Before I get going here, I don’t want you to be lost in case you were trying cigarettes in junior high instead of playing sorcery card games. So in case you don’t know, this is essentially what Magic: The Gathering is about:

You have “land” cards, that come in five types– red, blue, white, green and black. Each color has corresponding monsters, spells and corrective footwear that gives them advantages over cards from other colors, and you use the land cards to “pay” for them. Some people use two colors, or three, in a deck; most use one. So, your goal is to beat the opposing cartomancer by “damaging” him or her with your spells and critters. The concept is simple and straightforward, right? Good.

When I first arrived, there was a sign for the Magic tournament that said “Battle of the Bad.” Apparently, this was because we were all going to “draft” cards from different stacks of terrible cards, so we would all be playing with the worst of what Magic had to offer. I remember more than enough from my athletic playing days that you have to put yourself in the mood to succeed in whatever way works best for you; that’s why, on the drive in, I listened to a two-song playlist consisting of Cake’s “The Distance” and “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine. By the time I arrived, then, I was in no mood to be fucked with.

Organizer: “Hi, are you here for the tournament?”

Me: “No. I’m here for the Battle.”

Organizer: (awkward silence)

Me: “Am I saying that right? ‘Battle’?”

The first thing I noticed was that, whether coincidental or merely unfortunate, the room consisted in the panoply of stereotypes that likely do not represent the majority of Magic players. Thesaurus.com offers these (evidently) accepted levels of increasing severity for the nerd:

“a geek is any smart person with an obsessive interest, a nerd is the same but also lacks social grace, and a dweeb is a mega-nerd.”

Armed with this objective, scientific analysis, I was able to see quickly that the tournament offered at least one example of every major nerd sub-category:

Weird Facial Hair Guy: usually, nerds with substantial girth and height mask their insecurity by having ‘crazy’ facial hair; the rationale, I believe, is that by showing others they are good-natured about the hydraulic grip of the cold hand of evolutionary injustice, they will dissipate sarcasm, criticism or even their own insecurity. In a word, they strive to make everyone, including themselves, comfortable with them. At the tournament, this manifested in a 6’5″, 240 lb. guy with a Charles Manson beard teased out to a handlebar mustache. It was epic.

“Oh no I dih-n’t!” Guy: In his collection of essays “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace’s review of a new dictionary includes a brilliant digression on the contexts of different vernaculars in language. When we are kids, e.g., we talk differently with teachers, with parents, with friends, with religious figures, with sports coaches, etc. His point is, part of complex language acquisition isn’t the acquisition at all; it’s the understanding of euphemism and social context that determines language use. His explanation concludes that kids that are ostracized as nerds under-develop, or never develop, the ability to change social contexts as kids. If they did, they would learn to pipe down in class to not look “uncool,” they would learn to swear when no adults are around, they would learn to make fun of others in order to be a member of a “better” social group. Nerds, though, are always hopelessly trapped in one vernacular, unable to adjust to the quickly sophisticating social relationships that occur in childhood and adolescence.

A young outsider turns into an old outsider, and something really interesting happens for some nerds: in an attempt to breach this vernacular gap, they will intentionally use language in a way that is flagrantly “for” the crowd they’re with. This is always for one of two reasons: to assure others that they are funny/witty/edgy, or simply to assure others that any first impression of them as a nerd is wrong. Either way, it takes the power of categorization away from the observer, and awards linguistic leverage to the nerd– a valuable coping mechanism, particularly for those who have always been in sociolinguistic bankruptcy. The problem, of course, is no one in a given social sphere announces what they’re doing to others. Cooks don’t tell each other “the temperature of this grill will really do the trick for cooking this meat!” People getting high in the dunes at the beach don’t tell each other, “wow, we sure are smoking marijuana cigarettes!” This tournament happened to have the “funny/witty/edgy” guy, who would laugh loudly at his own jokes and frequently say things like “Why did I do that? I shouldn’t have smoked so much crack before I got here! Haha!” or “oh man, I’m going to hell for saying that! Maybe this time around I’ll get a better room!” or “jeez, I might as well bend over the table right now and save you the time!” There was one of these there, and he said all of these things and more at some point.

