, but still ranking somewhat way above the norm by a considerable margin. [I say this, well mindful of the documented fact...proven in several recent studies...that generally speaking the lower a person's intellectual abilities are, the greater he thinks they are.]

Individuals who fall into this secondary category of ability are more numerous than one would expect in most populations, but still often greatly isolated from the social aggregate that comprises our familiar cultural paradigm. Not unsurprisingly, I consider myself to be one of them. Not a Strauss by any means, but well above the herd in terms of what goes on in the tightly rationed confines of my intellect.

Charles Murray, the eminent social scientist who co-authored that controversial best-seller ‘The Bell Curve’, frequently references the difficulty so many people of ‘slightly higher awareness’ contend with in finding amicable and stimulating companionship in our devolving American society, these days.

One of the most interesting, if somewhat lesser, dynamics he explores in another of his books (‘Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 – 2010', ISBN-13 978-0307453433, 2012) is the question of how extremely intelligent individuals seek suitably potential marriage candidates through the institutions of higher learning they gravitate to (the best and brightest universities in the nation). Although his thesis in this book focuses on how America is separating (perhaps catastrophically) into two sharply divergent classes (the super-wealthy and the super-poor), a process that seems less related to ethnicity than to economic clout, he argues in the course of his book that those educational institutions uniformly regarded as the creme de la crème of the nation’s top universities serve an interesting secondary function of bringing together intellectually compatible individuals. This then serving as a venue for matching the brightest men and the brightest women together, thereby producing familial unions from which it is demonstrably certain that equally intellectually gifted offspring will issue forth.

Murray states, in this light, that evidence shows that the progeny of bright parents will generally tend to produce children who possess a mean of both parents’ IQs, a conclusion that, even lacking the proliferated body of convincing evidence Murray provides, would seem logical.

While I find Murray in most ways absolutely brilliant in his conceptual hypothesizing, for me the fact that he painstakingly and relentlessly documents everything with far more statistical evidence than I find convenient to absorb serves as a distraction to the important flow and overall contiguity of his arguments, although I certainly understand the need and basis for this as an integral part of the academic model. Perhaps this is a selfish personal quirk of mine, but it more likely reflects a vestige of my life-long ADD affliction. [The latest DSM 5 now separates out ‘ADD’ into three-subtype ‘ADHD’ diagnoses and calls the form I suffer from ‘ADHD predominantly inattentive’.]

Although Murray hews (rightfully) to the accepted academic format in his exhaustive examinations of American social phenomena, his writings still remain generally quite readable and understandable to the general reader, although perhaps that ‘readability’ suffers a bit when it comes to readers possessed of my difficulty in focusing intensely. Still, I thoroughly enjoy and admire Murray’s fearlessness when it comes to courageously dissecting social phenomena and calling things as he sees them…bereft of nods to PC convention. In today's ascerbic and vitriolic intellectual battleground, it takes true courage for an academic to stray far from 'herd-think' social convention.

Murray presupposes that all truly gifted individuals will find their way into the hallowed halls of Yale, Harvard and the other highest ranked universities and that it is there that they are most likely to meet their future marital peers, given that at that level all who find themselves in that population may be assumed to possess extraordinary personal assets and far higher intellects than are formally found in community colleges and ‘lesser’ higher institutions. This is very probably true, but it doesn’t cover those who possibly possess a similar quotient of these superior qualities, but who for various reasons never made it to the Olympian collegiate heights he references.

My own academic track record is a very, very spotty one, I’m afraid. I am one of those ‘bright underachievers’ (as they were summarily categorised by school psychologists back in the 60s) who seemingly had the intelligence to achieve, but who failed to demonstrate and fulfill the practical expectations levied thereupon.

Sadly enough, it took me a whole lifetime to truly discover exactly what I wanted to do with my life and the quality of my academic output discernibly reflects that wavering uncertainty and indecision. Today, at an advanced age, I fully (and finally) understand that what I find most fulfilling in life is the study of history, although as a ‘first-rate second-rate polymath’ who has been bedeviled by ADHD throughout my life, I must constantly contend with a tendency to become easily distracted along the path…much as a small child is distracted by bright, shiny objects that catch his eye.

Although I did eventually manage to pull down undergraduate and graduate degrees in history, they were obtained through second-tier upper institutions of learning and over an abnormally protracted period of years. Had I had the drive, focus, economic assets and motivation to achieve, I would undoubtedly have pursued my higher education through one of those upper-most tiers of learning already referenced.

