Thinking Along Other Dimensions
I'm really long past the age where it's acceptable for me to spend a lot of time thinking about how cool I am, or am not, particularly as it orients me relative to other people and especially when relative coolness is determined by scrutinizing the things I or other people enjoy spending time or money or thought on. But I totally do it anyway, and I think I've figured something out that makes sense of at least some of that navel gazing.* I'm not fond of the verb 'unpack' as in 'talk at length about using all my big words,' but that's totally what I'm about to do. Stand back, y'all!

It's been years now since the first pass at a Geek Hierarchy started making the rounds, and even longer since the rehabilitation and semantic relaxation of the word 'Geek' itself began in earnest but there's still no true consensus on the relative geekiness of any particular interest relative to another, and geek pride proclamations still come off a bit sweaty and overeager. Because people are people and people like to categorize. Preferably into hierarchies. I do it too, but never very successfully. Part of this surely has to do with the scattershot nature of my own interests. In addition to the usual self-consciously highbrow stuff you could guess I like just looking at me, I get a lot of genuine unaffected enjoyment out of what could be considered junk culture. I'm game for nearly any film movie or TV show if it's set in a high school, and, I'll keep saying it, I really liked that Paris Hilton album.** I like genre stuff, sometimes enough to do follow-up reading that involves comic books, and one afternoon a few months ago I actually killed a couple of hours on a weekend watching Battlestar Galactica fan edit clips on YouTube. So while I do consider myself "better" (meaning "in posession of more refined aesthetic sensibilities") than people who love the crap out of "Heroes" I regard that as a knee-jerk and rhetorically indefensible position. At best I'll argue that "Heroes" is not a very good TV show, but even that isn't as fun as it was when I was younger and meaner.

But even as I got more and more comfortable with the idea that it's not that cool (Shit! There I go again!) to give people a hard time about the things that they enjoy, especially when the whole pseudo-objective aesthetic criticism doesn't hold together, I still knew that my I-can't-help-it hierarchy still existed. I just no longer had any clue how I was doing the sorting. I only realized what it was like a week ago, and now, no joke, it's like seeing the world in a whole new dimension. Or, more to the point, along a whole new axis. See, the problem with most of these hierarchies is that they only operate along a single scale of variability. What you like matters, yes, but how much you like it matters just as much, if not more. I don't think I'm "better" than people who love "Heroes," I think I'm better than people who love "Heroes" so much that it matters to them in a very personal way what I think about "Heroes." I feel the same way about people who love "Lost" so much that it matters to them in a very personal way what I think about "Lost." And I watch "Lost!" I love it! I read epic close-reading academic analysis of each episode (sometimes)! I don't dislike tween Jonas Brothers fans because they like the Jonas Brothers, I dislike them because the degree to which they are into the Jonas Brothers sort of horrifies me. I'm not contemptuous of people whose opinions on abortion differ from mine, I'm contemptuous of people whose opinions on abortion are so strongly held they feel entitled to commit acts of intimidation, vandalism and murder on the basis of those opinions. And here all this time I thought I'd been making progress toward being open-minded!

Someday I'm gonna get to the point where I can be totally cool with anybody in the world and genuinely respect their humanity and not look for reasons to write them off for lapses in judgment, taste, hygeine standards, whatever. I'll probably die of old age the very next day. But in the meantime, if the best I can do is be slightly less of a reflexive judgmental asshole each day, I suppose I'll take it.

* You know what? No, it doesn't.
** Liking it does not mean I don't hate Paris Hilton the person, or, more precisely, Paris Hilton the cultural construct. Except for that cameo she did in that one O.C. episode. I thought that was kinda funny, albeit totally unconvincing.