Assignments

Dysgenics makes the clerisy giggle, and so it is with talk of a movie on the subject that jokes about intelligence and affluence are swapped. One family, broken, two boys, comes to mind: the mother with an IQ below average and the biological father, now long gone, a thoroughgoing man of the underclass. The mother, nearing sixty now, is warm-hearted but still mostly careless; one son means well but is lowbrow and aimless. The other son, however, is motivated and articulate, determined to enter a career that will, in all likelihood, mean his transcendence of unpromising beginnings. He's the one who moved away with good reason, who decided that he could do better than drudgery. From a few hundred miles away, he looks after his mother.

Odds are against success to be had by those of lesser faculties and fortunes but they can be beaten, and done so through character — inspired by something other than blood or books — absent from the smart and disdainful.

«     »