Race to the finish

I want to tell you about a guy I’ll call “Ron.” That’s an alias. I didn’t pick a goofy one, because Ron’s story isn’t particularly funny.

 

See, Ron is a racist.

 

What makes that difficult to admit is that Ron and I have a history going back to grade school; we’ve got one of those rare bonds that’s forged through the sheer accumulation of years and common experience. Our friendship dissolved just before the holidays, not with a climactic blowout but in a quiet, melancholy moment which passed sadly at the site of so many of our shared memories.

 

I was back home for Christmas. A mutual friend of ours, “Ken” – a non-racist, and absolute sweetheart – was paying me a visit. As we were sitting at the kitchen table, swapping war stories over foamy microbrews, Ken got a text. “Ron’s in town,” he said. “Do you mind if he pops by?”

 

It was easy to say yes. Months had passed since I had last seen Ron. Years before, he had attended law school in Florida, and after passing that state’s bar exam, got a job with a firm just outside of Miami. Distance, and his commitment to his career, had prevented us from engaging in the kind of laugh-laden backslapping that was typical of so many moments in our now-distant youth. It also prevented me from witnessing just how much he had changed.

After exchanging a few pleasantries and chuckling over some old tales from our high school days, the talk turned to politics, world affairs, and education. We shared the view that the educational system in America was in dire straights. We did not agree as to why.

 

“There are so many minorities in the Florida school system,” he said. “They drag the white kids down. They’d be learning at a much higher level if only the other kids could speak English.”

 

Sometimes a comment hits you with the force of a violent thunderclap, jolting you into a moment with crystalline clarity. And I didn’t say anything. To my shame.

 

“A black guy, a Hispanic guy, and an Irishman walk into a bar.” A lot of jokes start off that way. I’ve chuckled at a few; told a few. Maybe you have, too. I’ve always justified it by claiming that the humor in such jokes can be found in the fact that their very basis, the logic on which they’re built, is spectacularly untrue. Hyperbole is funny. Mentally, I always wiggled my way out of guilt by telling myself that if a black guy, Hispanic guy, and an Irishman did happen to walk into a bar, they would be judged on their relative merits, and not on the odious stereotyping that provides the punchline. That’s easy to do in a region that’s overwhelmingly white; there are fewer tests of character, fewer opportunities to rise to the promise of enlightenment.

 

You coast on cognitive dissonance. And then you encounter a serious comment so disgusting, so morally reprehensible, that it shocks you into contrition. 

 

Some will tell you that racism is no longer a problem in this country. Look, they say, at all the advances that have been made. Jim Crow segregation, internment camps for Japanese-Americans, slavery – all dusty relics of a distant and bygone age. Those were historical blips, they argue, with no residual effects, no need to ensure that the long march of progress doesn’t stumble and fall.

 

It’s a fool’s argument. In a nation where all people are supposedly presumed equal, it’s difficult to realize that some are still considered less equal than others. The signs are more subtle. But that’s exactly why it’s important to not become complacent. You don’t ease up on the gas when the finish line is still so far away.

 

A few years ago, my mother backed up some old home movies to DVD in an effort to preserve them digitally – an invaluable resource for miners of personal history. I watched one of them recently. It featured footage from my sixth grade graduation ceremony, a folding-chair event in a gymnasium awash in orange light. The principal, Mr. Whitfield, was handing out certificates for various accomplishments, like high grades or good attendance. One by one he read our names, and one by one we walked to the podium to collect our prizes. At one point, he called Ron’s name; and a few seconds later, out of the edge of the frame, a 12-year-old boy appeared, all gangly limbs and goofy smile. My heart broke. Because I could see our future: Joyrides in his boat-like Lincoln, nighttime tennis in a misty rain, school video projects filmed at the kitchen table. The very table where, 20 years later, he would reveal a sad and sorry prejudice.

 

I’ll never know if the grinning boy in that clip was innocent, only to be warped by an ignorant tribalism, or whether the seeds of racism were already sown. I’d like to think that bigotry is learned, that we’re born free of pernicious worldviews, but who can say for sure? It’s hard not having an answer to that question.

 

I’ve been fortunate enough to make some close friends in my life, and collectively they hold wide-ranging views on a variety of topics, from politics to religion and the nature of morality; and that’s fine. In many cases, our differences make our friendships stronger. There comes a point, though, when you have to acknowledge that someone has chosen a path you simply can’t follow. Your values have just evolved in different directions. And that’s painful. It’s unfair. But it’s life.

 

Most everyone has heard the old Edmund Burke bromide: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” When Ron dropped his bombshell, I had a chance to say something and didn’t. But I do have one action left to me. If Ken once more sits at the table and asks if Ron is allowed to visit, I can simply say no.

