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.