Un-nerd Guy: because people are not categorical stereotypes from “Revenge of the Nerds”, the reality is that the interests of “nerds” are not relegated to sociotarded Rain Men. These traditional things, like Magic, Dungeons & Dragons, Risk, and (massive multiplayer online) role-playing video games, are associated with nerds because they create a sense of togetherness and communal interest in a social group negatively defined– they are not nerds because they are nerds; nerds are nerds because of what they do not have: mainly, membership in the social groups we designate as ours, and refuse to them. Naturally, tons of people who move fluidly through multiple vernacular spheres breach on the nerd sphere easily. It feeds particular interests they have that other social groups do not satisfy, but they operate with a level of confidence that they can still move between spheres as much as they’d like without being “condemned” to being a nerd, for example, because they like video games. I am this kind of nerd, and 4 others there were as well.

The Cruelty of Interests Guy: this kind of nerd is generally the nicest and most secure of any of them. When you have a set of interests that includes deep investment in vampires, dwarves, spells and knowing insults in Latin, it can be a cruel reality that you happen to look exactly like the things you like. For example, I’m 6’3″ and broad-shouldered; I’m not really type-representative of anything you’d see on a Magic card (unless they have one for “Breakdancing Pope of Tacos”). There was one kid, though, who was about 5’5″, and on the portly side. Liking dwarves and looking like one is one of these somewhat cruel intersections. Generally though, these nerds are far more socially aware of how they are perceived because they are aware of the phenomenology of their being. This is opposed to…

Projection Complex Guy: I’m not talking about people who dress up for Star Trek or Star Wars conventions; that’s a social exercise among like-minded individuals, and whether you into it or not, that’s one thing. Some proselytize, though; they say things like “man, that was a stupid move!” or “I thought you said you played this before” or even “if you want, you can just leave now and I’ll give you your entry fee back. What a waste of time.” The goal is, obviously, to punish you for not being like them. If you weren’t so you, you’d see how awesome this guy is. He’s just turning bullying on its head: if you aren’t like him, he’ll tear you down simply on account.  We had one of these guys, and he got booted from the tourney after 10 minutes.

The Big Fat Liar: some nerds can’t give up the dream that they can sate their nerdery and still distance themselves from the nerd sphere in the eyes of others. Having, for example, gone off to college, and realizing that unlike high school, no one here knows you once made a sex doll of an anime cat-woman out of Q-tips, acrylic paint and Neosporin, then poof! Now you’re a new man! Kurt Vonnegut wrote, in “Mother Night”, that “we are what we pretend to be… so we must be very careful what we pretend to be.” This is the mantra of the liar– he will feed you the stimuli that prove he is how he wants to be seen. So he might show up to the tournament and say something like, “yeah, I mean, so I don’t really play Magic, but I know like the rules or whatever, and if I win I can sell the cards they give you on eBay. It’s like, it’s free money, know what I mean?” There was one of these.

If you did the math on all that, you’d reach ten participants. This took place on campus at Eastern Michigan University. EMU has 22,974 students. 12 of them signed up for the tournament, and only 10 showed. Many of them probably misinterpreted the title, and fearing that their radness wasn’t awesome enough, they couldn’t be good enough to beat the truly bad. But generally speaking, we can all agree I was in very selective company.

My first game did not go well. I was playing The Big Fat Liar, and his laissez-faire attitude only made getting my ass handed to me more demeaning. Clearly, I was not nearly so prescient as I had anticipated being. I rationalized beforehand that the game is essentially about using the abilities of all your cards to help each other, and hurt your opponent. It quickly became obvious that my original game plan was somewhere between “lobotomized earthworm” and “sentient pig semen” on the broad scale of intelligence. I revised my dissociative strategy, and took game 2. I lost game 3, and so was defeated in the first match.

At this point, I started questioning whether or not I possessed any supernatural ability. I mean, I know that my grandfather on my mom’s side was a Daywalker and I had two uncles that were ghosts, so I figured I must have inherited something. I resolved to focus my wizarding energies, lose all strategy, and just let the magic speak through my death-bringing fingertips.