 

A black guy, a Hispanic guy, and an Irishman walk into a bar. I forget the rest. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Feeling testy

There was this kid I went to high school with who got a perfect 1600 on his SAT exam. Everybody hated him for about a week.

 

The brains hated him ‘cause he outshone them at their own game, storming his way to the top score en route to becoming King of the Teacher’s’ Pets. Everyone else hated him because it briefly made him a pseudo-celebrity. I remember stopping by my locker one afternoon, probably to ditch my pre-calculus text in exchange for a gruesome zombie novel, and seeing a TV station’s camera crew following him through the halls – as though he were a hard-luck Hollywood actor called to task for drunkenly driving his Bentley through the dining room of a Chinese restaurant. It was like going to school with Lindsay Lohan, except Lindsay Lohan couldn’t get a perfect 1600 if she was three-months’ sober and coached by physicist Stephen Hawking. 

 

I belonged to neither of these camps. Frankly, I never cared that much, since his score had about as much impact on my life as a donkey fart in Siberia. But I remember being impressed. The SATs were hard.

 

Well now, not so much. In a recent article, AP Education Writer Kimberley Hefling reported that the iconic test will soon undergo some revisions, which, judging from their nature, should make it an easy, breezy affair, the stuff of pasta collages and spelling tests with words like “crayon” and “ham.” 

 

One of the changes is actually positive: It restores 1600 as the test’s top score, which has been out of vogue since the last series of updates were made in 2005. Now granted, since the requirements of the SAT periodically change, this is less important than it could be. Contrasting a current class’ test scores to that of previous generations sounds helpful, until you realize it’s akin to comparing an NFL quarterback’s stats to those of somebody who played in the 1940’s, when helmets were leather and guys played with broken bones and polio. When standards change, comparisons become less meaningful. Even so, there’s something reassuring about the number 1600; it restores a tradition that somehow perfectly encapsulates the unmitigated terror of doing the actual deed. If memory serves, fear was one of the best incentives to do well on the SAT. It can be a powerful motivator. Just ask Stalin, or Lex Luthor.

 

Other changes seem designed simply to lower the bar, which is never a good idea, especially in a country preoccupied with cheese-stuffed pizza crust and the diplomatic achievements of Dennis Rodman. It’s well documented how far America has fallen educationally when compared to the rest of the world; we’ve gone from being a mecca of academic excellence to a nation that considers a top score on “Wheel of Fortune” to be a high intellectual goal. Our reading levels are far behind other first-world countries, and our math scores are even more abysmal; in a worldwide ranking, I’m pretty sure we rate just below that tiny Pacific island where the locals make toothbrushes out of the blubber of dead sharks.

 

Which is why it seems like a bad time to remove penalties for wrong answers. And make the essay optional. And replace challenging vocabulary words, such as “prevaricator” and “sagacious,” with easier fare like “synthesis” and “empirical.” Those, according to Hefling, are among the changes that are slated to take effect by 2016. 

 

College Board President and bespectacled sea turtle David Coleman said the test should offer “worthy challenges, not artificial obstacles.” He asserted that the changes are more reflective of what students study in high school, and the skills they’ll need in college. No word yet on whether the new test will have questions about keg stands or making bongs out of plastic water bottles. Something tells me there are certain skill sets that have to be acquired in the field.

 

I understand the desire to take academics in one hand, and the SAT in the other, and get them both pointed in the same direction. Makes sense. But if there’s a gap between what children are learning and what they’re tested on, heightening the standards of academics seems to me a nobler goal than lowering the standards of the test. Sure, you’ll see improved scores, but what will that mean, exactly, for the next kid who lands a 1600 and thereby gains admission to Harvard or Yale? It’d be a shame for some poor student to be accepted into a top-tier university, only to flunk out before learning how to paddle a rowboat in a polo shirt, or smoke a corncob pipe pretentiously.

 

If kids today don’t know the meanings of “prevaricator” and “sagacious,” let’s teach them. The brain is a muscle, so even if they don’t use certain words or skills in real-world scenarios, at least they’ve given the ol’ fleshbag a good workout, the mental equivalent of the training montage in all 27 Rocky movies. American high schoolers are going to have to compete globally, so if we want them to perform on the level of, say, the Bavarians or the Brazilians, then we need to expect more of them. That means holding them to a higher standard, but it also means teaching them better.

 

Whew! Quite the view from this high horse, lemme tell you. Blue skies for miles.

 

One more point: The whole culture of fear surrounding the test is unwarranted. Not that it isn’t important to study hard and do well – it is – but the impact of any given student’s score is consistently overblown. Mr. Perfect 1600, the last I heard, was a stand-up comedian.

 

Nothing wrong with that, by any means. Some of me favorite people ever are stand-up comedians. But it goes to show that you never know how people’ll turn out. Take me, for example. My score was far from perfect. But at least when I crack wise, I get to do it sitting down.

