Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) Read Online Free PDF Page B

boredom and immobility liberated what was best in people.
    “What’s that thing?” my father asked me one afternoon. It was November, well into the school year, and my art teacher was pushing a new line: that art, to be good, should show emotion . This contradicted her old line: that art was good no matter what.
    “It started out,” I said, “as a triceratops charging a stegosaurus that you can’t see except for the tip of its snout there at the edge, under the boulders shooting from the volcano.”
    “So how come it didn’t stay all that?”
    “My teacher.”
    “What about her?”
    “She told me to open up.”
    “Open up in what respect?”
    “By drawing forms instead of objects.”
    “The distinction there being …?”
    “All I know,” I said, “is what she told me. It’s fine that I draw good dinosaurs, she said, but drawing things that look like other things—things that we have pictures of already—isn’t really art, it’s copying. Art is feelings. She wants me to draw feelings. That’s what those squiggles are. Those wavy parts.”
    My father nodded. Then he went hunting. In a pipe in the wall I could hear the water draining from my mother’s bath upstairs. To spare her the awkwardness and insincerity of having to show pride in my botched picture, I crumpled it up and stuffed it in my corduroys, where it stayed hidden until laundry day.
    “What’s this?” my mother said.
    “Some art I made.”
    “I love it.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s different.”
    “Than what?” I said.
    “Than what you usually do. There’s something new here.”
    “Feelings.”
    “Is that it? Huh. I think you’re right.”
    That’s when, art-wise, I became a fraud. With the pure, un-corrupted logic which God grants eight-year-olds, I reasoned that if art was made of feelings and feelings were secret, known only to the artist, then art could be anything you said it was. Collage by collage, tempera by tempera, I practiced producing mysterious oddities to which I could attach invented feelings. My stories about my art became my art. “This decoupage is about how sad I get when my father leaves on a long business trip.” “This watercolor shows my happiness when it snows and I can use my sled.” These stories brought praise and sometimes hugs, eventually convincing me that art was about one feeling above all others: being loved. Or wanting to be loved. And once I discovered this, I got straight As.
    A rope dangled from the ceiling of the gymnasium. If we could climb it fast enough and high enough, we’d be eligible for a framed certificate signed by our nation’s commander in chief—a man of humble beginnings, my father told me, who’d worked his way through law school, entered politics, suffered much ridicule from “egghead” types who lived in “ivory towers,” and finally prevailed by “giving them the finger.” You could think what you want about Nixon, my father said, but the man was no quitter, he had grit, and no one had ever given him anything; he’d taken what he had by force of will. No wonder I wanted so badly to climb that rope for him and bring home his autograph to show my father.
    I hung back and let my friends go first. They attacked the rope with zeal, gaining their first few feet through sheer momentum, but for most of them there came a point when it was clear they’d rise no farther no matter how desperately they strained. The other kids would crowd in under them and holler encouragement, but all this accomplished was to rob the climbers of a dignified glide back to the floor. Instead, they were forced to put on a futile show, to claw and grunt and slip back even farther, turning what might have been a quick defeat into a protracted humiliation.
    I panicked when my turn came. I’d already disappointed the president in two less-strenuous events—chin-ups and the standing broad jump—and another defeat, I feared, would crush me utterly and show me up as a poor citizen. It would prove