It totally worked. I played dwarf guy next, and he was a genuinely enjoyable person. I fucked him up really hard for all three games, and by the end of it I felt absolutely terrible about myself. He even invited me to hang out with them later that night– grabbing a couple beers then going to a group thing they do every week. If the group thing hadn’t been dressing like vampires and role-playing life in the 14th century (which, in fact, it was) I may have considered it. He apologized to me for not playing better. Devastating.

I can only imagine he was an agent for my next opponent, who was a fellow Un-Nerd. He wasn’t substantially better than me, but he did have strategy. And there I was, an emotional tempest in a teapot and a strategic nightmare, sitting across from him. He evenly and methodically tore me to pieces– three games in about twenty-five minutes. (The average was three games in about forty-five minutes.) Just like that, my day was done. The whole process– from draft to draw to playing all three opponents–lasted about four hours.

This was even more embarrassing, because we were allowed to put our own names on the dry erase board for the standings before we got going. Other people put their names on it. I put “The Alabaster Porkchop” where my name was supposed to go. My rationale was, when I won the final game and the big prize, I would karate-punch my opponent’s throat until it stippled then shout “you just got CHOPPED, son!” But there I was, in a room full of people representing .0005% of EMU’s student population, at a tournament where 2 people paid money to show up then thought about it later and were like, “mmmmnaaaah, I don’t think I’ll do that,” on a Saturday at 1 PM when the number of other things any of us could have been doing besides this tournament was so inconceivable that your aneurisms would catch leprosy just from trying to think about it…

in that room on EMU’s campus, at that tournament, at that time, you could’ve walked in and seen all the legerdemain and cunning of the world’s foremost warlock and eye into the future walking slump-shouldered back to his car, and the unmistakable signature of hubris burning like neon sex into the dry erase board:

The Alabaster Porkchop.

Dead fucking last place.

On the whole, the experience was a good one. As a country, we’re so horny for nostalgia that a tragic percentage of entertainment is sampled, stolen, remade, reissued or reworked. The main problem with this, besides pandering to intellectual sloth and creating a culture of vapidity, is it never really works either way: the old who experienced it around the first time won’t appreciate the added sensationalism needed to sell it to a younger audience, and the young don’t have the cultural background or history to understand why this, why now? In the end, the product never truly hits either audience, but each audience will patronize it before being let down, justifying this process of creative abortion by agreeing to its terms. I think that’s why it’s so easy to go to something like this tournament; it’s not like they’ve added hookers or jetpacks or solid gold credenzas just to bring in a newer audience. The game has evolved a bit, but it hasn’t changed. Lots of “nerd” culture is like this. The fans and participants are militant about rules, accuracy and constancy, because it is their thing, and they won’t let what is important to them be changed without a fight. For some, the childhood dream to see their favorite things become a movie, show or toy isn’t eclipsed by the fanhood that gave birth to that dream. There are some pockets, some social spheres, where a sense of integrity still adheres to the things which brought them together in the first place. And when you can look at something you did half a lifetime ago and return to find it essentially unchanged, I think it begs an interesting question:

who, exactly, is keeping who out?

I’m probably not the only one who spent a large portion of my childhood dreaming of being a soothsayer. There was something alluring about the black arts, and not in that angsty teenager “sitting in the basement cutting ourselves and listening to The Cure while the Asian kid from homeroom tells us about Tarot cards” way. Everything I knew about wizards came from science fiction movies made before 1950; this was not a very progressive time for the thaumaturgically-inclined. Most Wizard-Americans enjoyed a variety of activities back then, such as baby finding, baby theft, baby burning, baby eating, beating babies at chess, tricking babies into signing over their powers of attorney, and backgammon. We see more than half of these, nowadays, as culturally backwards.

We’ve come a long way, baby.

