Volume 4, Issue 75: Fortunate Son

"All this from a slice of gabagool?"

Hey, the book’s out. If you haven’t bought it yet, you should. If you have, you should write a (hopefully positive!) review of it on Goodreads or Amazon or both. I hope those of you who have a copy are enjoying it.

Pat Sajak announced his retirement from “Wheel of Fortune” this week. Like most people, I suspect, this announcement provoked me a brief wistful memory, of watching the show with my grandmother—she always had unusually strident opinions about Vanna—as well as a little confusion, since I had thought Sajak had retired many years ago. (As someone whose brain retains millions more random sports factoids than he would like it to, the name of former San Diego Chargers kicker Rolf Benirschke popped into my brain too.) With the constant firehouse of world-alarming breaking news, Sajak’s retirement inspired little more than a shrug. It was probably time.

Then I read into it a little bit, and it turns out: Sajak has been having some issues over the last year or so. He randomly started tugging on one contestant’s beard. He put another in a headlock. He asked another to take his shirt off. After one contestant’s opening anecdote introduction, he said, “that may have been the most pointless story I’ve ever heard.” There are a whole bunch more. The Pat Sajak bot seems to be malfunctioning.

Pat Sajak, it’s fair to say, owes his longevity (he has hosted “Wheel of Fortune” for a shocking 42 years) to his bland inoffensiveness: He has existed, essentially, not to be noticed. But of late, he has started doing the worst thing the host of “Wheel of Fortune” could possibly do: He has begun making a spectacle of himself. This has been happening off-air as well, most notably with Sajak’s political Tweets, including an infamous one in which he said, “I now believe global warming alarmists are unpatriotic racists knowingly misleading for their own ends,” which, I think we can all agree, regardless of our political persuasion, is an accurate phonetic representation of what it feels like when your brain leaks out through your ears.

I look at Pat Sajak, the cheesiest cheeseball who ever cheesed (which I actually don’t even necessarily mean as an insult; that cheesiness is a great quality for a “Wheel of Fortune” host to have! It’s why Ryan Seacrest got hired to take over his job!), suddenly putting dudes in headlocks and hanging out with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and I wonder … what happened? But maybe the answer is pretty simple. He got old. This is what happens. If we’re lucky, it’ll happen to us too.

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I have something extremely rare for a 47-year-old man to have: Two healthy, alert, perfectly capable parents. My father will turn 74 in August and remains my favorite person to watch a ballgame with, capable of flying all the way to London to watch the Cardinals play and buying rounds of beer throughout; he remains active and useful, keeping himself busy as a handyman for several AirBNBs here in Athens. (As well as the guy who fixes all the stuff his grandsons keep breaking.) My mother, who would shoot me in the face with a shotgun if I mentioned her age here, is an avid runner of 20-plus miles a week who regularly wins her age group—and more than holds her own in younger age groups—in 10k races. Just yesterday, they each drove eight hours, in separate cars, from Georgia back to Illinois, and the only thing I stressed about was whether Dad could get his Audible app to work so he couldn’t get bored. They can take care of themselves. I recognize how fortunate I am to have this. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve seen Elder Care become a central stressor for nearly everyone my age; dealing with the health issues of one’s parents has become, for many, a central organizing principle of some friends’ lives, people trying to take care of their kids on one end and to take care of their parents on the other. And that’s if they’re lucky enough to have their parents’ still around in the first place. My parents are happy, healthy and together. I’m extremely grateful, and I will not take it for granted.

But this does not change the fundamental fact that they—like me, like you, like the dog—are not getting any younger. They—like me, like you, like the dog—are slowing down. My father, whose work ethic of clocking 60 hours a week and then spending the entire weekend working outside in the heat has been the single guiding principle in my professional life, now takes daily naps and no longer makes it to the end of most Cardinals games anymore. (Speaking of fortunate.) My mother, who got her nursing degree (straight As, as she’ll inevitably tell you) while taking night classes and raising two children, will happily tell you the same story multiple times a day, and if she doesn’t get enough sleep, giving her basic travel instructions is a little like trying to explain advanced physics to a toaster. When you have active parents like mine, it’s a constant balance between making sure they remain as vigorous as they need (and want) to be, and making sure they are safe and healthy and comfortable. You don’t want to treat them like children. But you also can’t help but want to treat them like children. I worry about my parents more than I have ever have in my life. I think most people my age are similar—again, if they’re lucky enough to be able to do so.

And again, and I want to be explicit about this: I am lucky. As I wrote in the Times last month, that my parents have not become reactionary and cranky, even mean, as they’ve gotten older feels like an immeasurable gift. A friend of mine told me how, when her father came to visit last year, he was playing with his grandson, being a goofy fun grandpa, and then every few minutes he’d type something into his phone and then go back to cooing with the kid. At the end of the night, she looked at his Facebook feed that day. “It was the most vile, repulsive, truly hateful stuff,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it was my father. And he just posted it, while playing with my son, like it was nothing.” Part of this is social media, of course: Facebook has in many ways done to our parents what they claimed video games would to do to us. But it’s still a part of so many families’ lives, divisive and potentially destructive. It’s not just social media either: There are media empires dedicated to making sure older people are terrified of everything—it’s their entire business plan. It’s an exploitation of people at the time of their lives that they are their most vulnerable. Every year it feels more and more like elder abuse, an accumulating toxic zone that ends up poisoning us all.

