Down And Out in the Meritocracy

 

Whenever I am feeling particularly maschositic...

Or whenever I am seized by a deep sense of resentment that I was never chosen for the best college or the leadership of a major corporation or as the main script writer for a classic TV series...

I bring myself down to earth by opening up whatever New Yorker magazine I may have at hand, turn to the final page and examine the Cartoon Caption contest.

It is there I can feel fully cognizant of just how average, ordinary, how undistinguished and unworthy of the idea of "first rate" I truly am.

Displayed there is a single, caption-less cartoon for my consideration and I usually draw a complete blank, struggle to offer some utterly prosaic uninspired idea and then collapse in a puddle of self aware self rebuke.

Then, to really twist the blade in that space between my ribs, I read over the "finalists" suggestion from the contest the week before and am at once dazzled by their brilliance--"brilliant" that word so overused as to be almost meaningless now, but the best description of what I find there. And in the face of the three extraordinary offerings from my fellow citizens, I sink to the bottom of my own well of collapsed self regard and gasp.

The only salutatory part is once I am at rock bottom, I have achieved getting to the point where everything else has got to be up from there. 

When I was in middle school (then called "junior high") in Montgomery County, Maryland in some capricious lark, no doubt launched by a bored bureaucrat in the depths of the Department of Education, they administered an examination to some unsuspecting cohort of students, who were spared English class that day, sat at their desks and presented with an SAT like test booklet. Breaking that seal with your #2 pencil that day unleashed a different experience from what we usually expected. The questions were not multiple choice but required essays, handwritten in those days, which presented its own special sort of bias, but there you have it. 

Each question was shown below a picture, a photo, a painting and the student was asked to comment on its meaning, to write a paragraph or two about the image.

One frame was left blank. The classic blank canvas, and this was a particularly important question. Some students simply wrote there must be some error here because there was no image on the copy of the test the student had been provided. (These students, we were later told, tended to be the students who scored highest later on the Princeton Scholastic Aptitude Test--the SAT. These students could see the game and prepare effectively for those concrete, there-is-always-the-answer-right-in-front-of- you type tests, but give them a blank page, not so much.)

Some students, confronted with the page wrote wonderful stories about a snowstorm with white out conditions. Others ruminated on what sort of state occurs before we are born. Others wrote about what comes after death. Some got so carried away by the blank page, they continued their answers on the back of the answer sheet. 

So, this experimental test was a game about creativity, imagination, the ability to express one's ideas using a pencil in hand.

You had to get the game, of course, and some of the straight A students with the high college boards, most of them actually, apparently did not get the game or if they did, they did not have that sort of intelligence or energy. These high SAT students got the game of the SAT, which required some learned concepts in math, some cunning to see the traps in the questions, some memory prowess and, in the case of syllogisms some feel for the variations in meaning in words or in difference between words like "to want" and "to need." 

But the rules for this test were different. A different game. 

I thought I did pretty well on that test, but, of course, never heard what anyone else, much less the test makers, thought. No scores were ever reported. Certainly, nobody from Harvard or Yale ever called saying they had read my exam and wanted me to come up and visit the campus. 

But now, looking at those blank spots for the captions in the New Yorker, I could appreciate the depths of my own unworthiness. 

Consider the #730 contest. Just look at that cartoon. For me, the important detail is in the expression on the lab rat's face, and that makes me choose the first answer below, but I would have been happy to come up with any of the finalist answers. Never could. My mind is just not that rich. Each of these answers is a reference to some social/cultural issue, and the last one is a jibe at that line about continuing a family tradition in the workplace. Each is beyond clever. Not me. 

But, there is a whiff of hope:  In a nation where at least half of the people find Donald Trump inspiring, there is some intelligent life buried under the red dust, and all you have to do to know it's there is to put a cartoon on the last page of The New Yorker and ask for suggested captions, and this life sprouts out, like photosynthesizing organisms reaching for the sun.

“I bet you also had to be twice as smart as the men.”

Eva Hess, Davis, Calif.

“And, when you get hungry, the cafeteria is to your right, left, left, right, left, straight, right, straight, left, and then you push on the big lever.”

Michael Moran, Evanston, Ill.

“They tell me your family has been doing lab work for generations.”

William Howard, New Fairfield, Conn.