Nerds Versus Geeks: The Ongoing Crusade against Tighty-Whitey Underwear

“The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things...”

I am a Nerd.

Pardon my oblique statement of self-definition, but it is quite clear that I can not separate myself from the term. Let me explain.

To be a Nerd is to be part of an (admittedly) snobbish, select group of relative intellectuals. There is no hazing for new members, no test, no hoop one must jump through—there is simply Nerdiness, and Non. You can see us, huddled in our group, gasping over the (admittedly, old) romance of Jean-Paul Satre and Simon Beauvoir. We have fantasy wrestling matches of Shakespeare lovers, arguing over who would win: Romeo and Juliet versus Anthony and Cleopatra (Cleopatra of course; Juliet, was, after all, rather wimpy and saddled with a corset). Our battle of the bands features covers of Mozart and Stravinsky; our musical discussions debate the merits of Glenn Gould over Van Cliburn. We play the violin, but not the tuba, we read Shakespeare and Dickens but not Orson Scott Card and Ludlum, we listen to Classic Rock and Classical, but not Heavy Metal.

Nerd-dom is a state of mind.

We are defined by what we are, and what we most potently are not. The Geeks are our sworn enemy—we look upon them with disdain and loathing. They are the pageant queens to our supermodels, the ginger ale to our champagne, the Canada to our France. In other words, we are what Geeks aspire to be—Geeks, version 2.0, with sophisticated add-ons such as Shakespearian insults and concrete poetry. They are the usurpers of our intelligent trophy, the charlatans in the face of our genuine cleverness. They cannot use proper punctuation to save their life, yet are fluent in HTML, Perl, and C. They have assassinated our letters and ““I223P14(3I) 7I-I3I/I w/ II II I/I I3 3 I25”” They play the tuba and give orchestras the spit-upon dogma of “social suicide.” Join and die, cable and DSL, CounterStrike and World of Warcraft, Lara Croft and the newest anime schoolgirl—their list of corrupted “intelligence” rages on…

..And they will answer for it.

We will pit the card catalogue against the computer screen, the Communist Manifesto against the Hacker Manifesto. Ours will be a crusade against the computer, a holy war against Halo. We long for the long-awaited Reconquest of our beloved lands of Calculus and Physics, Band and Biology. All of those subjects and objects you add the suffix –Geek to—they are ours by birthright. We will prevail. We will conquer. We will succeed, and we will do it whilst conjugating irregular Latin verbs and playing Shostakovich’s Fifth.

We will smile as our shots of sophisticated smarts echo through the darkness, calling and asking for those who endeavor to blasphemy the power of Ptolemy, the might of Machiavelli, the scepter of Shakespeare.

… “But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.”