 

Tat attack

Whenever I see Mike Tyson, I feel this strange motherly urge to spit into a handkerchief and wipe that gray muck from the side of his face.

 

It always takes me a minute to realize that the weird muck is actually a tattoo. I remember watching him box back in the day, before he went off the rails and started telling his opponents that he would eat their families, and he looked more or less like any regular dude. Assuming any regular dude has a gap in his teeth and pectoral muscles that could be used as sandbags during a Biblical flood.

 

Then he just appeared one day, without warning, with this trippy design etched onto his mug. Extending down the left side of his face from his brow to his chin, it looks like some skeletal dragon that’s trying to gobble his eye. It’s the kind of thing that would be fun as a temporary tattoo – maybe as part of a Halloween costume depicting the head-shrinking tribesmen of the Amazon rainforest – but as a permanent marking, it makes it hard to take Mike Tyson seriously. The man can punch a hole through a car door, yet it looks like he just had his face painted at the circus.

 

I may never understand face tattoos.

 

On other areas of the body, they’re fine. Depending on taste, execution, and location, they can be downright cool. Sometime during the past couple generations, there’s been a shift in peoples’ thinking about body art; back in olden times, before a pill could cause a four-hour erection, tattoos were considered the province of criminals and ne’er-do-wells, a sign meant to convey a person’s hard-edged toughness. They were often acquired in prison, where getting one’s ink was a nice way to break up the monotony of lifting weights and spooning with men named Shirley.

 

Now, so many people in my age group have tattoos that when I get together with friends of mine, there’s a fairly high likelihood that I’ll be the only one at the gathering without some kind of body art. And they’re not ruffians, these people. They don’t use spittoons or smell like motorcycle leather. They wear T-shirts with video game characters on them and watch “Dr. Who.” At some point, people like that became the patrons of tattoo parlors, which must have been confusing to the needle-wielding artists, so accustomed were they to inking up pool sharks and big-bicepted sailors.

 

Even I came close to having a tat of my own. I was in college (of course I was), and was strongly considering getting an emblem permanently grafted onto my upper arm. The design was a four-sided star that’s become a logo of sorts for the metal group Metallica; it was perfect, I thought, because it would be located in an easily-concealable spot, and represent a genuine passion of mine without resorting to off-putting imagery, like a skull with a mullet dripping blood from its eye sockets, or Satan flipping the bird to a basket of puppies. 

 

In the end, though, I decided against it, for the simple realization that I’d just never have the chance to show it off. My lumpy, oddly-constructed body is like a solar eclipse, in that you probably don’t want to look at it directly without the aid of protective goggles. I’d have to make a special point of bringing the tattoo up in conversation, at which point I’d roll up my sleeve to display it, and realize that I just dropped eighty bucks to see people politely nod their heads. 

 

Also, I do have to admit that I was influenced by the whole it’s-going-to-look-terrible-when-you’re-80 argument. You’ve heard (or even spoken) this line of reasoning: “Sure, your tattoo may look nice now, but gravity always wins, and when you’re old it’ll look distorted and weird.” That made sense to me ten years ago, but over time I find it less and less persuasive. Yes, at 80 years old, any tattoo’s you’ve got will probably look bad, but then again, so will the rest of you. At that point, what does it matter? When you reach that age, it’s not like you’re still trying to pick up women on spring break by sucking in your gut and preening like a peacock. At 80, relax. You’re done. Mission accomplished. If you find yourself single and looking for a companion, I don’t think a mere lumpy tattoo will be that great a hindrance. Chances are your potential honey-bunny has plenty of interesting topography themselves, whether they had ink done or not.

 

So I guess a tattoo is still on the table, potentially – less a compulsion now than a wistful bucket-list item. But if Mike Tyson has taught me anything, it’s that the face is a bad, bad place to put one.

 

As mainstream as they’ve become, I think there’ll always be a stigma about placing them there. And there should be. Tatted-up or not, people don’t identify us by our upper arms or lower backs or calves or ankles; it’s our mugs that get us in the door. They send a message to the world. Sullied by an artist’s needle, that message is: “I will eat your family.”

 

My dad’s got a tattoo on his forearm. He’s had it for over 50 years, and had it done during an era when the technology wasn’t on par with today’s standards; you can tell that it’s seen better days. It’s either an anchor, or two seals making love on a gondola. I’m not positive. But as rough as it looks, it’s still preferable to anything that would rouse the spit-and-wipe instincts of hygiene-oriented parents. 

 

Personally speaking, the only above-the-neck ink I’d consider would be a scalp tattoo of a full head of hair. Really turn peoples’ heads. What do you think, should I stick with the natural brown, or change it up, be audacious? I’d better choose wisely. Once there, it’s there forever.

