The Earth produces few geniuses, so we expect the learned to admire genius, to emulate geniuses [albeit about as well as Rich Little imitated Johnny Carson], and to hide their shortcomings absolute and relative, real and imagined. Maybe we should also expect learned sinecures to stifle those less credentialed. We know that retarding tyros does not move the learned any nearer to genius. Still, obstruction and destruction happen all around us. Let's recall why.
Learned critics assay the work of geniuses ostensibly to deepen our appreciation of the original genius, yet sooner or later to draw attention to the derivative genius of the critic [as a three-inch plastic replica of the Space Needle recalls the original]. The learned further call on those less schooled to retrace the steps of the genius, as if mapping some savant's path would blaze similar pathways in the brains of others. [Reciting all of Duston Hoffman's lines in "Rain Man" probably does not augur success in Vegas.] When the foregoing exhumations and exhortations do not calm their envy of geniuses, the learned try to hide their inadequacies, usally behind some magnum opus that is ever putative but never produced.
Lamentable as such fraudulence and flatulence may be, many learned easily metamorphose into stinging creatures. In "Good Will Hunting," Professor Lambeau [Stellan Skarsgard] laments that most earthlings cannot appreciate Will Hunting's talents but Lambeau can and that is what torments him. Such torment produces the wannabee, a waspish creature who stings others because his or her stinger will not reach the truer object of the wannabee's scorn.
Trained mediocrities -- that phrase comprises those who become mediocre through training as well as those who start out mediocre and are trained up -- long for excellence or greatness that they cannot attain and so must seem to have attained. They cannot be, so they must seem to be. The wannabee cannot much impede absolute genius or geniuses, so he or she works over relative genius or geniuses, especially developing genius or geniuses, to keep them down. This is to say that wannabees fear that colleagues and subordinates may surpass the wannabees and discover how far from genius the wannabees are. This fear is justified, for discourse between the wannabee and the genius is at least an overseas call and sometimes "sub-space radio."
So wannabees behave as if they were still in a grade-school hive. Wannabees create some distinctions that they "locate" just beneath or behind themselves to push competitors or unmaskers further from greatness than the wannabees have located themselves. "I may not be a Queen, but I am a princess, and you are merely a worker in the hive." To maintain an appearance of genius that they do not possess, they must keep competitors "away" from actual genius.
Suppose that in "Amadeus" Salieri had started to poison composers who might supersede himself instead of eliminating the composer so far above him that Salieri could barely see his superlative butt. Salieri would then have been defining greatness as "the two of us, Mozart and me" and sealing off this imagined duet from rivals. This is about as convincing as my noting that Marlon Brando and I, taken together, have won two Oscars. However, what alternative will avail the swarm of hapless wannabees?
We derived "genius" from the Latin for a protective, minor deity. In that etymologic sense, then, wannabees become geniuses that they make themselves ever pettier and ever more defensive.
Next: Open Files and Closed Minds
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