Quote of the Day | January 16, 2009: The Real World

Dave Eggers, in his 2000 bestseller A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, pitching himself to MTV's The Real World:

So, let's work this out. First, you'll get a black person, maybe two -- they'll be hip-hop singers or rappers or whatever -- and then you'll get a couple of really great-looking people, who will be nice to look at but completely ignorant and prone to terrible faux pas of taste and ignorance, their presence serving two purposes: they a) look wonderful on screen, and b) also serve as foils to the black person or people, who will be much sharper and savvier, but also easily offended, and will delight in raking the dumb people over the coals week after week.

So that's three or four people. You'll probably throw in a gay guy or a lesbian, to see how often they can get offended, and maybe an Asian or Latino, or both. Or wait. A Native American. You should get a Native American! That would be so great. No one knows any Indians. I mean, I've never met an Indian. Actually, there was that one guy in college, Cletus, who said he was one-sixteenth -- But so you need to get one who's easily offended, not a passive sort. You need someone who'll actually care about and debate the "tomahawk chop," the Redskins and everything. That'd be great. So. Let's see, that's five or six people so far. Then you'll need a really straight professional type, a doctor or something, a lawyer maybe, someone in grad school. And then me.

The Tragic Person.

Right. I realize I seem much too average, at first. I'm white, not even Jewish, my hair is horrible and I'm poorly dressed and everything -- I know how blah that seems, suburban, upper-middle-class, two parents (why do we seem so boring, all of us? Are we as utter boring as we seem?) -- it certainly didn't help with my college admissions experiences, let me tell you. But you need someone like me. I represent tens of millions, I represent everyone who grew up suburban and white, but then I've got all these other things going for me. I'm Irish Catholic, and can definitely play that up if you want. And then the Midwest thing, which I don't need to tell you is pretty valuable. And if you want to go hard-core rural, play that angle, I went to school in the middle of a cornfield, have seen cows, smelled their waste every day there was a south wind. Oh and: it was a state school.

So, I can be the average white suburban person, midwestern, knowing of worlds both wealthy and central Illinoisian, whose looks are not intimidating, who's self-effacing but principled, and -- and this is the big part -- one whose tragic recent past touches everyone's heart, whose struggles become universal and inspiring.

Tags: Dave Eggers