Volume 3, Episode 50: Open Mind

"I will throw myself underneath the wheels of any train of thought."

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I was driving the boys out to my newly vaccinated parents’ house the other day when my younger son Wynn began to howl in pain. “Ow, brother, ouch!” I turned around and did the if I have to turn this car around thing—a gloriously Dad maneuver that delights me in its timelessness—and saw William, the older son, throw his hands up in the air. “Sorry!” he said, looking slightly sorry, maybe, a little. “I was just giving him an Indian burn!”

For those of you who might not remember summer camp, an “Indian burn” is when you grab someone’s arm with both hands and twist, making it feel as if their arm is burning. Here is a YouTube couple demonstrating an “Indian burn” and getting a big kick out of itself in the process.

I do not believe I had heard the term “Indian burn” in at least 30 years, and my 2021 ears instantly perked up. “Where did you hear that, ‘Indian burn?’” I asked William, laughing a little to make sure he didn’t think he was in trouble. “Where’d you come up with that?” He told me that he saw it in Calvin and Hobbes, specifically as a punishment for losing in tag. I later looked up the comic.

Researching this, it appears in the UK this is known as a “Chinese burn.” The phrasing got me to thinking. I, of course, used the term “Indian burn” all the time growing up, not relating it to any sort of ethnic group and, being a kid, not really thinking about it at all. (This was not the only phrase like this that went around Mattoon, Illinois, and likely not the only one in your town either.) But the sort of education and culture context for a kid in 1988—the year the above comic came out, one that also uses the word “sissy,” for what it’s worth— would seem different than the education and cultural context for a kid in 2021. So I decided to try to find out how different.

“So, guys, I have a question for you: What does an Indian person look like?” I asked them. They sat there for a second, confused. “Uh … like an Indian?” I tried to be more specific. “Yes, but what makes them Indian?” William rolled his eyes. “They’re from India, jeez, Dad,” he said.

We were getting closer. I wanted to confirm something, something I thought might be good. “So what are people who live in tribes called? People who used to live in teepees?” Wynn raised his hand, a funny thing for a kid to do in the back of a car. “I know! I know!” he beamed. “Native Americans! They’re Native Americans!”

William chimed in. “Yeah, they were the people who were already here when Christopher Columbus showed up,” he said. This was information he had gathered from the Who Was? show on Netflix, a very funny show based on the children’s historical books that’s hosted by Andy Daly, written by The Daily Show and Conan writers and featuring appearances from H. Jon Benjamin, Ellie Kemper, Jordan Klepper and John Oliver, among others. Upon hearing Christopher Columbus’ name, Wynn started cracking up and gave us his favorite Who Was? line.

“They shouldn’t call him Christopher Columbus!” he said. “They should call him, ‘Guy who can’t read a map!”

It is fair to say that when I was taught about Christopher Columbus in elementary school, it was not that he should be known as “guy who can’t read a map.”

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When my family moved to Athens, Georgia, in 2013, the question I was mostly commonly asked was “are you ready for how different that’s going to be from New York?” I understood that, of course: I’d lived in New York City for 13 1/2 years, and NYC is obviously much different than a quiet college town in the South. But to me the major change in my life was not going from New York to Georgia; it was going from Mattoon, Illinois, to New York City in the first place. That was the transition that required the most adjustment. It took me three years in New York just to get my feet to stop vibrating; it took me that long just to catch my breath. New York was an alien planet where everyone seemed in on the same in-joke but me, as if the entire population had been training their entire life to live in New York City and I’d just missed all the important classes that told you what you were supposed to do. The flight I took to New York when I moved there was the fourth flight of my life, and I’d never been on a subway until I took it to the office on my first day of work in midtown. I ended up loving New York, feeling like it was my home in a way I never could have imagined, but it took me a long, long time to get there.

Athens, though, Athens was a more moderate, reasonable upgrade from farm country Illinois. It was, it is, obviously, a college town, and while it’s tiny compared to New York, it’s downright massive compared to Mattoon. And it had all the things that, as a kid, I desperately wished I could have had in Mattoon. Again: It’s a college town! There are museums. There are restaurants that aren’t fast food chains. There are big-time sports. There is a thriving, and historic, music scene. There is more than one school. And perhaps most important: There is the possibility of being amongst people who aren’t all white kids who look just like you, all named Billy, or Joe, or Jeff. My kids—and there was only one kid when I moved here—could meet people who were different than them, who had different life experiences from them, who had seen parts of the world they couldn’t have imagined. When I saw it through my kids’ eyes, and my own eyes growing up, Athens wasn’t “this sleepy small town that wasn’t New York.” It was a land of infinite experiences and opportunities. They would get to see so much that I never got to. They would be better. This is what the American Dream is, isn’t it? That your kids have a chance at a better life than you did? That was my parents’ goal, and their parents’, and their parents’. I’ve been fortunate in my life, in so many ways. But the stuff that I missed out as a kid, all the stuff I had to learn in college or as an adult because I wasn’t exposed to it when I was younger, that’s what I wanted my sons to have. Athens wasn’t a come down from New York City. It was an incredible opportunity for my kids to have a life I couldn’t.

And so much of that was tied up with school. One of the reasons we left New York in the first place was the pressures of the school systems, the stories we had heard, the people who were already asking us, “So what are you going to do for William for school?” even though he was only 18 months old. When I left New York, I actually gave an interview to The New York Observer (during the Jared era!) about this very thing.

“I want my kid to have a yard and a dog, and I want his application for preschool to be, ‘Here’s his social security number.’”

