Is Barack Obama a nerd?

Or a geek or a dork?
That seems to be the big question this week, it is the holiday season, the cabinet is picked and other than watch the global economy collapse there is a shortage of soft news for the media to report.
This is a narrative woven out of a stray Star Trek joke that Obama made during the campaign and the fact that he once read Spider-Man comics in high school.

Thin stuff if you asked Humble Elias and you haven't.

To tell the truth, the term "nerd" has undergone a sea change since Barack and I were teenagers in the late 1970s.
THEN it was bitter pejorative usually fastened to bookish outsiders in order to reinforce a rigid and short term hierarchy in US middle and high schools.
NOW it denotes a playa n the US technology economy as well as a particularly powerful subset of consumers. The rise in "nerd culture" and "nerd economics" is supposed to herald a great change in the way the USA views intelligence and creativity...or so Time Magazine and that ilk insist.
To quote the olde misanthrope "what rubbish!"
Concentrating on this buncombe neatly sidesteps any discussion of stagnant wages in the US and our suicidal policy of national de-industrialization.
It is in fact, False consciousness and for better or worse it largely defines the current debate over the rise of "nerd culture" in the USA.
"Nerd" is a fallacious class distinction and a bizarre one in an economy largely driven by technological innovation. The larger question is how well does that economy do in terms of moving new cadres into the middle class, educating the poor and working class and spreading prosperity around in general.
the answer to that is, it doesn't do that very well at all no matter how cutting edge the new I-Phone may be.
AS for Obama, he is far too charismatic, sporty and focused to pass muster as a survivor of ye olde geekerdom circa 1979.
Moreover, reading "Spider-Man" was no great dork signifier back in the day either, one of the star basketball players at my tiny marginal parochial high school was a fervent reader of Spider-Man and didn't give a hoot in hell who knew it either.
And no his name wasn't Barack Obama either.