The Weekly Screed (#942)

The wealth of knowledge

by David Benjamin

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” 

— H.L. Mencken

MADISON, Wis. — As best I can guess, I became an elitist during a spelling bee in fourth grade at St. Mary’s School in 1957, when the only person in my class who could keep pace with me was Beatrice Dwyer. Of course, I beat her. But winning a classroom spelling bee, even over the formidable Ms. Dwyer, was not an obvious ticket to the elite. Nor did I feel even remotely elite. Nor have I ever. 

Really, it’s hard to be an elitist when you’re a stunted nine-year-old living in a one-horse hamlet over a hardware store in an apartment that’s been condemned by the Building Department as unfit for human habitation, and your mom is a high-school dropout who waits tables for sixty cents an hour plus tips. Elitism is not the pose to strike if Mom is seeking a divorce that foreshadows her excommunication from the Church and disownment by her ferociously Catholic father. Moreover, you don’t feel even remotely elite if your old man actually deserves to be divorced because, despite his tons of charm and an eerie resemblance to Robert Mitchum, he’s prone to sudden and prolonged fits of terrifying rage. Also factoring into my childhood elitism deficit — and this applies to my whole life — was that I bore little resemblance either to my handsome dad or Robert Mitchum. I looked more like a nameless black-and-white background figure in “Gasoline Alley.”

Despite my spelling mastery, my attitude in general was not elitist arrogance. I leaned toward fear and confusion, which I wasn’t good at covering up. You could read cold feet all over my face. Nevertheless, with my conquest of Bebe Dwyer, I began to grasp subconsciously that knowing stuff, like how to spell “parallel,” “apocalyptic” and “rhythm” somehow sets a kid apart from his fellow riffraff. Apart but not above, because, after all, most of the boys and a plurality of the girls in my grade could — and occasionally did — beat me up at recess. 

The rub is, I wasn’t trying to win anything. Wanting to know stuff was a compulsion. At the Tomah library, whole walls of books fell before me like herds of mice beneath the harrow. I turned into a spelling maven not so much because I’d studied my workbook but because I’d seen those words in books and remembered them. I read voraciously not to beat Bebe — for whom I harbored a lingering crush — or declare my superiority over the other kids at St. Mary’s. I just had to know.

It never occurred to me that my chaotic hunger for knowledge would bestow status and brand me as “elitist,” setting me apart, above and irreconcilable from millions of strangers who know less stuff and who prefer not to find out.

If you had asked the fourth-grade me to identify the elite, I would’ve said, “Yeah. Rich people.” Silly me. “Elite,” in America, is a slippery word. We were founded by an Enlightenment-besotted gang of intellectuals not measured by wealth. They disdained the royals and aristocrats from whom their forebears had fled, and from whom they finally decided to sever all ties, declaring as they did so, a heresy heard ’round the world, that “all men are created equal.”

As diligently as some privileged Americans, since then, have tried to create a wealth-based nobility that replicates the landed aristocracies of the Old World, the effort never produced the popular awe and subservience desired by a hereditary elite. This is because Poor Richard’s erudite example prevails. In America, the quality that more often sets you apart and above, rendering you superior in the eyes of others, is what you know. 

Our most reliable snobs, our most honored statesmen and our most despised pedants, are the know-it-alls, the snotty eggheads who can — without looking it up — spell “minuscule” and “Aristotelian.” Like me.

“Elite” has always been a concept that cuts both ways. Lately, it’s a word oft-bandied as a political bludgeon by an erstwhile slumlord who spent his career trying to buy, borrow and bluster his way into aristocracy. His education should have helped. With course credits from Wharton and an Ivy League degree from Penn, he acquired the scholastic credentials to at least apply for America’s ill-defined but clearly intellectual nobility. When he failed to crack the club, it wasn’t just because doesn’t he know stuff. The bigger problem is that he can’t figure out — nor will he ever understand — why his moneybags and a warehouse full of shiny, costly things can’t lift him into an elite that he has come to resent almost as much as he envies its members.

If you listen to him, you see why he doesn’t get it: “You know, I always hear ‘the elite, the elite.’ Well, I always said… ‘they are the elite, I’m not.’ I have a better education than them, I’m smarter than them, I went to the best schools, they didn’t… [I have a] much more beautiful house, much more beautiful apartment, much more beautiful everything. And I’m president and they’re not, right?”

“Right?” 

Why add that last word, that child’s appeal for affirmation? Why the note of insecurity, cancelling all that strutting and preening? Why is this guy’s “tell” so pathetically obvious?

In our flawed meritocracy, knowing stuff makes you special. But you have to actually know, not just say so. Calling yourself “genius” isn’t genius. That’s fear and confusion. 

Of course, knowing stuff doesn’t stifle the fear. It only helps a little with the confusion (and only on those subjects you know cold). It tends not to make you feel elite, because brains are harder to show off than country clubs and trophy wives. If you try to tell people what you know — in thorough and accurate, enlightening detail — their eyes glaze over.

The heartbreak of knowing stuff is knowing what you don’t know, what you’ll never know as long as you live, and knowing it will all go poof the day you die.

This is something Donald Trump, bless his hairdo, will never know.

Before it was all over, my dad — that scary guy who eventually grew up and settled down — knew. A reluctant housepainter by trade, he’d been let into hundreds of homes. He got to know pretty much everything about who lived where, who’d lived there before, and what had gone on amongst all those families, on their block and in the neighborhood. Also a living encyclopedia of mixology, Big Bill tended just about every bar in town — from the Carlton to the TeePee to Kelly’s up in Oakdale. For forty-odd years, he served as amiable confessor to every man and woman who needed a stiff drink and an ear to bend. By osmosis, Dad became a living repository of Tomah’s 20th-century history. Possessed of an unappreciated brilliance, he remembered it all. He was, in the true sense of the word, in the simple matter of knowing a hell of a lot of stuff, elite.

Of course, unless you bugged him, he uttered nary a word. Like most folks who really know, he was disinclined to self-promotion. Not because he didn’t enjoy the telling. His eyes tended to twinkle when you asked him who had lived in a certain farmhouse on a particular hill, or about the diaspora of the Koniceks and Kozareks, or whatever became of old Joe Houn, the hermit of May Street. 

Dad, whose life was spent leaning across the bar listening to bores, knew better than to turn into one in his old age. There was nothing to be gained by trumpeting knowledge that no one else seemed to want, nor to pat himself on the back for knowing. He kept his peace.

When Big Bill died, without ever writing anything down, all that juicy local lore and precious but unmarketable knowledge went poof.

I kneeled at Dad’s funeral, pondering what I had lost and scolding myself. I’m a writer. I should’ve asked.