Totally Super-Genius

Every so often someone comes along who is a total super-genius. Sometimes they demonstrate their freakish propensities at an early age, like Amadaeus, who wrote "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" at the age of five. Sometimes genius isn't limited to one field, like Leonardo, who was a great artist, an architect, and inventor. I wouldn't be surprised if someone turned up some "lost" sketches of Leonardo that detailed an early nuclear reactor. And sometimes a genius is so smart that no one ever knows what they're even talking about, like Heinsenberg and his theories on matrix mechanics.

They're almost always insane, especially the creative ones. When he was like seven or eight, Amadaeus was presented to the court in France and asked Marie Antoinette to marry him. Picasso was an absolute maniac, drunk and partying all the time; I get the sense that you'd talk to him like five minutes and then be totally lost. And I've heard that Einstein owned seven identical suits (one for each day of the week) so that he wouldn't have to waste time or energy thinking about what to wear; Einstein's genius also did not extend, apparently, to the area of hair care products.

Sometimes geniuses screw up. Hitler was the closest thing to pure evil that I can imagine, but they say he was a military genius. I don't know about that. I mean, forgetting all the super-nationalist anti-Semetic paranoid racist crap that he believed, and just looking at his strategy, he was in a pretty good position at the end of 1939. He had a non-aggression pact with Russia, he'd taken half of Poland and all of Czechoslovakia and France was within his grasp. The facists in Spain were on his side even if their resources were too depleted for them to give him any help. America wasn't entering the war any time soon, and he had allies in Japan and Italy. All he had to do was finish off France and then cross the channel into England and he would have held all Western Europe. He would have decades left to deal with the Americans and the Russians. But he was SO AFRAID of the Communists that he divided his forces and invaded Russia in the dead of winter and got his ass kicked on both fronts. Served him right. Crazy Nazi bastard.

Any time anyone comes up with new ideas, though, someone is not going to be happy about it, or think its stupid or crazy. Nobody in some small beach town in North Carolina (or anywhere else, in fact) would have thought you could make a machine that flies using just old bicycle parts. No one would have imagined you could cure all kinds of diseases and infections by drinking juice from molds and fungus.

Ok so my point to all this is just that genius is a hard thing to define. Its even harder to recognize, at least beforehand. So how do you know, when you see some toothless old guy shuffling down the street and muttering to himself, that he's not going to find a cure for cancer? How do you know that the stoner you spent your Freshman year of high school with jackpotting coke machines for pot money isn't going to wind up unifying South America in a right-wing dictatorship?

You know, Leonardo thought of a lot of stuff, even stuff like airplanes and parachutes. He just didn't have the resources to build any of it. In a way that's really a good thing, because think of all the ways that would have changed history if Leonardo had invented a working airplane and all that. Joan of Arc would have been like Amelia Earheart, only flying bomber missions over England. The Confederate states would have developed the atomic bomb. Japan would have had moon colonies by World War II.

Ben Franklin thought of a lot of stuff, too. It was probably easier to think of stuff back then, though, since hardly anything had been thunk up yet. He was supposed to be a super-genius, too, although he is best remembered for putting a metal key on a kite and flying it in a thunderstorm. I don't know what that proved but maybe that's just one of those things that is so super-smart it just seems really really stupid.

Edison invented lots of stuff. The light bulb and some kind of battery and some kind of telephone or phonograph or telemarketing or who knows what all. Just lots and lots of stuff.

But being an inventor today is probably much much harder than it was back then, because most everything's already been invented. Unless someone comes up with something totally new, no one remembers them. And you have to invent a whole thing, too, and not just a part of one; I mean it would have to be a totally new kind of computer and not just something that goes in the computer you already have. New drugs are always cool, like Viagra or Rogaine, but those are called "discoveries" and not inventions.

So even if it's not a good time to invent things, there are still other ways to be a genius. You could be a military genius, but to distinguish yourself you really have to have a big major war going on, or at least to overcome some vastly superior force if its a smaller war. You could be a creative genius, but the real test of that comes with longevity and no one would know until you'd been dead 100 years or so. You could be a musical genius, but everyone is a musician these days. The thing is, there hasn't been a major war for over 50 years and so no one can be a military genius, but also everyone has so much free time NOT FIGHTING that they all try to be creative and no one stands out.

Here's my conclusion, to be considered a genius you have to win a war, invent something really great, or be dead 100 years.

Radical Moderates

If there are two extremes of human behaviour, and a person is guilty of one of them, it's likely that he or she will be very well-educated in the dangers of the opposite extreme. An extreme liberal could rattle off a dozen reasons why its dangerous to be a radical conservative. An anorexic could tell you why its unhealthy to be fat. An obsessively neat person could make a list of reasons why it's bad to be sloppy. It's interesting to me that no one ever sees the danger of their own extreme behaviour until its too late.

It seems that everyone is extreme these days, not just politically but socially and even religiously, even though no one ever wants to talk about it, especially that last one. Not only that, but everyone wants to say that the other guy is too extreme: To conservatives, liberals are all bomb-flinging anarchists, and to liberals, all conservatives are jack-booted stormtroopers. Everyone is so totally convinced that they are completely 100% correct that compromise has become a dirty word. If you compromise, or even appear to, you are a sell-out and an opportunist.

What if there was a complete and truly moderate politician? I don't mean one like you see today, who runs as an independent and believes in compromising certain issues but as for the rest he's really either liberal or conservative. I mean someone who took the middle ground on every single hot-button issue, and he didn't take this stand to make people happy; he did it because its what he truly believed. His motto was Moderation In All Things.

Here's what would happen. People who have been so disillusioned by the political process in America would start returning to the polls. People tired of bickering and political back-biting would rally round him. Young and old alike would take up the cause of moderation, and a new generation calling themselves Middle Grounders would rise up from the political ashes and reclaim America in the name of well-reasoned moderation.

It wouldn't be an easy struggle, to be sure. The liberals would still call for socialized medicine and abolition of the death penalty, and the conservatives would still want to ban abortion and do away with gun control.

But the cry of moderation wouldn't be silenced! And as the movement grew in number, and this one true moderate increased in stature and in influence, and moderation would take hold in other areas as well. Moderation in what we eat, what we say, how we work, and even what we believe.

It's not too long before the moderates start to recognize the dangers of being too extreme, and identifying their foes on both the left and the right. At first there might be a few isolated incidents of violence, like a riot at a Young Republicans rally in Houston, or a car bomb at a Greenpeace March in Seattle. But then it escalates, there are lootings in San Francisco and Charleston, SC goes up in flames! The new Moderate Majority in Congress responds by placing tighter and tighter restrictions on both the left and the right. It culminates when the one true Moderate politician is elected President and all the "extremists" are put in forced labor camps.

This is what could happen if you start getting to moderate.