You know I wanted for my kids? I wanted them to learn without pressure. And I wanted them to learn everything. Yeah: I wanted them to go a school that taught them that the people who lived here before the colonizers arrived are called “Native Americans” and that Christopher Columbus couldn’t read a goddamned map. I wanted them to learn the important stuff as kids so they didn’t have to wait until they were in college to unlearn all the wrong things they taught us or, worst of all, decide, like so many people, that they’ve reached a certain point where they didn’t want to learn anything new and just be stuck repeating the same dumb wrong shit the rest of their lives. This is not about my kids going to Woke School. I just wanted them them to have a better start. I just wanted them to be better. Better than me, better than us, better than what has come before. Isn’t that what everyone should want?

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There is a major movement, in the wake of the popularization and mainstreaming of reinterpreting and recontextualizing our history—or, one might say, actually describing it correctly—to roll back these changes in our educational system. Jeffrey Sachs, a lecturer and free speech scholar, compiled a list of them last week, from lawmakers trying to ban teaching of The New York Times “1619 Project” to an Arkansas bill that prohibits, “offering of certain courses, events, and activities regarding race, gender, political affiliation, social class, or certain classes of people” to South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem proposing funds for classes in public school that focus solely on “why the U.S. is the most special nation in the history of the world.” This movement attempts not to educate our children, but to deprive them of basic, foundational knowledge. It attempts to make the world smaller.

I want my children to be proud of their country, to be proud of who they are, to have confidence in themselves and their place in this world. But I do not want this to be based on lies—to be based on their own ignorance. They don’t need to be perfect: They just need to be better. I love that my kids have access to information that I never did as a kid, and I love that they’re using it without even knowing it. This is how the world gets better. This is how it’s supposed to work. Plus: They’ll know how to read a danged map.

Also: Whatever you call them, it is undeniable that Indian burns hurt. May all brothers across this great land be giving them to each other for centuries to come.

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WEEKLY BOOK UPDATE: 12 WEEKS TO LAUNCH

Every week here at The Will Leitch Newsletter, we count down the weeks until the release of How Lucky, my novel that comes out May 11. This is the spot for weekly news, updates and pre-order reminders.

Hey, do you want to win an early copy of the book? Hopefully you’re all pre-ordering it, but if you’d like an early copy, Goodreads is doing a book giveaway contest. Just fill out your info right here, and they’ll pick winners at the end of the month. And while you’re hanging around Goodreads, remember to give the thing five stars. It helps it get boosted in rankings and stuffs. It is probably unethical to encourage you to give five stars to a book you have not read yet, but here I sit, regardless, doing that very thing. I stand before you, guilty as charged.

So: You can pre-order the book right now. I’ve had a few people ask whether it makes a difference where they pre-order the book. It doesn’t: It only matters to the purchaser, all told. If you are anti-Amazon—for perfectly good reasons!—there are other options for you on the HarperCollins page, though from what I understand, at some sites you can’t pre-order until two months before the book comes out. Pre-ordering is important, though: It shows the publisher that there are people excited to read the book and thus encourages them further to promote it. So hey, you’re here, reading this far already. Pre-order already.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. Immanuel Quickley Is Here to Save the Knicks, GQ. GOOOOOO KNICKSSSSSSS.

2. The Telling Streaker at the Super Bowl, New York. It is maybe not the best thing that a streaker can get on the field of the Super Bowl during a pandemic.

3. Your AL East Preview, MLB.com. Weekly division previews are out! We’re getting closer now.

4. We Must Not “Move On” From January 6, Medium. I wrote this before all the video presentations at the impeachment and feel it even more strongly now.

5. Introducing Internet Nostalgia, Medium. A new rubric we’re trying out. This one’s on Justine Sacco.

6. Ten Essential Christopher Plummer Performances, Vulture. I had totally forgotten he was in Malcolm X.

7. The Ridiculousness of Tom Brady, GQ. I’m officially on the “kind of like Tom Brady” train. Sorry.

8. What We Talk About When We Talk Vaccinating Our Parents, Medium. It’s a huge, huge relief.

9. This Week in Genre History: Jumper, SYFY Wire. Poor Doug Liman’s just never gonna get this right.

10. The Thirty: Each Team’s Biggest Offseason Acquisition, MLB.com. Did I mention that Nolan Arenado plays for the Rockies now?

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Malcolm and Marie,” “A Glitch in the Matrix” and “Ordinary People.”

People Still Read Books, we’re back! Discussing “From Hang Time to Prime Time” with Pete Croatto.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, finally did a show. We were very overdue, and we needed it.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Among the Insurrectionists,” Luke Mogelson, The New Yorker. From last month. But very much worth another read, for obvious reasons.

ARBITRARY THINGS RANKED, WITHOUT COMMENT, FOR NO PARTICULAR REASON

Quentin Tarantino Movies

1. Inglourious Basterds

2. Jackie Brown

3. Pulp Fiction

4. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood …

5. Death Proof

6. Reservoir Dogs

7. Kill Bill: Vol. 1

8. Django Unchained

9. Kill Bill: Vol. 2

10. The Hateful Eight

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Maureen,” Fountains of Wayne. That “Who Was?” show in Netflix, the one my kids love? They particularly love the theme song. It’s so catchy that I looked up who wrote it … and of course it was Adam Schlesinger, the composer and member of Fountains of Wayne who died last year of Covid-19. This sent me down a Fountains of Wayne rabbit hole. These songs are so clever, smart and deeply infectious; I always love how his narrators are observant about everything but themselves. I still kind of can’t believe he’s gone.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section.

This week’s fun Zoom interview:

Go Knicks!

Be safe, everyone.

Best,
Will