Like most kids, I wanted practical magic powers. I didn’t want to travel through time or control other peoples’ minds or trick John Lithgow into making me Gatorade. I just wanted to see about thirty minutes into the future. That was it. As an overfed and underachieving middle class white kid, I was subject to a lot of peer pressure. So when you’re in 7th grade and trying to prove to a bunch of freshmen you’re cool, it’s not uncommon to do something like put “I brake for Monster Booty!” bumper stickers on the back of all the cop cars in town. Wouldn’t it be nice to know when they’re going to show up soon? It would definitely solve a lot of awkward questions with your parents after being caught: how you sneaked out, why you smell like peppermint schnapps and burning hair, when you became such a huge fan of booty, etc. Future-sight just seemed like the only worthwhile power to have. Unfortunately, the movie examples I had all arrived at the same dilemma: which is it? Are magicians always horny, aquiline sociopaths, or are they more like great white sharks– ambitious and misunderstood?

Later in junior high, I found the answer to my question– and it didn’t require any babies, stealing women for sport or shark magic. The answer was:

Surgeon General's Warning: may contain social stigmas and inappropriate self esteem.

I began to play Magic: The Gathering. This was the perfect solution, because it gave me all the benefits of predicting what others would do and then thwarting them, all without having to go to a Black Mass or becoming ensorcelled by a spell-casting donkey with a devil-may-care attitude. It wasn’t until I was almost 17 or so that I realized that, enjoy it or not, being good at Magic doesn’t really prove anything to anyone else; it does, however, tell everyone two very specific things about you. Let me explain.

1.) You might be a space alien.

Let me tell you a story. In the Old Testament, God was powerful but insecure; He made Israel slaughter the Midionites because their women were lookers, and he got jealous; He burned down Sodom and Gomorrah for doing the same things that most half-sane kids are bored with by the time they’re college sophomores, and then he turned people into spices this way and that. It’s a pretty hard sell to a potential convert; so what you do is talk up the New Testament God. Most people like the New Testament hippy God because he let his kid be in a gang, get hammered, and hang out with prostitutes. That’s some fairly progressive parenting.

So imagine you’re Paul of Tarsus, wandering around the Mediterranean in the days of yore, trying to make everyone believe that a powerful floating white guy wants their undivided attention with no proof it will get them anywhere. It’s no surprise he was laughed out of Athens; when the Greek logicians heard the idea that a god would send himself/his son to be sacrificed to redeem the people the god created as sinful to begin with as well as act like a neurotic manic-depressive, it made them spew whatever it was pretentious Greeks drank right out of their noses.

If you haven’t picked up on the parallel by now, Magic players are like St. Paul. There’s this reciprocal and insulating value to the environment of many hobbies, and 14 year-olds using a card game to establish self-worth likely qualifies as just such an environment. But to everyone on the outside, you aren’t nobly sticking by what makes you happy; you look like you’ve lost the good sense to be publicly ashamed, and whenever you try to talk an outsider about why Magic is great, they’ll just tell you why drinking beer and smoking weed at your classmate’s house with his hot older sister is just a better use of their time. Above and beyond that, high school relationships are tenuous enough anyway without introducing constant, heated competition into groups of kids who have had no outlet for competitive energy their whole lives. If you lose your Magic friends, consider how fucked you would be for friends in general. (EN: it’s very. Very fucked.) So if you can’t understand why any of this is somehow socially crippling, the chance is good you’re an intergalactic hive mind that put on a people suit to experience life as a human.

Above: a roadmap to shattered dreams and forgettable friendships.

2.) Misplaced Priorities

Parenting a Magic child can’t be easy, particularly if you have many such children. Any first-born with a younger sibling will tell you that there’s the feeling that the second kid has it better. It’s no surprise that first time parents have no clue what they’re doing. Go ahead, read parenting books. You think that’s going to prepare you for when your eight-year old beats your neighbor’s dog with a summer sausage, or when your twelve-year old daughter bangs a college sophomore for some Boone’s Farm and half a pack of smokes? Doubt it. And if you already have experience with those situations before having children, there’s a good chance your kid’s already on the fast track to the exciting career of “public masturbator/arsonist.” If you come down too heavily, you’ll make them rebel, like all teenagers desperately want to do– only because they’re Magic kids, the rebellion will be the sad ghost of anarchy, like drawing mustaches on family photos are taping popsicle sticks to your cat’s legs so he walks like Frankenstein. But if you’re too lenient, your priority– protecting your genes for future generations– may be compromised, particularly since modern teens know even something as simple as stealing rare Magic cards and rubbing them on dangling unmentionables during recess is enough to put your kid into a fear coma that won’t begin to subside until they discover alcohol, strip clubs and passive-aggression.