One of the most regrettably palpable results of this highly circumlocuitous and lengthy academic meandering is the fact that I never had the opportunity to meet marital peers of the sort I desired to associate with. In other words, whereas those in the nation’s highest institutions of learning were literally surrounded by overachieving, highly motivated and capable potential marriage partners, I typically found myself being jerked around and yanked out of any possibly promising liaisons that might have developed in the course of my sporadic exposure to the academic systems circumstance presented me with.

The result of that was frequently telling, much to my everlasting chagrin. As a bright and decidedly ‘unconventional’ person (the ‘first-rate second-rate person of many broad interests’), I had enough trouble connecting with a potential mate as it was. Looking back now, I suppose I was what we would call a pseudo-nerd in that while other kids were interested in popular conventional adolescent preoccupations (like sports teams, cars, etc.), I was a science-fiction fan, a precocious reader, an early discoverer of J.R.R. Tolkien (in the early 60s), fascinated by aviation & aerospace research, and a devotee of solitary sports (such as climbing, running and cycling, etc.). The result of these socially insular proclivities was that I was never around a similarly ‘different’ group of bright kids with whom to develop bonds and mutual interests long enough to develop attachments.

Later, when many of my equally ‘gifted’ peers were already off earning their graduate degrees in some rarified academic environment, I was freshly released from service in the US Air Force (where I ended up in medical services, fortunately) and back in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I began a career as a medical technologist (pulmonary and cardiovascular).

Having pursued courses off and on at UC Berkeley, Merritt College, Cabrillo College, Mt. Diablo College and a few other institutions on a fitful basis, I was, while also working full-time, gathering up transferrable units towards a degree as well as I was able. It didn’t make for much of a social life, needless to say, although there was an endless supply of cute RNs to meet in the hospitals I worked in. Despite vacillating in and out of college majors (among the few I recall were sociology, philosophy, political science and Asian studies), one thing became clear to me even at that early stage of my 20s: I felt that if I ever married, it would be to a woman of Asian extraction…Korean, Japanese or Chinese…since it was apparent to me that the Asian Confucian cultures reflected qualities I most strongly valued and appreciated: loyalty to family, the raising and caring of children, respect for elders and respect for Taoist/Buddhist philosophical precepts Thus, I was determined to marry a woman with those bloodlines cursing through her.

When I finally met a woman whom to me seemed profoundly embodied with all those desirable qualities (a Chinese resident at the hospital I was then currently employed at), I thought I had found what I was looking for. But as a very, very careful and somewhat guarded person, I was taking my time getting to know her, since by my standards one doesn’t just get married without a huge degree of attendent serious commitment. Marriage was to me, while not a ‘sacred’ or holy institution (I’m a decidedly secular non-believer, despite having been brought up an Anglican), at least the most serious undertaking imaginable in life. By my reckoning, marriage was not like a coat that one bought and wore, then rid one's self of it when the novelty faded. Thus, this ‘slow approach’ worked against me and before I knew it I had been rejected by the love of my life (herself a highly educated, self-motivated woman who had put herself through medical school entirely on her own efforts) in favor of a UC Berkeley undergraduate law student (a chap presumably was on his way up to that same high level of academic excellence my paramour was the product of).

At any rate, it quickly became a doubly crushing blow when I learned that my lady-friend’s peers (other residents in her group at my teaching hospital) made no bones about sharing their feelings with her that I was somehow ‘socially deficit’ in not being able to match their peerless academic backgrounds (i.e. therefore not a suitable class match for someone with an MD and almost through her residency program). Had I also been a young doctor (with a proven ability to rise through and meet the arduous and demanding rigors of pursuing medicine), there’s little doubt in my mind that I would not have been so callously cast aside by my lady-friend. To this day, I am still unsettled and repulsed by the thinly disguised snobbishness inherent in their sentiment.

Among the many factors Charles Murray explores in his book ‘Coming Apart’, he notes the huge influence that peer associations have on matching up suitably compatible mates. Against that backdrop, the fact that I had been rejected and cast adrift as a sort of ‘unsuitable’ match by those in that upper tier of higher medical academia becomes somewhat more understandable (although even more embittering in the fuller realisation of it) than I had even imagined in the many decades of constipated self-reflection I have since devoted to that painful incident in my early life. Not that this acute hindsight helps to any extent whatsoever, for water over the spillway is always merely that: hydrodynamic currents flowing into the past and forever lost to any promising ‘energy’ potential they might have presented prior to passing beyond the dam’s gateway.

