Counter-Currents
First page and inset of Ernest Hemingway’s War Department-issued overseas visa
1,173 words
As I stroll lackadaisically through life’s pollen-belching daffodil fields, it occurs to me that I’ve never seen a depressed person with Down syndrome. No matter how sad their lives may look to outsiders, down to the last pumpkin-headed man and woman they seem blissfully ignorant of how they may appear to others. They happily embrace life as if they are clutching a fistful of multicolored balloons.
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12 comments
“Although I felt bad that she’d wasted all that time, I took it as a badge of honor that I was considered beyond the pale even for HUSTLER.”
Good one!
I got my subscription money’s worth with this gem.
Such an awesome line, and I feel sure he is the only person on the planet who can claim it. I also very much enjoyed the “supremely dumb and entitled” line about the bag-of-hair editor at his last mag. I hate that chick like I hate Glenn Beck.
If you’re ever offered an over/under bet as to how many times on a podcast Jim Goad will say how smart he is, take the over. Even so, definitely worth listening to.
I’d figured there were sufficient levels of false humility and insincere buttering-up of the audience in this piece to prevent such comments. Now I see how wrong I was.
I see no pride in this piece. People often misinterpret humility as a negative virtue; as a type of humiliation or extreme mortification in order to avoid being the center of attention. In truth, humility is authenticity- to own up to your personal attributes. To obscure one’s intelligence to appear humble is actually pride. If you are intelligent, own it, and put it on a lamp stand for all to see – Bless the race.
C’mon, Jim, you know how uncomfortable it is for people to read about IQ. Couple that with your honest self-appraisal and of course you’ll get some pushback. You live for it.
People who tut-tut about Schopenhauer being “unfortunately quite misanthropic” belong to the Stupid Party or are virtue signaling to keep their useful friends. He was absolutely right to argue that the blessing of intelligence made other people annoying but also unnecessary, like everything else in the external world; since an intelligent person can commune their own vast intelligence, they have no need of outside stimulation — conversation, champagne, oysters, movies, all the externals that duller people need to stave off boredom.
Schopenhauer would have either not noticed or delighted in the lockdown, as long as the taverns were open. Each evening he would dine — alone — at the local bierstube, delighting in their beer and sausages. He would place a coin (a golden thaler?) on the table, as a bet to himself that the soldiers dining around him would for once not talk of only women or dueling; he always won.
I spent an uncomfortably long portion of my youth trying to “be normal” due to indoctrination with egalitarian philosophies. It couldn’t be that I was really miles ahead of everyone around me in intelligence, no it had to be hubris on my part. Sad to say, the psychological damage is probably never going away.
I am constantly entertained by Mr. Goad’s articles because they so speak to my similar life experiences. This one is no exception, but my experience was a little different. I was placed in “special class” at an early age and was surrounded by equally high intelligence kids. Then at the start of high school, my parent moved us to a rural area and I was plopped into regular classes. What a shock. It was like being dropped off at a school for retarded kids every day. Sorry it took so long for you to have your epiphany, Mr. Goad. It was always quite evident to me that the people I did not want to have anything to do with were dummies.
Lovely post, Mr. Goad. As the parent of a son who sounds remarkably like you in so many aspects, I’m truly glad you’ve found some happiness. Being more than a standard deviation or two above average is not an unalloyed blessing. Extremely high IQ does tend to come with asynchronous development (i.e. ‘ahead intellectually and behind emotionally’). And a lot of the resentment, when you’re an extremely bright child, comes not even from the other children but from their parents and, of course from the idiot female teachers.
From what little I know about your personal life, I would guess that along with the intellect comes a propensity for the adrenaline rush (i.e. you were ‘bad’ or ‘troublesome’ because you were a natural risk-taker). Again, my son definitely exhibited the same from a very young age (screaming with excitement and joy at going down a pool slide headfirst, again and again, as a very young toddler) and I would argue that strain is visible in other male relatives and ancestors. Better suited to a better age, and very difficult to navigate in ClownWorld.
I fear some people will reverse the syllogism and claim that if they’re miserable, it proves they’re very smart.
That War Dept. visa for Hemingway is intriguing. This is some 17 years before he blew his brains out in Ketchum, but its date is very close to another of his brain-damaging mishaps. May 20, 1944 is just before he boarded a Pan Am Clipper for London because he was going to cover D-Day for Collier’s. A couple of days after he arrived, Hem stayed up drinking till 3am and then he and his friends had a horrible car bang-up in the blackout, which incapacitated him for a week or more. All bandaged up, he got out of hospital and covered D-Day from a transport ship and landing craft. Then he filed his story and got very tight for the next week.
It is probable that this accident and aftermath, along with one or two other severe concussions he later suffered, led to the memory loss and depression that made him shoot himself in July 1961, shortly before his 62nd birthday. Of course, being highly intelligent might also have made him unhappy.
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