More than that, Magicians are usually either poor, young teenagers, or poor, old loners. Neither one has a lot of money. This means that whatever cash either of them can weasel out of their parents, scrape together from stealing bottle return slips or by selling your neighbor the “A Tale of Two Titties” and “A Cockwork Orange” porno movies he found under your bed, they will use this money to buy more Magic cards. And, because they are likely aliens, they won’t understand that they are buying packets of Virginity Insurance, 15 cards at a time.

Yet, like most people, I occasionally pine for that which is gone. I don’t particularly think about Magic anymore than, say, abusing myself to Victoria’s Secret ads, but its all part of the gestalt of adolescence. That’s why I’ve enrolled in a Magic: The Gathering tournament. Except for brief lapses very few and far between, it’s been more or less 15 years since I laid down my orcs and scepters and whatever the hell, and I’m morbidly curious to see what the modern Magician looks like– and, of course, whether I start giving a shit a little too much once the games get going.

In just a few short hours, I’ll either be heralded a champion of supernatural combat, or whatever the opposite of that is (Arby’s shift manager?).

Only time will tell where this old wizard lands.

Ironically, this is probably the best advice Magic players won't have the good sense to listen to.

As I’ve said before, in spite of my cynicism, I love America. To the extent that a man can love a tract of land inhabited by fanatical, ungrateful half-apes, I mean—not in the creepy uncle way. America is like sharing a bunk bed with a heroin addict: it doesn’t matter whether you’re on the top or the bottom, it’s all about the putting up with other peoples’ shithead problems until we snap, and stab all their clothes with a barbeque fork. You can do a lot of stuff in America—poop in a garbage can, eat your own beard clippings, “know” a Winnie the Pooh doll in the Biblical sense, listen to Coldplay, anything. And if there’s one thing this country loves, it’s itself. Never has a country been so committed to pursuing its own laziness; the sun never sets on our shiftless, half-hearted crawl towards cultural progress. We invented both eating disorders and Count Chocula, and we continue to show the world that a weird fusion of boredom, under-education and attention deficit disorder still can create the likes of Oreo pie and the Real Housewives of Whereverthehell.

In a country where a lot of people list “Jesus” or “America” as their political affiliation, though, it’s inevitable that we’re going to run into some speed bumps. And by “speed bumps,” I mean “retardedly backwards bigotry.” I don’t know if you know who Peter King is, but you should. He’s a Republican representative from New York. He’s also head of Homeland Security, and lately he’s had a hard-on for justice. He throws around the word “terrorism” about as frequently as I judo punch sucking at stuff; he calls WikiLeaks a terrorist outfit, and actually said that “80-85%” of mosques in America are run by Islamic fundamentalists. In order to combat this totally invented number of guerrilla soldiers gathering against the Great Satan, King has declared a jihad against reason that happens to take the form of hearings to investigate the radicalization of American Muslims.

Now I’m willing to give King the principle of charity here. If nothing else, I am obviously a man of unlimited optimism and even-handed inquiry. I’m the kind of person who visits doctors with the symptom of “existential malaise.” I don’t buy into any religion, and it drives me nuts when people quote the Bible in an argument. Honestly, I’d rather have you quote Hall and Oates. At least I know they existed. I’m also not an atheist or deist or Korean or vegan or Bono, and when people say they’re not religious but they are “spiritual,” it makes me feel like their words are growing sex organs just for the sake of being gay. If I want to be a cynical dick about the soul, though, I can do that in the sweet, ozone-depleted sunlight of American freedom. At the end of the day, nobody questions my dedication to free democracy, because nobody really gives a shit. Maybe that’s why I think King may have a perfectly valid point in organizing these hearings. Let’s forget  the part where King used to head an organization that raised money for the IRA, and forget about the part where his Congressional record shows that he’s historically soft on terrorism. Just block that out. This country has a long history of deontology standing on its head; comic books during World War II portrayed the Japanese with neon yellow skin, and if there’s a better Cold War superhero than Captain America (who fought the Red Skull, obviously Russia with Hitler’s German accent) I haven’t seen it. In the 1950s there were movies like “I Married a Communist!” and the first “great” American film was “Birth of a Nation”, which was a highly sympathetic story about how the Ku Klux Klan was actually saving black people by oppressing them. It’s sort of a Red Queen effect, culturally speaking: we don’t evolve away from a mindset until it’s decidedly disadvantageous to keep it. Then we make reparations, assume everything is copesetic, then find a new devil. From the Native Americans to the blacks to Irish immigrants to Jewish people to Asians to hippies to Russia to the Middle East, there’s never been a period in America’s history where we weren’t obsessed with defending ourselves from an imaginary threat that was destroying society in ways we never knew society functioned to begin with.

