Gaywad who won’t say Pledge a nerd hero

They look cute now, but as soon as those little hands come off their hearts, they go upside Will Phillips's head.

They look cute now, but as soon as those little hands come off their hearts, they go upside Will Phillips's head.

As an adult nerd, I am peculiarly fascinated by Will Phillips, the Arkansas ten year-old who refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance until gay people are allowed to marry. If you haven’t seen the CNN interview he did with John Roberts, quit your job, tell your loved ones to go to hell and watch it now. Will Phillips is a very principled young man, who is possibly the puppet of his enormous father but unquestionably very brave. He is also a big-time nerd. Specifically, he is a nerd subspecies I refer to as the Careful Nerd—an articulate person whose intense awareness of himself has terrified him into a state of eerie calm, as if he were perpetually speaking from the top step of a ladder. The Careful Nerd makes up for his inability to confidently navigate nonverbal social cues by investing in the denotative meaning of language. Hence his vaguely Spock-y demeanor—he’s put his faith in the logical value of what he’s saying to get through the conversation, and organized the rest of his communication around not fucking up. I base all of this one accepted psychological study, by the way, and certainly not on my own personal experience.

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Nerds of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your bags of holding.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFIWUYr0n10

That’s a clip from Mazes and Monsters, the made-for-TV movie starring Tom Hanks, created to exploit the widespread (okay, pretty narrowly spread) fear that Dungeons & Dragons would make kids commit suicide and/or worship Satan. It was the eighties; everything was going to make kids commit suicide and worship Satan. Remember “Suicide Submission,” and the culture that briefly took Judas Priest seriously? The 700 Club was full of reports of kids all across America who became level 20 magic-users and killed themselves thinking they would achieve immortality, or sacrificed their little brothers to get the ingredients necessary for Power Word: Kill. It turned out that was like, two kids, but the message was disseminated nonetheless: Dungeons & Dragons will make your kid insane.

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