Read Lost in the Meritocracy (v5) for Free Online

that I wasn’t just weak but flawed, defective, and likely to prove a burden on my country should it ever be put to some great test such as resisting a foreign invasion. As I understood the program, the highly specific performance standards required to earn the fitness certificate reflected desirable or normal levels of strength, agility, and speed for healthy young American males. How these levels had been determined I wasn’t certain—by NASA or the Marine Corps, possibly—but I did understand that falling short of them was not a purely private matter.
    I gripped the rope with clammy palms. The gym teacher blew his whistle and clicked his stopwatch. Five feet, six feet, six feet and an inch. I was already flagging and couldn’t hide it, certainly not from myself or from my observant classmates, who, I saw when I looked down, had already started massing for their death cheer. I felt puny, crippled, trapped. This wasn’t art or music, this was gym, and quick-wittedness couldn’t help me here. I was up against gravity, which can’t be fooled, and the implacable limits of my physique, which my father had urged me to strengthen through calisthenics but hadn’t bothered to demonstrate which ones.
    “Go! Don’t quit! You can make it! Reach!” they cried.
    I locked my ankles around the rope. My slide began. I checked it by clenching my thighs, slid farther, groaned, and imagined the president shaking hands with a line of strapping boys who would someday bring glory to America, in war, perhaps, or by building a base on Mars, while I lay feebly on a couch, watching their exploits on TV Then, for the first time since I’d entered school, I yielded, I folded, I gave up. I landed on the gym mat, found my feet, and as the next aspirant approached the rope, I wished him luck, sincerely, without envy. People were different. Some smart, some strong. The boy scrambled upward, on track to reach the ceiling, and I found myself pitying him, oddly, because I knew his triumph would be brief, his moment of conquest would be over soon, while mine, which would be of another sort—mental, not physical; fate had spoken—would only build and build.
    Could Nixon have climbed that rope? I doubted it. But he could make others climb it, and that was true strength. The strength I wanted for myself.
    I n fourth grade I learned that reading was serious business, not just a pleasant way to pass the time, and that like medicine or engineering, it had a definite, valuable purpose: to foster “comprehension.” I learned this from boxes of plastic quiz cards whose labels bore the letters SRA. The letters stood for Science Research Associates, which was identified somewhere on the boxes as a division of IBM, the giant computer firm whose amazing machines, I gathered from the news, were crucial in the sophisticated activities which underlay our modern way of life, from weather forecasting to missile guidance. That IBM had taken on the job of providing the nation’s grade schools with color-coded essay cards arranged by steadily increasing difficulty and capable, according to the teacher, of enriching and assessing students’ “language capabilities” suggested to me, once again, that I was part of a vast and vital program, success in which would confer colossal rewards, possibly even widespread public gratitude.
    The structure of the SRA kits encouraged scorekeeping and competition. Toward the middle of the second quarter, having finished the blue cards and plunged into the green, I consulted a homemade tally sheet taped to the bottom of my desk’s hinged lid and determined that, comprehension-wise, I was a solid week ahead of my two closest rivals: Brian Dahl, of whose background I knew little, and Karla Miller, the child of farmers who cultivated a modest patch of swampy acreage. The sheet was a secret and, I thought, unique, but later that month evidence emerged that Karla was keeping a similar log.
    “I did some math,” she said. “By