L'Écart

Lyrics

Case file: one-two-three-six.
Subject: McArthur Wheeler.
Pittsburgh, nineteen ninety-five.
The diagnosis begins.

He squeezed the lemon, felt the sting of the acid on his skin.
A chemical cloak. A perfect theory.
He saw the cameras, and he smiled.
Believed the juice had rendered him invisible.
Two banks in broad daylight.
The surveillance tape was clear, bright, unforgiving.
Later, in the sterile room, under the hum of fluorescent lights,
He offered his defense, a masterpiece of flawed logic.
His voice, not a tremor of doubt.
"But I wore the juice."

This is the gap. L'écart.
The summit of Mount Stupid, where the view is so clear.
And the valley of despair, where the masters live,
doubting the light from their own two hands.
The curse of the unskilled is not knowing they are unskilled.
The curse of the skilled is assuming the path was easy for everyone.

At Cornell, they gave the tests.
Humor, grammar, logic.
Pages rustled under the December nineteen ninety-nine sky.
Dunning and Kruger charted the cohort.
The bottom quartile, a blaze of certainty.
Inflated self-assessments, bold and beautiful.
The top performers, however, they faltered.
They looked at their own perfect scores and thought,
"Surely, it was not so hard. Surely, everyone else did just as well."
They couldn't see the mountain they had climbed.

This is the gap. L'écart.
The summit of Mount Stupid, where the view is so clear.
And the valley of despair, where the masters live,
doubting the light from their own two hands.
The curse of the unskilled is not knowing they are unskilled.
The curse of the skilled is assuming the path was easy for everyone.

So how can a person be so wrong about himself?
The question hangs in the air like smoke.
It is the anosognosic's dilemma.
The tool you need to see the error...
is the very tool that is broken.
And so the expert sharpens her knife,
convinced it's dull.
And the fool wields his like a sword,
convinced it's a god.

The tapes roll on.
A man with lemon juice on his face,
staring into the lens.
Absolutely certain.
"But I wore the juice."
He wore the juice.
End of report.