Last night I dreamed that I traveled far and wide through many distant
lands. What did I see there? A scientist named Professor Meme and his
friend, who went by Joe or Jake or if it was Robert—you know how
dreams can get fuzzy—and their buddies, a couple of clown comics of
yesteryear.
They explained to me that “Everyone in this land is sorted into
one of two categories. Evans, who have an even number of teeth
(usually 28, 30, or 32), and Prims, who have a prime number of teeth
(usually 29 or 31).
Evans have higher salaries and love vanilla and comedy and yellow
clothes. Prims do all the housework and love chocolate and drama and
orange clothes.”
Through the life-changing magic of dreams I had been granted the super
power of “vector space analysis” (which is how I knew it was a
dream because in real life I can’t do those things) so I
traversed their realm and saw that yeah, for the most part, those
traits did cluster together. Usually. But there were plenty of
chocolate lovers who told me in confidence that they wouldn’t mind a
good comedy every once in a while. And the whole thing about lower
salaries turned out to be a pretty big point of contention! There were
a lot of traditionally-minded folks clad in orange who said they were
glad to do the housework, they were better at it than their
yellow-draped companion who always left the butter out anyway and
broke plates.
Because yes. Prims and Evans were usually paired up in constellations
of one of each. That had actually been the largest political issue of
all time just one generation ago; whether two Prims could shack up
together, or an Evan with an Evan. And why always groups of
two? That’s what you get with dream logic… I found a trove of
old newspaper articles that proclaimed the collapse of society if two
Evans were to partner up, and to vote for the Traditional
Constellation Party that would protect everyone from that (the same
party that incidentally also wanted to steal from the poor and give to
the rich) or the proverbial sky would fall.
That battle had been lost and in some areas of the land I did meet
some Orange+Orange couples and some Yellow+Yellow ones too.
Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert didn’t seem to mind that as much as
they were fighting a “new” menace: people who didn’t neatly fit in
these two categories.
Actually… talking to them about it was quite confusing in that dream
way where things tend to shift and morph, because when I said that the
salary/housework thing seemed a little unfair, they said “of course!
We fight for the rights of Prims, and these reactionary category
straddlers are muddying that issue with their performative housework
and parodic chocolate-gobbling. It’s disgusting!” In all my stay in
this faraway land I never saw them actually talk about the rights of
the Prims; in fact, time and again I saw them side with factions that
wanted to constrain Prims even further, even lower salaries for Prims,
even more housework. “Don’t you see?” they said angrily. “We’re
prioritizing their right to even be a Prim. Isn’t that the most
fundamental of all Prim rights? And now all of a sudden it’s under
attack after being completely static throughout history.” (I
actually saw in museums there that a couple of hundred years ago,
everyone was wearing orange regardless of which ice-cream flavor they
were eating. I also saw that the vanilla-eaters were all strictly
wearing velcro shoes and all the chocolate-eaters were strictly
wearing laced shoes, and I saw that when the first chocolate-eaters
had dared to put on velcros just a few decades prior, they had been
fined and jailed, but these days I saw all kinds of people—including
Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert—wearing velcro shoes with
completely no reaction from anyone because it was completely normal
now. But each younger generation thinks they’re the epitome of punk
and each older generation thinks they’re the sentinels of
eternity.)
There were three kinds of people that this duo and their clown comic
hangers-on hated. The first were those who blurred the lines. A
vanilla-eater who loved drama. A comedy watcher clad in orange. This
was the worst thing. “No! No! You’ve got to stick to your tooth-given
lane!”
The other kind where those who sought (or provided) dental care.
Pulling of wisdom teeth, dentures, fixing cavities, repairing crowns.
People who had after dental care ended up with a different quantity
and/or quality of teeth, and reregistered as such in the National
Dentist Registry and applied for a new passport. This was also the
worst thing. Whether or not they then sought to associate with the
traits associated with their new dental parity group or not. Dental
care was called “mutilation” and “grooming” and several laws were on
the docket to outlaw it.
So one of the most confusing parts of the dream was how they hated the
some of the “cluster transgressors” for being too visible and they’d
yell “we can always tell”. They hated others for being too invisible
and they’d yell “stop confusing us, put on your orange clothes, you’re
being deceitful”. There was no winning with them. You’d think sticking
rigidly to a thin line between these two ends would’ve made them happy
but those who tried that ended up getting both kinds of hate since
those hatreds overlapped by quite a margin.
