On track for a Big Mac?

Don Stuart

Winner of 100 consecutive FreeCell games without a loss. Innovator in parent-child relationships, renowned for grounding an entire neighborhood of kids after a particularly annoying touch football argument. Developer of an intricate and finely balanced method for wearing – at the proper time and for the proper duration – officially licensed luck-inducing apparel of favorite college and professional sports teams, guaranteeing victories for those teams.

Heady accomplishments, these. And unbelievably, all achieved by one extraordinary man. Me! (Okay, I admit, I’m still tinkering with the “guaranteeing victories” element of that last one.)

You would think such a resume of achievement would by now have caught the eye of not just one but several of the super-secret nominators of the MacArthur “Genius Awards”?

For those who futilely fail at FreeCell, or frustratingly flub fan fashions, an explanation: The MacArthur awards are fellowships bestowed each year by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago.

Twenty-five new MacArthur Fellows were just named last week, the 27th year the awards have been granted. The new Fellows get their own fawning pages on the MacArthur Web site, and also, a prize of “five hundred large,” if you know what I mean. (If you don’t, it means $500,000.)

This Big Mac is paid out in quarterly installments over a five-year period, but still, according to my calculations, $500,000 equals — well, a lot. Maybe not enough to bail out AIG, but still.

As you can imagine, the burdens of winning so much moolah are onerous indeed, the biggest perhaps being that the winners have to decide what to do with the money. Yes, can you believe it? There are no restrictions! No one looking over their shoulders! No one they have to report to! What a confusing and intimidating proposition that must be.

We’re talking, after all, about mostly academics and artists here. People who, in spite of résumés littered with references to Harvard, Cambridge, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, likely have scant notion about the vast amount of truly important work their unexpected windfalls could fund. Such as groundbreaking experimentation with officially licensed luck-inducing – and expensive – sports apparel.

Lots of snarky media types and bloggers eagerly anticipate the MacArthur awards each year, because it gives them an excuse to gripe about how undeserving some of the winners are, or how the awards are part of some left-wing (or maybe right-wing, I can’t remember) conspiracy aimed at making the “good” wing look way dopier than the “bad” wing.

Here’s an example of the kind of disrespect MacArthur Fellows have to deal with. On a Web site called omnivoracious.com, a fellow posted this comment below a story about this year’s honorees: “Wow, so this is what qualifies as a ‘genius’ nowadays? What exactly have these people done...aside from being popular to the NPR crowd?”

(I’ve got bad news for this guy; I listen to a lot of NPR during my daily 120-mile commute, and before this week, the 2008 MacArthur winners were mentioned by NPR commentators as often as I was [zero], calling into question how “popular” they are.)

I, however, am a snarky media type with no such agenda. I praise the MacArthur Fellows, especially if it could enable me to become one. Unfortunately, I don’t exactly look like the “average” Fellow. Based on this year’s group of honorees, I need to be:

n A scientist, preferably studying astrophysics;

n 45.4 years old;

n Living someplace where I could routinely get stuck in traffic on Interstate 95.

This last point is critical, because it suggests a definite East-coast bias to the awards. I determined that 18 of the 25 members of the 2008 Fellows live in the continuous megalopolis I call “Boshington” (the I-95 corridor from Boston to Washington). I began grousing about this prejudice in the MacArthur selection process, until No. 3 and 4 sons (ages 13 and 11) observed that nine new Fellows aren’t Boshingtonians. And, they pointed out, between derisive guffaws, that 18 + 9 doesn’t equal 25.

I calmly explained that my MacArthurian gifts have nothing to do with mere math, and that they’ll more fully appreciate my Macqualifications after spending the month of October grounded.

But then, innovative parenter that I am, I relented, and allowed them to go unpunished. As long as they spend the next five weeks wearing a carefully prescribed wardrobe of officially licensed luck-inducing Cubs apparel.

uuu 

TakefiveT5@yahoo.com



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