One dynamic I note that Murray does not even remotely touch upon in ‘Coming Apart’ is the role played by pure, dumb luck in making associative connections throughout one’s life. And yet fortune does indeed play a seemingly huge role in determining not just the course, but the outcome of our lives. I have never been an especially ‘lucky’ person, reflecting back on my life, and in fact certain aspects I’ve noticed in my affairs seem to confirm this unhappy circumstance. For instance, I’ve learned that almost 99% of the time my very first, reflexive choice turns out to be the wrong one.

Even in circumstances involving random chance, I’ve noticed that my initial intuitive feeling is invariably wrong: If I were betting ‘heads’ on what side of a coin would come up in a coin-toss bet, again 99% of the time the reverse outcome would prove to be true. How does one explain that? If at all? I thus learned that no matter what my first, instinctive hunch is, if I want to get at all ahead of the ‘game’ I need to reject that very first ‘gut instinct' and bet to the contrary. If this seems a sort of perverse or polar luck, I suppose that is exactly what it is, but it’s probably fortunate that I’ve never, ever been a gambling person (in anything). ‘Luck’ is therefore not a reliable resource in my quiver to avail, so to speak.

Over the years, not long after I finally cobbled together and finished my grad degree work, in my early 40s by that time, I did meet someone (a woman recently arrived from China) in the USA to whom I am presently married (we’ve been together for 31 years now). Ironically, the circumstances of our meeting were entirely coincidental, despite the fact that I’d just returned from working in Taiwan for a period of time and had encountered while there a number of ‘eligible’, highly educated & bright young Chinese women, any one of which I could have cultivated a relationship with.

I chose not to, however, given my knowledge of both potential cross-cultural ‘shock’ effects and certain concerns over non-US individuals wanting to obtain green cards that would later permit naturalisation in America. If I am nothing else, I am a cautious, non-risk taker of the first water and I did not want to end up finding myself in an unintended ‘marriage of convenience’ through oversight on my part. Having read a number of academic studies on the result of cross-cultural marriages produced after the war (concerning WW2 GI ‘war brides’) probably didn’t help in the slightest.

Coincidentally, while in the Middle East, I had worked with a number of lovely Filipinas who were also well educated (medical technologists, etc.), but I had heard too many stories about Caucasian expats marrying women from the Philippines who then found themselves also married to a family that regarded them thereafter as a wealthy source of money & support. Again, I had side-stepped the prospects over there, despite taking a fancy to several of them.

While my eventual marriage has turned out to be often fitful at best (due to the usual cross-cultural disynchronicities and ‘culture-shock’ factors), there is much about it that has proven to be quite positive in a pragmatic Chinese context. It may not always be an unbridled ‘love-fest’ in the popular Western romantic model, but it has at least been stable, mutually supportive, affectionate and steadfastly loyal in the long-term. Viewed in any larger context, isn't that what a successful marriage is theoretically all about? Even for a diehard romantic like myself?

But one can never have it all! Regrettably, my wife is not my intellectual peer, despite her having achieved an undergraduate degree much as I did, and I increasingly find that we have very little in common that we can meaningfully talk about on a higher intellectual plane. Our tastes also vary considerably, hence we don’t really share a lot of common, day-to-day interests other than a mutual love of ‘good music’ and our beloved husky dogs (thank god for that, since I absolutely cannot conceive of a life without several large husky dogs as companions!).

I’m a runner, bicyclist and unnaturally awkward dancer (among other things) who’s lucky if I can remember how to ‘Twist’, 60’s style (watching me try to dance brings to mind a severe case of cerebral palsy); she’s an excellent dancer, prefers ‘Zoomba’ and group exercise and is afraid of bicycles! Not exactly a lifestyle match from Heaven!

But she’s also a tireless, energetic person who stays physically fit and believes in eating healthy food (all extremely important, of course), as well as a member of what Charles Murray calls the ‘community supporting’ type that he feels are such an vitally important part of the ‘American Project’ he describes in his books. In all these areas I am quite proud of her and greatly appreciate all these strong aspects of both exceptional character and dutiful devotion to responsibility (very Chinese, of course) that she has in abundance. She’s also an excellent cook and I can barely boil water!