Looking back through the history of the land had told me that while
conflicts between the orange-clad and yellow-draped had been an issue
for ten thousand years, this latest batch of category-separation
hysteria had started out as quite a minority, an issue only a few
people had known about or cared about.
That’s when they came up with their stroke of genius:
Sports.
They brought up how in some sports like championship flossing, the
300-yard brush stroke, and pie eating contests, different teeth were
likely to perform differently, and they then generalized that to all
sports like long-distance running or Omaha hold’em. And this did
become popular! Even the emperor of the land would as a complete
non-sequitur bring up how ridiculous he thought the idea was of an
Evan participating in the Prim sports category. Of course, this
emperor was a strong proponent of the
steal-from-the-poor-give-to-the-rich politics that the dental parity
traditionalists like Professor Meme and Joe/Jake/Robert had sided with
so he saw a chance to make hay while the sun shone.
And what started in sports soon extended to all facets of society.
Going to the restaurant, going to the grocery store, even going to the
powder room! Leaving your apartment in any way would induce scrutiny
and accusations and paranoia, for everyone. All for the greater good
of the Olympics!
This sudden sports-mania ushered in a new law: you shall be
categorized as Prim or Evan at birth. I know, I know, babies don’t
have teeth. And neither do old people. That’s just how crazy this
dream was! The doctors (the few remaining doctors, since dental
care was under legal attack) would just take their best guess.
And that was the parity category you would stick to for the rest of
your entire life. Problem solved easily and perfectly.
That created a third kind of people for our diligent duo to hate on.
For example, there was a boxer… or maybe it was a runner. The doctors
had categorized them as Prim at birth. Which they were happy with.
They loved orange. They loved chocolate. They loved drama. All was
well. Until they won. Didn’t their mouth look kind of even on TV?
Something about the cheeks, the way they moved… an invasive dental
counting procedure was promptly ordered and it turned out they had… I
forget if they had two teeth (both prime and even) or 27 teeth
(neither prime nor even) but out came the hate, long before the
mouthcount. That’s how it was in this land. They hate you if you
transgress your medically assigned dental parity cluster and they hate
you if you stick to it. They hated everyone until there was no-one left
and darkness and decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion
over all.
You see, they were scientific and rational.
And in their rationality and science-mindedness, they had come up with
all manners of slags and mocking names to apply to everyone who didn’t
stick to their lane. “Oh, so you’re stick-to-your-laners?” I asked,
and they boiled over with anger. “How dare you utter such a slur?!”
they screamed, “We’re just normal people!”
After a few years of this, they came up with the term
“cluster-critical” for themselves. I thought that didn’t make any
sense. Weren’t they the ones who were more strongly than anyone else
trying to really enshrine these societal clusters of traits into two
immutable granite-carved groups, and erase all outliers and
overlappers? How is that being cluster-critical? They slapped me with
a splintered ruler and said “You dolt! You clod!” and explained that
the whole idea of speaking more generally about the two groups as
being mere “clusters of traits” was “propaganda of the cluster movement”
which they opposed, which they saw as denying the biological tooth of
dental parity, denying how almost everyone has either an even amount
of teeth or a prime amount of teeth. How that’s a natural fact.
(Question marks on how that 27-denying factoid, even if it had been
true, would apply to ice cream flavors, clothes color, or TV
genres.)
I asked them if is this what they spent all their time fighting about?
What about climate change? It has already killed millions of people.
They just looked at me stubbornly, and started to explain, once more,
from the top, something about the delicate flavors of vanilla.
You would think that in this land, everything would’ve been
teeth-forward. Everything would’ve been all teeth teeth teeth on
billboards and t-shirts and mugs. But actually no. Teeth were a very
private thing and had been so throughout the ages. Ogling teeth was
considered vulgar, and was sometimes done in an exploitative way.
You’d see a poster with teeth in a workshop or a pair of rubber dentures
hanging off the back of a truck, for shock value, but normally people
covered their mouths when they ate. When a movie scene featured bare
teeth, usually a “tooth stunt double” subbed in for the actor, or
dentures were worn. Asking each other about their teeth was a big
taboo.
Under a mossy stone in the deep, dark wood, I found a file showing
that before they came up with this teeth-counting business, they had
been counting people’s nose hairs. Everything had been all about the
nose hairs. Until they discovered that the teeth thing had a three
percent stronger correlation with the socially created cluster roles.
So if you’ve ever wondered why some wear yellow and others wear
orange, now you know.
