The Dust Bowl

While I must make it clear that the Ennobler in no way endorses the New Yorker or the viewpoints that it holds, I do encourage readers to dive into the depths of their archive and have a look at this article from January of 2006. The long and short of it is that 15 year old Brandenn Bremmer, who had an IQ of 178, unexpectedly committed suicide on his family’s farm in Nebraska. Here is a story of the mismanagement of a boy’s raw potential. With only a somewhat demented special children’s teacher to guide him and his parents through his education, Bremmer resorted to pursuing a career as an anesthesiologist because of the financial rewards that it promised. While it was clearly a mistake for his parents to isolate him from other children and prematurely accelerate his education, it was ultimately Brandenn who gave into his own despair.

What are the broader implications of this? Well it certainly wasn’t merely the C he got in his biology class that caused Bremmer to take his own life. More likely it was his loneliness and the feeling that he had passed his zenith as a young genius. His death reflects F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sentiments that, “there are no second acts in American lives” which he himself wrote in a time of despair. This is the darker side of the American dream; a sort of malaise that shadows the more visible success and potential. The ennobled, of course, can see the bigger picture and avoid such fatalism. Let’s hope that the dark side will remain hidden as we push through recession years.