Over the summer I read The Partly Cloudy Patriot by Sarah Vowell. Many of her essays talk about being a nerd and one article proposes that nerds need to be self-deprecating in order to be accepted. She claims that all of her nerdy peers are skilled at mocking their own intelligence when they start spewing forth on a topic. This makes them less intimidating to their friends and colleagues. She speculates that the absence of this skill resulted in Gore, Dukakis and other intellectuals loosing key elections.

I found this intriguing. Perhaps she's right but as a nerd from a slightly older generation than hers, I failed to adopt self-mockery as a way of gaining approval. When talking about a book, film, documentary, etc. I get into the subject matter and forget about how I'm being perceived. I don’t think of myself as knowing more than the next person, I’m just eager to share with others what I’ve learned and see if they have anything to add. Does this make people uncomfortable or think me arrogant? Perhaps sometimes it does.

I’ve thought about Vowell’s self-deprecation theory more than anything else that I read in what was a topical and light-hearted book. On the one hand, I totally agree that Gore’s intelligence alienated the populace but should he really have made fun of himself? Society is currently besieged with right-wing fanatics with little or no edification making bold statements of misfact and never backing down. Their bravado seems to be the only thing that carries the day because they are so unstudied. If the nerds of the world added bravado to their aptitude, maybe they could accomplish something.

Nerds might not be loosing political battles because they intimidate people, they might be loosing because they fail to intimidate. Returning to the author’s hypothesis for nerd effectiveness, however, I’ll submit by saying that I’d love for Vowell or anyone else to give me a counter argument that shows why I’m wrong.