The Ecphorizer

Letters Issue 1
Letters

Issue #01 (September 1981)

To ecphorize, broadly interpreted, is to bring forth the latent ideas and judgments buried in the backs of people's minds. A letter to the Editor accomplishes this well, for it permits a short statement of what is an the writer's mind without imposing the discipline of a formal magazine article.

Our policy will be to print all letters, as space permits, so long as they do not get us into legal troubles. letters about specific Mensa business, activities, or persons will be forwarded to the Editor of the Intelligencer. Short letters will take precedence over longer ones. Letters may be printed anonymously or pseudonymously, but must be signed.

But how do you get letters for the first issue of a magazine? No problem; Mensans are only too happy to sound off at the drop of an opinion, thus the following, which reached our office unsolicited:
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To the Editor:

I have noticed with displeasure the rising birthrate in various inferior populations around the globe and most especially in these United States over the past hundred years. (Not personally, of course, but validated statistics will bear me out). This is slowly but surely pulling the average intelligence of the human race down to the level of the tree toad, a notably poor conversationalist. This could be tolerated if Mensans would all become survivalists, filling their bunkers with automatic weapons and freeze-dried food until these inferior types had wiped themselves out and we could take over the planet as evolution has so clearly intended.

An even more frightening fact has come to my attention recently, however, which causes me to rethink my whole position. Mensa members were graded on the curve. This means that as the level of the general population sinks, so does that required to be placed among the top two percent. By the year 2041, my calculations suggest that the IQ of the population as a whole, while still being numbered 100, will rival that of a jar of of Cheez Wiiz at best; whilst Mensans will be able to communicate only by barks, grunts and letters to the editor.

What are we to do to stop the degradation of Mensa, the last, best hope of man/womankind? We must stop this pernicious relativism, an invention of fuzzy-headed liberals! We must stop drawing our members from the ranks of the barely human (what we now call the 98%). Starting immediately, only those with one or more M parents should be admitted to Mensa. Furthermore, we must freeze the test scores today that allow those without M-genes to enter. And as a last step in keeping our scores pure, we must retest periodically all members qualifying after I did (the well-known grandfather clause), to be sure their intelligence is as pristine as on the day Mensa elected to admit them. What benefit can be demonstrated to derive from belonging to a society drawn from the top two percent of nothing?

Andy Fish

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