I’ve never watched Glee. If I did, I imagine my eyes would bleed, quickly and painfully. I have no interest in writing about the show as television, but as a movement.
What Glee does is turn popular kids into the geeks they never were. And THIS I have a major problem with.
I try not to pay attention to the show or the buzz that it receives, but one thing I have noticed is that fans of this monstronsity of a program call themselves “Gleeks.” Fine, a simple and potentially clever way of punning the show’s title. I get that.
And if these people were geeks who were unpopular and awkward in high school, it would make sense. But there is a major and incredibly irritating problem with this sentiment–almost all Glee fans I know were not geeks in school–they were popular, non-geeky, and socially adjusted.
What is it about the past that makes people pine to be bigger losers than they actually were? There’s an oft-repeated statistic about wealth in the United States–19% of people believe they are in the top 1% of earners. Clearly, this is a mathematical impossibility, so they are not all that rich.
It appears that nerds are the same way. It feels like 75% of Americans want to believe that they were among the 5 nerdiest, least socially-adept people in their high school. Your later success comes after being picked on in high school. But your shirt being called weird once doesn’t make you a geek. You were not one. And you can’t be one retroactively. You can’t pine for the days that never were.
I don’t care for Glee–I find it annoying, and pointless, and stupid. That much can be gleaned solely from the commercials I’ve had to watch. However, it becomes offensive to me on a personal level when the head cheerleader wants to remember her days as an weirdo. NO. YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO. Real geeks can be attracted to this show. I don’t care. But I refuse to allow non-geeks to commandeer our word. I’m not going to accept that without a fight.
Letters From Suburbia 