But people do have their own agency. Part of getting older is no longer caring as much about what you say or do, no longer feeling like you have to be so cautious about the secret things you think but try not to let other people know. Part of it is just saying what’s on your mind, damn the torpedoes. (One of my favorite subplots of the pandemic was my mother getting banned by Twitter every couple of weeks for yelling at Rep. Andrew Clyde.) Part of getting older is becoming more of who you are. You do you. Why not? Because who cares at this point? I do not know if I will be like this when I am old. But I bet if I am … I’ll really enjoy it.

Also, it must be said: It sure looks like the two people who are going to be our Presidential candidates are both older than Pat Sajak. It is perhaps instructive to compare how those two people are perceived, age-wise.

Joe Biden is 80 years old, a fact that he and his campaign staff would very much not like you to notice. (His 80th birthday passed last November with barely a peep from the White House.) That Biden is so old is the signature attack point for his opponents and a source of considerable anxiety even amongst his supporters. I will confess that, as someone who likes Joe Biden, will vote for Joe Biden and in fact thinks Joe Biden is doing an excellent job as President, it is not particularly reassuring to see him stumble on stage or hear him confuse Ukraine and Iraq twice in 24 hours. I wish he were younger. I think we all do.

But the way we react to Biden’s age and verbal slip-ups, contrasted with the way we react to Donald Trump’s, is completely bizarre. Saying “Iraq” when you mean “Ukraine” is not ideal. But Jesus Christ look at this.

You can’t embed Twitter clips in Substack anymore because two rich children are fighting with each other, but you should watch that clip of Trump trying, and failing, to describe a “conversation” he had with Vladimir Putin. It’s absurd. You know what that is? That’s an old person making up crazy shit. If someone asked Joe Biden a question about Putin and that were his answer, I’d be terrified! Justifiably! But because Trump has more “vigor” than Biden, there’s a sense that age is somehow less an issue with him than it is with Biden. (Biden is not the one whose father had Alzheimer’s, by the way.) Age is an issue for both of them. But Biden is the only one it sticks to as a campaign issue. So much of it is just perception and narrative. So much of it is just guessing.

Which I wonder if we’re all guilty off—myself very much included. After all, when you see someone make some sort of crack about someone getting older, or claiming someone is doing something out of character because they’re older, the person making the crack is always … someone younger. I’ve never seen someone older be snide about getting older. It’s younger people. It’s younger people being smug about an advantage they believe they have, one they did absolutely nothing to earn. We look at older people and think, “they’ve lost a step.” People younger than us look at us and do the same thing. And they always will.

The thing about losing a step, though, is that you get to keep taking those steps. May we all be so fortunate. The world is run by older people who think they’re the only ones wise enough to be in charge, being sniped at by younger people who think they should be in charge. Which makes us of course exactly the same: Human beings who think they, personally, know what’s best. Every young person, after all, is just someone who doesn’t know if they’ll be lucky enough to be old yet—and therefore doesn’t know, in a certain way, who they really are. Pat Sajak may be putting contestants in headlocks because he’s getting old. He may be doing it because he always wanted to and now finally can. He might be doing it just doesn’t give a shit anymore. Life is a mystery of infinite dimensions. May we all have as much time in this life as we can to solve it, the best we can.

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

1. Lance Armstrong Can Drink a Big Can of Shut the Hell Up, New York. He’s the most lying liar who lies out of all of them.

2. The Ten Biggest Surprises of MLB’s First Half, MLB.com. Yes, the Cardinals did make this list.

3. Jennifer Lawrence Movies, Ranked and Updated, Vulture. Updated with No Hard Feelings.

4. Your June All-Stars, MLB.com. I always get some needed context from this one.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, no show this week.

Seeing Red, Bernie and I wrapped up London.

Waitin' Since Last Saturday, no show this week.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Buzzer,” Eamonn Brennan. I am one of those people who can read about college basketball all year long, so the new college hoops newsletter from longtime Athletic and ESPN writer Eamonn Brennan is right up my alley. If you are like me, it’ll be up yours too.

Also, for a better piece on the theme that I (only somewhat successfully) tried to capture in this week’s newsletter, here’s a classic Michael Kinsley piece on boomers aging, from the New Yorker nearly 10 years ago now.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Dragula,” Rob Zombie. It will not surprise you that I am living my life just fine without Tiktok, thank you very much, but I am absolutely not immune to the charms of the incredible Rob Zombie/Grease mashup that was making the rounds this week.

@electra0449came across this video and absolutely loved it. You can't get a better mashup.I give credits to @DmR 🎥 check him out and give him a like and follow #mashup#metal#video #fyp #robzombie #dracula

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I will also confess that I have always liked that song. If you find it surprising that I would put a Rob Zombie song on my playlist, know that this is in fact the second Rob Zombie joint on The Will Leitch Newsletter Playlist.

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

Also, now there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Happy Fourth of July week, everyone. Be safe out there.

Best,
Will