That’s why 9/11 was a huge relief; we love to be irrationally afraid, and the grim reality of life after the Macarena made us feel hopeless and adrift. So it doesn’t really matter that 94% of Muslims, give or take, are not radical fundamentalists. Picking the good ones out implies spending a lot of time we’ve already committed to nacho cheese and Charlie Sheen, and plus there’s all that “getting to know them as people” bullshit that, frankly, sounds like a lot of work. Hell, we don’t even do any of that with domestic terror groups, like the KKK, abortion clinic bombers and the Westboro Baptist Church. So it makes sense to just drag Muslims in front of Congressional panels to prove they don’t want to pilot a bus full of nuns into a detox hospital for celebrity clown porn addicts. In the big picture, it’s a time-saver.

Since my job pays me in Mallomars and punches to the solar plexis, this is essentially a pro bono public service announcement I’m spending my free time writing. You’re welcome. And I don’t want to sound cynical, but we just had the state governor of Wisconsin threatening to use the National Guard to break up protesters. Militarily suppressing free speech is kind of what Communist dictatorships do. Just, as a point. And the brilliant sun that illuminates our exercise of inalienable rights is a double-edge sword: it is our greatest cultural asset, but basking in it to the point of hubris proves cancerous. The shadows do not last very long, and with their retreat, the next great hatred comes into the light. Peter King is unfortunately not walking a dangerous line; by ignoring domestic terrorists and focusing on Islamic groups, he is reinvigorating a dangerous precedent: the same energy we used to put the Japanese in internment camps in World War II; the same energy McCarthy (incidentally, also from Wisconsin) used to elevate jingoism to irrationality and puppet trials; the same energy the government used in the 1900s and 1910s to illegally eradicate the growing influence of the Socialist Party. Paranoia breeding fear, fear breeding hatred, hatred breeding the unfolding of the viper’s fang.

Vitriol, corruption, dichotomy, destruction, hate, hate, hate.

There is, of course, a bright side to all of this. Peter King is only one guy, and while we may not be able to chase away these hearings about radical Islam away so fast, let’s go ahead and let Peter King have his way. Just, stay the course. We can afford it. Because what I’m proposing, is that to prevent yet another dangerous cultural regression into that same swirling Charybdis we love to feed without shame, to steer clear of something like King’s initiative that could get wildly out of control, we just go ahead and make our own Congressional panel: instead of McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, we’d call it the House Too-American Activities Committee. I mean, sure, there’s plenty of radicals living out in the woods on their own, masturbating with turnips and searching desperately for the tie between the End of Days and our dwindling population of butlers. The way I figure, for every one of these sociopaths, there’s someone who just seems a little… too American. People who are suspiciously vehement about liberty and hegemony. It just makes sense to parade these kiddos in front of a panel to see whether or not they fit our shifting, opaque definition of what “American” is, the same way King insists that we can identify the line between “radical” and “not likely to crash a go-cart into a beaver dam.” We’d start with people like King– those who see it as their duty to protect us from a threat they have no proof exists.

C.S. Lewis said, “of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive… those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for the do so with the approval of their own conscience.” The terrorism of 9/11 was frightening and indelible, make no mistake—but not nearly so frightening as an unrequited bloodlust a decade old, wearing an imaginary dynamite vest, hiding in plain sight and storing its poison for a vicious final strike. When the sun dawns, the infinite vision it gives to us asks only one question: with all that light, how is it that there are some who insist they need no eyes to see?

