Triumph of the Nerds

Last week I saw the new Star Trek movie at an IMAX theater with my girlfriend, thus achieving all three of my goals from high school simultaneously. If you looked around the IMAX theater (an acronym for Image Media Antelope Xylophone) there were several hundred other nerds and femmedorks present who had convinced a date to come along with them. They weren’t being ironic, either. People legitimately wanted to learn about Spock.

This is important to me, as I am ethnically nerd. (Technically I am half nerd on my mother’s side, but my dad was a nerd throughout college before converting to Presbyterianism. Now he’s both.) You  may remember from old films that the frightful 1970’s were little more than geek pogroms wherein guys in varsity jackets and terrible haircuts spent most of their days shoving nerds into toilets or kicking their sandcastles over.

Nerds spent thirty years eschewing dates and finagling their way into media, and have been steadily burrowing into pop culture and taking it over from the inside. An excellent example of this is Lost, or Heroes.

A few years ago at a party, I spent several minutes flirting with a girl. I don’t remember where this encounter lines up chronologically, but presumably this was the first girl I ever met, because I recall making quips about Star Trek conventions to impress her (note the plural). She said she did not like Star Trek, or any science fiction, really. I asked her what kind of show she did like, and she said Lost. I’ve never seen an episode, but according to her, it was a show about time travel.

Time travel is, in case you don’t know, a subset of science fiction. Television shows and films about super heroes are a close cousin, from the comic book geek wing of the family. All of these things have come to the fore. What was once the domain of dorkdom has become the wellspring of pop culture.

In fact I have pioneered a mathematical equation which, when applied to geeky concepts like “rocket ships” or “cyborgs,” can be smoothly integrated into mainstream media:

SCIENCE FICTION + PROMISCUOUS HOT PEOPLE = POP CULTURE HIT*

*also works for pornography

It’s hard to remember, but “nerd” used to be a pejorative term. Now it’s a mark of honor, and everyone under thirty in the country describes themselves as some variation of nerd. If you’re in college, feel free to take this premise and write a brilliant dissertation: “Twenty-first century youth culture embraces the outsider identity en masse, enshrining and redefining ‘nerd’ as an aspirational identity.” (As payment, send me three boxes of Ritalin in empty Tic-Tac containers.)

An unforeseen development, which I find irritating, is that “nerd” is now applied to fields which were entirely antagonistic to people with thick glasses. Jocks, our ancestral nemeses, come to mind. A friend of mine once apologized to me for rambling on about football, concluding his speech with, “but I guess I’m a sports nerd.”

No. You’re not. You can like sports, and you can be a nerd, but you cannot be a “sports nerd.” That’s our word! If you wear a Steelers jersey in public nobody thinks about it. If I wear my Star Trek TNG uniform on the bus, I get stabbed. You were dating cheerleaders in high school. I was building one.

That’s a minor linguistic complaint. Overall, I’m very pleased. Nerds took over when no one was watching. We’re running the show now. We won!