However it may be, that still leaves a huge, gaping hole in my cognative life, and here I refer to a conveniently ‘close’ clique of intellectually compatible peers with whom I can socialize and whose conviviality and company I can relate to and enjoy. This conundrum is a bigger problem that it might at first seem to be and it has everything to do with the continuing pattern of increasing urban fragmentation that is such a concern to Charles Murray. In his book ‘Coming Apart’, Murray argues that America is not coming apart due to ethnic conflict as much as it is disintegrating due to an extreme divergence of economic ‘classes’.

Murray explains that as the super-wealthy class grows more and more powerful, it also grows further and further detached from what we might call the currents of mainstream (lower class) America. Murray calls it the ‘hollow elite syndrome’ for reasons that are beyond my intent to explain here, but he argues that the super-wealthy have lost the ability to relate to the so-called ‘lower (or ‘common’) classes’ in America as they withdraw further and further from it and that their increasing insularity has vastly dire implications for both America as a nation and for all the rest of us as individuals.These are, after all, the formulators and dictators of taste, social habits and and the operators of the economic engines of commerce that drive all the rest of us 'average' consumers.

An example of this might be conceptually framed in terms of the celebrity ‘super-rich’ class in Hollywood whose utter detachment from the hoi polloi enables them to pursue their ultra-liberal progressive agendas without the risk of having to functionally conform to the gritty social realities that exist as a social substrate beneath them (the equivalent of so many hungry sharks circling just under the surface of an otherwise calm-appearing ocean that wait for an arm or leg to munch on). In their super-isolated bubble of artificial ‘class detachment’ the super-wealthy have lost the least vestige of real and genuine awareness of any and all 'mundane' issues affecting those in the lower classes (i.e. the 'Let them eat bread' disregard that Marie Antonette lost her head over). What makes them so dangerous as a destabilising dynamic in modern America is both their great wealth and their profoundly disproportionate influence on ordinary (lower-class) individuals. It is, Murray argues, a consequence of class divergence.

Murray demonstrates and documents this process continuously throughout his book with numerous graphic tables and statistical comparisons referent to two distinct economic populations in different hypothetical ZIP-code areas (they are ‘hypothetical’ only in the assay of certain specific factors he examines; the two locales do indeed exist and are in fact very real), documenting a radical divergence between the erstwhile ‘wealthiest class’ of previous decades and that of a poor white community, this is a relatively recent phenomenon.

[It is interesting to note here that Murray conveniently side-steps the matter of how black Americans fit into his paradigmatic construct, for the most part, by focusing only on the two cited white populations (one super-rich white and one super-poor white), since the very minute comparisons between whites and blacks come up in studies of this sort the red diversity storm flags start fluttering all over the place.]

While his focus is thus unique, it doesn’t escape me that on an ethnic basis, assuming a directly related economic correlation factor, the increasing fragmentation of our communities (notably a product of that of the Pollyannaish ‘diversity’ agenda so relentlessly pursued by liberal progressives) almost guarantees that any former tenuous sense of ‘community’ and ‘shared common weal’ that may have existed across class lines in the country during previous decades has now almost totally vanished.

No better example of this exists, in my own direct experiential observation, than right here in my own part of the Sacramento (CA) community (a neighborhood of solid 'middle class' nature). Given that there is no sense of shared ‘commonality’ discernible or experienceable from house-to-house and block to block in my neighborhood, no matter where you go in it, this means that in that specific context we all of us exist in equally isolated, detached personal ‘bubbles’ of non-interactivity. Neighbors consequently remain strangers, despite close proximity. The only real common thread to bind them together therefore becomes television, at best a commercially purposed and utter fantasy simulacrum of what we 'consumers' are brain-washed into believing is 'real life'. [With popular daytime commercial television programming consisting almost exclusively of crime and sex obsessed serial soaps, highly emotion-drenched media news broadcasts and relentless pharmaceutical product advertising, it is little wonder we all have a grossly distorted impression of that 'reality' we are thus socialised to conform to?]

In my case this sense of insularity is particularly pronounced, since I am such an unconventional social bohemian, given to concerns and awarenesses that most others near me could care less about, let alone remotely concern or involve themselves with.

For instance: I absolutely loathe professional team sports (the NBA and NFL almost induce physical revulsion when I think about their testosterone and money-fueled extravaganzas). In my reckoning, paying ‘pro’ basketball and football players multiples of millions of dollars to toss about an inflated rubber sphere verges on perversity and obscenity to me.