America is the land of opportunity. You can do it all, right here on your home soil: get a job, earn money, buy a house, lose a house to predatory lending, bang a hand model, get racially profiled, punch a goldfish, play Nintendo with just your toes, I mean anything. Why? Because you have all the space in the world to do it.

One of the backhanded glories of being American is that, compared to other countries, we enjoy a ridiculously healthy population density. Sure, there’s about 308 million of us, spread over about 3.5 million square miles of land. Even if you include massively dense cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City and Washington D.C., we still end up at an average of around 81 citizens per square mile. How screwy is that? Well, there’s only six nations more widely distributed than we are that have over a million square miles of national territory, and every single one of the 75 or so countries with lower densities are that way because they are islands, geographically tiny, have large uninhabitable areas (dense jungle, desert, mountains, turnpikes with a Hardee’s), or giant walls prevention territorial expansion (Mongolia). All this means is that Americans (surprise!) have it really, really, really good.

India has well over 1000 people per square mile. To put that into perspective, put your balls (or tits, for the ladies) in a bathtub. Just drop them right in there, as best you can. Pretty free and easy, right? Like you’ve got all the space you need, and then some. Now try stuffing them into a shot glass.

Thought so.

One of the social consequences of having excess space is the compulsive need to fill it with something. Here’s a thought: when our forebears loaded their families onto an oversized fishing boat and started lopping off the heathens’ face parts in the name of God, they brought with them an entrenched, logically inconsistent dichotomy: they believed God would save a predetermined number (“The Elect”) to go to Heaven, and the rest of us might as well live inside of a donkey skeleton and shove cold pancakes up our noses because we weren’t going Up no matter what. At the same time, they believed God did not specifically say who The Elect were; the only way to hedge your bets was to be virtuous, hardworking, and diligent in your faith, family and above all, work. You couldn’t work your way into The Elect, but you could definitely sloth your way out of it.

“We know God has chosen an Elect for Heaven” and “we have no way of knowing who The Elect are” disagree logically. They even disagree by all other Protestant theologies, which is why the Puritans left. Can you imagine how uptight you had to be to get kicked out of Reformation England? Just saying. Well, after time stripped the spirituality from this cultural dichotomy, it left us with, word for word, the definition of (you guessed it) The American Dream.

Americans are obsessed with natural talent, natural gifts, identifying the truly great among us and foisting fame upon them. We need them– whether they like it or not, our brilliant and talented are paragons of our own dichotomy: the contradiction between the American Dream itself, and the reality that precious few people are talented enough to realize it, and even fewer have the true opportunity to do so. This is why we let jailbait prance around on stages for millions of fans, and why there are entire websites devoted to nationally ranking child athletes as early as junior high. It isn’t just sports: there is a bizarre and powerful cultural imperative to force the pressures of adulthood on the ultra-talented– whether that is AP courses, music camps, or AAU traveling teams– to see, quite honestly, whether or not they can take it. It is not for talent’s sake that we challenge them– there is no real test unless the challenge is beyond their capacity to handle. The best develop that capacity; others fizzle and fade. We may have long since secularized the Puritan cosmology, but we’re no closer to shaking off the trappings of admiring The Elect than they were in their dark, frigid churches lit with pitch-covered sticks.

This would be all well and good if we had any sort of social compass about what we were doing, but we don’t. Seeing the forest for the trees is not something we’re often accused of. And it is our most pervasive obsessions, the brightest lights that we have created to shine on those we Elect, that are a self-destructive prophecy. Everyone from parents with shattered-dream complexes to delusional twenty-somethings who think power chords makes them a jazz guitarist agree: something about the limelight is too brilliant to ignore. The problem is, of course, that when we invest that fame with value it does not inherently possess– basketball, I don’t recall, made itself an international phenomenon and corporate cash cow– we inevitably must find that value from within ourselves in order to perpetuate it. And whether it’s politics, athletics, medicine, activism, academics, literature, music or human rights, we have developed the thorough incapacity to separate the individual with what the individual believes or does. This is why an ordained priest and Oklahoma football fan manually castrated a stranger for wearing a Texas Longhorns shirt; this is why abortion clinics get bombed; this is why Sarah Palin can create a cult of homespun folksiness around an alarmingly shallow political doctrine; this is why stem-cell research advocates are immoral.