 

Bit by bit

Let’s say all of humanity suddenly vanishes from the face of the planet. Maybe the rapture comes, which would probably settle some bets among the most pointy-hatted of religious purists. Or maybe there’s a hot sale on scented candles at a Bed, Bath & Beyond in the Andromeda galaxy, and every last person on earth decides they just can’t live without the smell of cinnamon-tinged eucalyptus leaves.

Okay. So what do we, as a species, leave behind?

That depends.

Certain things will remain long after we’re gone. Cities will eventually crumble and decay, but not for millennia, so whoever takes our place as the dominant species – hyper-intelligent giraffes, perhaps, or cockroaches who learn to manufacture conveniently-priced kitchen items – will have their run of the joint. Escaped zoo orangutans can play the craps tables in Vegas for the next several centuries, ’cause they’ll be there for a good long while, and maybe while they’re at it the buggers can figure out how the hell one actually plays craps.

Statues and stone monuments, properly shielded from the elements, will endure. Drawings and paintings, especially those preserved in museums, will last. You can eliminate people, but you can’t eliminate most of the artifacts they leave behind.

Digital files, though. That’s another story.

Life is increasingly digital, whether we want it to be or not. Bank transactions, correspondence, streaming movies on demand, and pictures of cats that look like Merv Griffin are all inescapably computerized; this ensures that an ever-greater percentage of our lives are lived in a kind of virtual hinterland, an ethereal ocean of interconnected ones and zeroes. We’ve grown comfortable with this. So comfortable, in fact, that we think nothing of consigning our personal data and life’s history to this great intangible mass. Humankind’s latest monument is a bank of humming computer servers at Google headquarters, guarded by pimply coders who power themselves through their workdays on the steam of meat lover’s pizzas and pitchers of high-octane Mountain Dew. In other words, the new stewards of human history are clones of me in high school, only better paid and less prone to nosebleeds.

Digital media, though, only lasts for about ten years, on average. That’s about the life expectancy of a stray dog, or an unwrapped Twinkie.

As long as we keep backing up our data to new storage devices, that’s not an issue. But consider a giant asteroid that collides with the earth and causes humans to become extinct, as likely happened with the dinosaurs. Poof, gone in two blinks. Centuries later, an intelligent species from the planet Dingleberry touches down on Earth to study the ghostly remnants of our civilization. What will they find?

With computer storage gone the way of woolly mammoths and Nicholas Cage’s career, the traveling Dingleberrians will think that human civilization reached its peak around 1996. Thousands of years of evolution, centuries spent in the pursuit of betterment and achievement, and to the alien archaeologists, our best accomplishments were glow-in-the-dark Nerf balls and “Seinfeld.”

I’m not knocking computers. While it’s true that they’ve spread like chlamydia at a frat kegger, they certainly have some great uses, like Photoshopping your enemies’ heads onto the bodies of obese hippopotamuses. But the actual, physical information stored therein, the means of holding onto data, is alarmingly fleeting; PCs, tablets and smartphones are loose piles of sand just waiting for the one stiff breeze that sends ’em all to hell. 

People are a funny lot, constantly building edifices that stand as testaments to their own greatness. The pyramids, the Sears Tower, the world’s largest ball of twine in Cawker City, Kansas: These are all attempts to leave behind something important, a series of peacock feathers meant to say, “Yeah, we’re pretty awesome.” The urge is understandable. On an individual level, most of us feel the need to make some kind of mark – it’s why we have children, write books, knit sweaters, and carve our initials into the desk when the teacher isn’t looking. We want to endure. Centuries after the final human has breathed his last, bathroom stalls from Rio to Amsterdam will still be riddled with etchings of cartoon genitals. What a legacy.

But the things we now rely on to mark our moment in history – blogs, social media feeds, vicious YouTube arguments between lobotomy patients – those will all evaporate like water. When clipboard-toting Dingleberrians studying your living room observe your wall-mounted photo prints, they’ll know that you once spent part of a summer taking scuba lessons from a freckly ginger with a birthmark on his chin that looked like Scandanavia. With the rest of the photos from that trip tucked away digitally in some now-defunct hard drive, they’ll never know that you and the instructor ended each day holding hands at sunset and smoking hash out of a hollowed-out apple. That little detail will be gone forever.

One wonders whether all of the permanent markers of our race have already been built, left to tell a story rooted in antiquity. It’s the price of transitioning from the real world to the virtual one. Let’s make a pact, you and me: If astronomers detect an asteroid that’s on a collision course with Earth, we’ll gather up humankind’s digital detritus, hop into a rocketship, and head to a planet on which we can preserve our collective history: our Facebook posts and digital music and videos of birds dancing to Van Halen. It’s not much, and it pales in comparison to the greatness of Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China, but it’s what we have. It would be a shame if it were all lost to time.

I suggest a place somewhere in Andromeda. I hear the sales there are spectacular.