Deadshit Detector

After matriculation from a country high school at the age of 17, I left the security, comfort and support of my family home to live in a residential college at university, 200 kilometres away.

It didn't occur to me that separation, for the first time in my life, from my parents, my home and the school friends that I had spent the first 17years of my life with would be a time of anxiety, loneliness and regret. 
And it wasn't. 

My experience of university college life in no way resembled that portrayed in Brideshead Revisited.
I can't recall any handsome, epicene young men wandering languidly about campus in three-piece suits discussing philosophy and the meaning of life.

Rather, it was a restless, rowdy testosterone-fuelled pack of untidy youths, noisily disagreeing about who's turn it was to drive to the pub.

Conscientious students who elected to stay in their rooms to study or complete their assignments or study were dismissed as "swat-wrecks', a term of pity and regret rather than disapprobation.

But the self-righteous few amongst these conscientious teetotallitarians who felt entitled to express their disapproval of the uncouth behaviour of their peers were, ipsofacto, irredeemably, "deadshits".



I mean, after all, what was university all about? Even in retrospect, I believe it was, obviously, about gaining knowledge, either for knowledge's sake (Arts), for practical application (Science) or for a profession (Medicine, Physiotherapy, Veterinary Science, Dentistry, Agricultural Science). 

But it was also about transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Or to put it another way, getting your end in, for the majority of us, in those days, for the first time.

So there was an unacknowledged primal competitiveness which expressed itself in disproportionate outrage at departures from the average in appearance or behaviour.


It's an interesting curiosity in human pack behaviour, this rejection of the outlier. 
Rather than leaping on its back and tearing it apart with our teeth, we use disdain, ostracism and labelling. 

And the ultimate label of disdain at our college was "Deadshit". 
Once bestowed, there was no turning back. 
Half a century later, the unfortunate recipient lives on, in the minds of his former fellow-collegians, as a Deadshit. 

With progressive seniority as a college resident, social survival depended on a sensitive Deadshit Detector.

I am ashamed to say that I was not that nice guy who befriended the unpopular. 
Previous experience had demonstrated to me what an unrewarding enterprise this was.
I made no effort to be the deadshit's friend and supporter. 
Deadshits had earned their titles, and it took a bigger, more generous and more tolerant man than me to accept their deadshittedness.


It is self-evident that, with the accrual of years, as Boomers evolve into The Elderly, Deadshits evolve into Boring Old Bastards.

And as the Corona Virus zeroes in on the elderly -a formerly invisible, circumstantially favoured cohort of society - the indiscriminate nature of its victim selection becomes almost socially acceptable if we accept that ridding society of Deadshits is worth a bit of collateral damage.



Post Script:
It is evident that Deadshit Detection is an autosomal recessive inherited trait, the penetrance of which is insufficient to prevent the election of an individual who is manifestly unsuited to the role of leader of the most powerful nation on Earth.