Take this argument for example:

1.) Person x is extremely talented at y.

2.) Y is the focus of cultural praise and admiration.

Conclusion.) The more x does y, the more we must praise and admire x.

This argument– and by extension, we– commit the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle: taking as true an argument whose premises neither agree with each other, or with the conclusion. How many unspoken questions are taken for granted here?

How about these questions:

*What level of praise and adoration is acceptable?

*From where does Y derive the value invested in it?

*If x chooses not to do Y, is x irrational?

*If x has the ability to Y and does so in a way we dislike, may we ignore x?

*If x desires this praise/adoration and yet fails at Y, do we owe a cultural debt to x for the attempt?

None of these are addressed in the simply calculus of the above equation. We don’t address them either. And the sickness filters to us from out of the American Dream: the inherent problem that most people are not talented enough to achieve significantly in the things which they have been taught to identify as praiseworthy. And of course, they cannot perpetuate this identification without investing that passion with their own personal sense of value– what they do becomes who they are… and to lose one is to lose the other. The sad fact is, we fill each other, and ourselves, with saucer-eyed adoration of those Gods Among Men, and the most committed of us– talent or no– will forever shoulder the burden of that unchecked cultural obsession.

(As a quick test, why don’t you hit up a hole in the wall and ask Glory Days over there in the corner how he could’ve been the starting point guard and gotten a scholarship if the coach hadn’t hated him?)

Our obsession is turning on us. Generally speaking, 1 out of 100,000 high school athletes will die this year because of their sport. Every year, more and more perfectly fit and healthy kids, without ever being tested for heart conditions and other congenital problems, die. They fucking die, God damn it. Did you just fucking hear me? They die. One more life was lost this week– this time, in a small town in Southwest Michigan– and you can read about it everywhere. He’s on ESPN, in the LA Times, The Washington Post, everywhere. Seconds after hitting the game-winning layup to cap a perfect regular season record for Fennville, Michigan, Wes Leonard, the “quintessential All-American kid,” the total-package point guard with a linebacker’s body, had a heart attack, collapsed, and died. And now everyone can read about it. We can all change our profile picture on Facebook to the school’s mascot. We can text our friends and family and ask if they heard about it. We can email the article to each other with the click of a button, and in the white hot sweep of a single day’s time every corner of the world can know about the tragic death of Wes Leonard.

But no one’s going to nationalize a program to test kids for dangerous conditions. No one’s going to dig into those genes to see which of those we corral onto travel teams by the tens of millions each year to see who might be next, or which budding genius might crack under the pressure and insecurity natural to overachievement, or which artful soliloquist taps into childhood abuse or rape in order to find the feeling for the part. Wes Leonard, like all tragedies– like every college shoot-up and every bullet through a congresswoman’s head, every burnt cross, suicide due to bullying and merciless beating or disowning for choosing the right to abort a child– like each and every one of them, we’ll shake our heads sadly for the ones we hear about, pretend those mute to us don’t exist, then go on desperately searching for the next Elect to put on the pedestal.

The irony is, Wes Leonard didn’t seem to care much about all that glittered. But we Elected him, and millions of others, the same as we have in the past– and it is our system of Election that damns the majority to an anonymous, fractured sense of self, and damns those who follow it with the inherent supposition that their health, their body, their very life– rather than a thing to be tended to and cherished– is a thing to be given, a value to be handed over: a means to an end.

So this? No. This is no tragedy.

The problem is that Wes Leonard died a senseless death.

The tragedy is that so many are drawn like moths to the flame they themselves stoke, and so many opportunities exist to delude ourselves about who we are, and there is so much space to create small ponds, that most big fish never find their way to the ocean.

And when a big fish floats lifelessly to the surface, it’s never worth worrying about for too long. After all, the fish is gone.

But our nets still work just fine.