Swompdonkey

A laboured analogy

Paul Martin reminds me of a guy I went to high school with in Thunder Bay. He was a couple of years ahead of me and several steps above me in the social echelon. He was the younger brother of a student who had been very popular, and had,with little effort, inherited his sibling's mantle. Above average athlete, clever enough to get by, winning personality, but his most noteworthy attribute, as far as I could tell, was his incredible ability to ingratiate himself with the teachers. He was a permanent fixture on student council and sailed to the presidency in his final year, which meant that he spent a ton of time out of class. I doubt that this guy did half the schoolwork of a normal student. He always seemed to be organizing this, or spearheading that. Too busy for silly stuff like homework, you see. I'm pretty sure he was on a first name basis with most of the teachers, both of the VPs and our weird Principal, who wore white socks with every suit he owned, no matter the color. If ever there was a chosen one, this guy was him.

I remember hearing teachers saying that this guy was destined for big things. I was perplexed. I found it remarkable that a guy who apparently spent so little time in pursuit of academic excellence managed to pull off straight As, but as some students noted sourly, teachers are a forgiving bunch, if you make the right noises, and you know which buttons to push. Needless to say, on paper, the guy was a scholastic superstar, a real leader who had been heavily involved in running the school from nearly the first moment he arrived in Grade nine as a snot-nosed greaseball in a Club Monaco sweatshirt and Zubaz pants. Universal admiration gave way to adulation when the faculty and student body heard the news that our man had made it into one of the best schools in the nation. A promising young man justifies the faith of his legion of supporters. And yet.... there were whispers of skepticism. Some questioned if this guy, who had coasted on charisma, could cut it as a small fish in the much bigger university pond. Could he meet the impossibly high expectations that had been set?

Fast forward one year later: Total wash out. Having had it easy, having had everything handed to him on a silver platter for five years, he was completely unprepared to take it to the next level when push came to shove. Maybe the doubt began to set in the first time he spoke up in a lecture. Instead of obsequious head-bobbing from cronies and a benevolent smile from the teacher, his words were greeted with the hostile stares of his fellow freshmen and a dismissive chortle from a prof thoroughly unimpressed with his intelect.

Maybe he found himself dismayed to discover that his quips, which played so well in the cafeteria, bombed in the pub, surrounded as he was, by wittier and cleverer guys.
Was he shocked to see the kind of guys he had dismissed as dull nonentities back in high school become the stars of their new fraternities, puking their guts up after shotgunning a couple of wobbly-pops behind the bleachers at the game? How about those weird hippy guys who were so terribly tiresome in high school, with their social activism and their hemp clothing... what were they doing chatting with the brainy co-eds in the student centre? When did they get so cool? Maybe he tried to join some clubs, but it wasn't the same. He was deprived of his ready-made high school social network and someone else, some other alpha-male, had usurped his spot as "the man".

I'm sure he tried to work those relationships with the faculty. But an overworked prof is too busy meeting with grad students and lecturing dozens and dozens of students to pay much attention to an anonymous freshman. Didn't do your assignment? Tough. Failure compounded failure, and the golden boy eventually found himself on academic probation. Eventually, our hero dropped out of school, and returned to his hometown, defeated and chastened.

"What happened?" incredulous observers asked. I think that ultimately, he was crushed by the weight of expectations, and reaching the dizzying heights to which he had aspired, a position that by rights, he was told, BELONGED to him, he found that he simply wasn't cut out for the gig.

Oh, to have been tested and be found wanting.