David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

at the way Connor let his dogs loose on their protesters—while at the same time, they were jumping for joy behind closed doors. And to the parents whose children they were using as cannon fodder, they pretended that Bull Connor’s prisons were a good place for their children to catch up on their reading.
    But we shouldn’t be shocked by this. What other options did Walker and King have? In the traditional fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, told to every Western schoolchild, the Tortoise beats the Hare through sheer persistence and effort. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s an appropriate and powerful lesson—but only in a world where the Tortoise and the Hare are playing by the same rules, and where everyone’s effort is rewarded. In a world that isn’t fair—and no one would have called Birmingham in 1963 fair—the Terrapin has to place his relatives at strategic points along the racecourse. The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity. In the next great civil rights showdown in Selma, Alabama, two years later, a photographer from Life magazine put down his camera in order to come to the aid of children being roughed up by police officers. Afterward, King reprimanded him: “The world doesn’t know this happened, because you didn’t photograph it. I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.” He needed the picture. In response to the complaints over the use of children, Fred Shuttlesworth said it best: “We got to use what we got.”
    A dyslexic, if she or he is to succeed, is in exactly the same position, of course. That’s part of what it means to be “disagreeable.” Gary Cohn leapt into the taxi, pretending he knew about options trading, and it is remarkable how many successful dyslexics have had a similar moment in their careers. Brian Grazer, the Hollywood producer, got a three-month internship after college as a clerk in the business affairs department at the Warner Bros. studio. He pushed a cart around. “I was in a big office with two union secretaries,” he remembers. “My boss had worked for Jack Warner. He was putting in his last hours. He was a great guy. There was this great office there, and I said to him, ‘Can I have it?’ The office was bigger than my office today. He said, ‘Sure. Use it.’ It became the Brian Grazer business. I could do my eight-hour workdays in one hour. I would use my office and my position to get access to all the legal contracts, business contracts, the treatments being submitted to Warner Brothers—why they passed, what they considered. I used that year to gain knowledge and information about the movie business. I would call someone every single day. And I would say, ‘I’m Brian Grazer. I work at Warner Brothers business affairs. I want to meet you.’”
    He was eventually fired, but only after he had stretched his three-month term to a year and sold two ideas to NBC for five thousand dollars each.
    Grazer and Cohn—two outsiders with learning disabilities—played a trick. They bluffed their way into professions that would have been closed to them. The man in the cab assumed that no one would be so audacious as to say he knew how to trade options if he didn’t. And it never occurred to the people Brian Grazer called that when he said he was Brian Grazer from Warner Brothers, what he meant was that he was Brian Grazer who pushed the mail cart around at Warner Brothers. What they did is not “right,” just as it is not “right” to send children up against police dogs. But we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside. David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others. That’s how people with brains a little bit different from the rest of ours get jobs as options traders and Hollywood producers—and a small band of protesters armed with nothing but their wits have a chance against the likes of Bull Connor.
    “I still t’ink Ise de fas’est runner in de worl’,” the bewildered Deer complains after a race in which Terrapin has done something that would get him banished from every competition in the world. “Maybe you air,” Terrapin responds, “but I kin head ou off wid