Another example: I am both by nature and training keenly interested in history, firmly of the opinion…to reference Santayana’s mercilessly over-familiar observation…that a knowledge of history is the only effective means whereby to avoid repetition of past mistakes. In direct contrast, the average street person has so little interest in history of any kind that the mere mention of that word typically produces a momentary lifting of the eyebrows in a casual conversation, let alone a discernible interest in pursuing the subject in an incidental conversation.

Further examples: I greatly enjoy poetry and good writing, two somewhat increasingly arcane and esoteric disciplines. Find me another person living with a square mile of my home who shares similar interests! I am an ardent bibliophile. In addition to being an omnivorous, voracious reader, I have a house so full of books that there’s hardly any more room for a single additional volume! In contrast, most people hardly bother to read anything with pages and a bound spine these days, thanks to a plethora of visual media on portable electronic devices.

My immediate neighbors are 1) ‘Daniel’, a rather simplistic and socially awkward, ex-state employee who regularly attends a fundamentalist church, 2) ‘Out-door Bob’, a retired prison guard who has a lawn fetish, an unhealthy relationship with his 200 HP leaf blower and the mentality of a fish, 3) ‘Josh’, a reclusive retired US Marine (living with his family) who probably suffers from PTSD and who is about a friendly as a door post, 4) ‘Emilio’, a local Spanish restaurant entrepreneur (who, although friendly enough, is not a stimulating conversationalist), 5) ‘Stu’, a 30s’ish Hispanic fellow (with a family) who lives solely for the opportunity to fish the channel in his souped-up power boat, and 6) ‘Madge’, another retired state employee with two resident grown-up dysfunctional sons and a palpable nervous disorder (plus a yappy ‘foo-foo’ dog that absolutely hates our husky).

Just down the street is another (reasonably well-off) Hispanic family with two vicious and noisy German Shepherd dogs that they keep totally isolated in their back yard, and a few other totally divergent types with whom I share no commonalities whatsoever. These are just a few of a host of differences that separate me from the ‘average’ guy hereabouts and the intellectual isolation that results in (at least to me) a very, serious source of social isolation that creates inordinate stress in my life. So, how about those 49ers, eh, grunt-grunt?!

Of course, this is all part of the social paradigm that our great ‘American Experiment’ has brought into being by virtue of the common misapprehension that ‘equal in the eyes of God and the law’ means we are all fully and completely equal in every single aspect of our lives! NOT!

Having nowhere to go to socialize with like-minded people may not seem like much of a big howdy-ya-do, but it constitutes a great source of dissatisfaction for me in the conduct of my daily life. This is the disappearing economic and social 'community' that Murray argues is responsible for the heretofore commonality of America that exemplifies the 'Great American Experiment' and that has permitted America to thrive and survive as a unique 'singularity' among other cultures, across the world and throughout history.

And given the also increasing ‘urban sprawl’ factor that is turning most western American cities into little Los Angeles clones, the problem of social isolation isn’t easily solved by getting into a car and going a short distance to alleviate the problem by connecting with others, elsewhere. In fact, the few close friends I do have are rather remotely located and in some cases live in entirely different countries! Thanks a heap, diversity!

There are many times when I wish I were simply a simple, uncomplicated ‘average’ person of pedestrian mentality who likes televised team sports, believes in a personal god (who looks suspiciously 'white'), drinks nothing but Budweiser (Light), goes to church meetings religiously, tears up the waterways with air-polluting personal watercraft, destroys the tranquility of the street with horrifically annoying leaf-blowers, has several noisy and ill-behaved little brats that run wild, who cruises around in a jacked-up pickup truck with radio blaring misogynistic hip-hop crap, and who owns several small, yappy dogs that are allowed to run free around the neighborhood every day.

Boy! Do I wish! Alas, I am not any of these and as a result life regularly continues to be a very, very lonely experience indeed for individuals like me.

If I were part of that ‘super-rich’ upper class ‘bubble’ it would at least enable me to seek out others socially with shared ‘over-educated snob' class interests but here I am, a person with an upper-class mentality living in a Heinz-57 middle-class area. As may be readily found out, life is not kind to over-educated snobs who don’t have the money and economic wealth to go along with their snobby condescensions. Boo-hoo.

All of the foregoing being what it is, I can well understand what Charles Murray declaims in his book ‘Coming Apart’ as a serious threat to America's continued preeminance on the world stage and I personally feel its impact acutely, as we slide further off the precipice into history's abyss of failed systems of government.

Perhaps a pre-frontal lobotomy would be the answer.

D’ya suppose?