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| Pictured: Smug Bastard |
Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman
Dear Mr. Gladwell,
Curse you. And that’s just for starters.
Your books have made me seriously reconsider what I know and think about the world around me, and, frankly, I feel violated. Have you any idea just how long I strolled about my day to day life, absolutely self-assured and totally confident that I knew everything worth knowing? A long damn time, sir.
I knew how to fill out an NCAA Tournament bracket, how to parent, and how to bluster knowingly in the directions of intensely bored friends about crime, education, business, and politics. But that’s all crumbled now, thanks to you. Now I bluster about the things you think.
If you suspect that I am somewhat to blame for the sad state I find myself in, that I simply could at any time stop reading your books and your New Yorker articles and the interviews you do and thus spare myself the indignity of being shown up as someone who understands very little (but proclaims to know quite a lot) about the world around me, then I take offense at that typically arrogant insinuation. How can I stop? You see, only by continually investigating your “well-researched” and “insightful” works will I ever find the critical mistake, the half-baked error that will invalidate all of your “wise” and “transformative” and “mind-bendingly revealing” drivel. Yes, I must soldier on.
Or so my thinking went.
One day last week, I pulled up a video of a speech you had given at a TED conference in 2004. I was searching for a short but rhetorically effective display of deductive reasoning to show my AP Language and Composition classes, and, in my poor judgment, I played your “Spaghetti Sauce” speech for my unsuspecting students. While they were largely unaffected (the coming generation has thankfully been immunized against exercising their capacity for abstract thought in all but the direst circumstances), I was once again traumatized and affronted.
In that speech, when you summarize the work of Howard Moskowitz , you extol the virtues of “horizontal segmentation,” wherein the largest possible number of people have the greatest chance at happiness when they abandon the Platonic ideal of one perfect choice. Instead, you suggest that they embrace the idea that no spaghetti sauce or mustard or olive oil is intrinsically better than any other, only that there are sauces and mustards and olive oils better suited to their individual tastes. I then (as I assume was your nefarious goal all along) applied this logic to my own choices.
Traumatized and affronted, sir. Traumatized and affronted.
Of all the other deeply held convictions you have made me question, none has horrified me so completely as this. I have impeccable taste. That taste is rooted in years of placing every conceivable song, film, book, album, score, and short story into a painfully crafted hierarchy of perfection. And from the top of that hierarchy I looked down at Stephanie Meyer and Nickelback and Drew Barrymore and I laughed, sir. Sometimes in pity, sometimes in rage, but always from the safety of my ivory tower.
Your implied suggestion that, in fact, relentlessly mocking Twilight and Two and a Half Men and Michael Bay’s films is not a beneficial and worthy use of my time, and that I should instead simply recognize that the people who enjoy things that I dislike are not actually brainless slugs whose very existence signals the apocalypse’s imminence appalls me. What else am I supposed to do with my time?
I have spent hundreds of fruitless hours in circular debates in which nothing is concluded but the friendships of those involved. If you claim that these have been a waste, you call into question my intellect, my behavior, perhaps even my sanity.
I’ve spent much of my life making sure that I am right, but now, all of a sudden, I wonder whether or not I actually am. Or if it's even possible to be "right" when it comes to matters of taste.
How dare you.
Dear Mr. Gladwell,
Curse you. And that’s just for starters.
Your books have made me seriously reconsider what I know and think about the world around me, and, frankly, I feel violated. Have you any idea just how long I strolled about my day to day life, absolutely self-assured and totally confident that I knew everything worth knowing? A long damn time, sir.
I knew how to fill out an NCAA Tournament bracket, how to parent, and how to bluster knowingly in the directions of intensely bored friends about crime, education, business, and politics. But that’s all crumbled now, thanks to you. Now I bluster about the things you think.
If you suspect that I am somewhat to blame for the sad state I find myself in, that I simply could at any time stop reading your books and your New Yorker articles and the interviews you do and thus spare myself the indignity of being shown up as someone who understands very little (but proclaims to know quite a lot) about the world around me, then I take offense at that typically arrogant insinuation. How can I stop? You see, only by continually investigating your “well-researched” and “insightful” works will I ever find the critical mistake, the half-baked error that will invalidate all of your “wise” and “transformative” and “mind-bendingly revealing” drivel. Yes, I must soldier on.
Or so my thinking went.
One day last week, I pulled up a video of a speech you had given at a TED conference in 2004. I was searching for a short but rhetorically effective display of deductive reasoning to show my AP Language and Composition classes, and, in my poor judgment, I played your “Spaghetti Sauce” speech for my unsuspecting students. While they were largely unaffected (the coming generation has thankfully been immunized against exercising their capacity for abstract thought in all but the direst circumstances), I was once again traumatized and affronted.
In that speech, when you summarize the work of Howard Moskowitz , you extol the virtues of “horizontal segmentation,” wherein the largest possible number of people have the greatest chance at happiness when they abandon the Platonic ideal of one perfect choice. Instead, you suggest that they embrace the idea that no spaghetti sauce or mustard or olive oil is intrinsically better than any other, only that there are sauces and mustards and olive oils better suited to their individual tastes. I then (as I assume was your nefarious goal all along) applied this logic to my own choices.
Traumatized and affronted, sir. Traumatized and affronted.
Of all the other deeply held convictions you have made me question, none has horrified me so completely as this. I have impeccable taste. That taste is rooted in years of placing every conceivable song, film, book, album, score, and short story into a painfully crafted hierarchy of perfection. And from the top of that hierarchy I looked down at Stephanie Meyer and Nickelback and Drew Barrymore and I laughed, sir. Sometimes in pity, sometimes in rage, but always from the safety of my ivory tower.
Your implied suggestion that, in fact, relentlessly mocking Twilight and Two and a Half Men and Michael Bay’s films is not a beneficial and worthy use of my time, and that I should instead simply recognize that the people who enjoy things that I dislike are not actually brainless slugs whose very existence signals the apocalypse’s imminence appalls me. What else am I supposed to do with my time?
I have spent hundreds of fruitless hours in circular debates in which nothing is concluded but the friendships of those involved. If you claim that these have been a waste, you call into question my intellect, my behavior, perhaps even my sanity.
I’ve spent much of my life making sure that I am right, but now, all of a sudden, I wonder whether or not I actually am. Or if it's even possible to be "right" when it comes to matters of taste.
How dare you.
By Josh Corman
Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman
P.S. - To better prepare your defenses against Malcolm Gladwell's devilish schemes, watch his "Spaghetti Sauce" speech.
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