#68 Songe
Heavyweight
Song lives with Tourette's Syndrome and carries deep guilt from an incident in 1983 where he mocked a girl with facial tics. The host attemp
Key takeaways
- Song attended a strict Muslim school in Atlanta during 1983.
- The incident involved Song and friends publicly imitating a girl's eye-blinking tic during a song performance.
Main topics
- Tourette's Syndrome
- Karmic guilt and atonement
Notable quotes
I was ashamed of having laughed at her.
Conclusion
The episode suggests that while true closure with a specific person ma
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:05) Pushkin. Speaker 4 (0:13) Hi, how are you, Stevie? Speaker 3 (0:16) Hi, Grandma. What have you been doing? I'm going to be hosting the second episode of this season. Oh, Speaker 4 (0:23) so let me know and I'll put it on. Speaker 3 (0:25) Have you ever had anything that you, I mean, you know the point of the show. Have you ever had anything that you want to apologize for? Speaker 4 (0:33) Oh. There are probably many things. I'm sure I've been thoughtless in many ways. You know what I say to my daughters today? I'm a b****. Grandma. I don't know if I did a lot of things on purpose. Speaker 3 (0:49) Right, right, right. Speaker 4 (0:52) But then again. Speaker 3 (1:02) From Pushkin Industries, I'm Stevie Lane, and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, song, right after the break. Speaker 4 (1:24) This is an iHeart Podcast. Speaker 4 (1:27) Guaranteed human. Speaker 1 (1:28) Malcolm Gladwell here. My new book, The American Way of Killing, investigates America's gun violence crisis. Why is the richest country in the world plagued by such lethal violence? Through a series of stories, interviews, and archival tape, I confront one of today's most urgent moral dilemmas and examine why the U.S. has never quite understood its own problem and why you can't fix what you refuse to see clearly. Pre-order The American Way of Killing at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Speaker 3 (2:03) Hey, Song. Speaker 1 (2:05) Hi. How Speaker 2 (2:06) are you doing? Speaker 3 (2:07) This is Song. All right. Speaker 2 (2:16) There's going to be a lot of peripheral noises coming from me. But I guess that's part of the story, too. Speaker 3 (2:22) Actions have consequences. The world is ruled by cause and effect. So when Song tells the story of how he became the person you're hearing today, it's hard for him not to see it in karmic terms. His fate feels predetermined by something that happened one day in 1983 when he was eight years old. Song was living in Atlanta with his dad. Speaker 2 (2:45) And my father decided that he would send me to a Muslim school. And I just went for a year. Speaker 3 (2:53) Song's dad was Rastafarian and his mom Catholic. But for this one year, he attended a strict Muslim school. Speaker 2 (3:05) So, yeah, that day, the day in question, we had mosque. Speaker 2 (3:14) One of the teachers told us that there were three girls that had written a song praising Allah, praising God, and they wanted to perform it for the school. Speaker 3 (3:30) The teacher brought the three girls up, and in front of everyone, they sang. Speaker 2 (3:35) And it was a really cute song. I couldn't sing it. Speaker 2 (3:41) Could you try Speaker 3 (3:42) to sing it? Speaker 2 (3:43) No, no, don't do that to me. The only part I remember is at the end, it went, A la whack bar, a la whack bar, repeated three times. Speaker 3 (4:01) Song and two of his friends were sitting up front, close to the girls. Speaker 2 (4:05) One of my friends noticed that One of the girls had a nervous tick, which was eye blinking, and pointed it out, and the three of us started to laugh about it. Speaker 3 (4:20) Laugh and imitate the girl's tick. A teacher caught them doing it, and after the girls were done singing, asked Song and his friends to stand up. Then, to publicly shame them for having mocked the girl, Speaker 2 (4:34) he made us sing the song. you know, in front of the whole school and imitate her while we were singing it. Speaker 3 (4:42) Oh, my God. Speaker 2 (4:43) So, yeah, we sang the song, and we imitated her tick, and everybody laughed, and everybody laughed. Speaker 3 (4:59) I have to say, like, it strikes me as, like, a really strange punishment because it feels like it would just be doubly horrifying for her. Speaker 2 (5:08) Right. I remember looking at her and she was crying. And she was crying while we were seeing it. I remember she was crying afterwards. Speaker 3 (5:23) What was going through your head? Speaker 2 (5:26) I was ashamed. I was ashamed of having laughed at her. Speaker 2 (5:32) And of course I felt terrible for her. You know, I mean, that also adds to the shame, is having to watch somebody else in pain because of something that I'd done. Speaker 3 (5:49) Afterwards, Song and his friends were brought to a back room where they were beaten with a large paddle. Speaker 2 (5:54) That they called the Board of Education? It had that written on the board? No, Speaker 3 (5:58) no. Wait, really? Speaker 2 (5:59) Yeah. It had holes drilled into it so that there would be less wind reduction. Speaker 3 (6:05) Oh my God. Song's memory of the incident, though, ends there. Speaker 2 (6:10) I don't remember any more interaction with her. I don't, I wish, you know, like I don't remember, I don't remember her name. Speaker 2 (6:20) I just remember the situation. Speaker 3 (6:23) Yeah. And Speaker 2 (6:23) it's hard to say whether or not it would have stayed with me had not my own condition progressed in the way that it did. Okay, so you can probably hear it a little bit, but I have Tourette's Syndrome. And it's... It varies in severity, but I'm considered to be a pretty severe case. Speaker 3 (7:05) Song says it was right around that same time, the summer after that school year in 1983, that he first started displaying signs of the disorder, signs that were eerily similar to the singing girl. Speaker 2 (7:18) The tics that I had in the beginning were mostly facial, you know, and that was like the same ones that we were laughing at that girl for. It was like eye blinking and stuff with my eyes, you know, make faces, smiling or opening my mouth wide. Speaker 2 (7:39) And other people around me were commenting, like, why do you keep doing that? And, oh, wow, you're doing this thing. Hey, you're doing this thing. And, you know, I would try to hide it and stuff. Speaker 3 (7:52) What does that feel like in your body? Speaker 2 (7:56) I can suppress it. It's very difficult. Speaker 2 (8:01) Anytime I'm suppressing it, I have to pay for it. It comes out worse afterwards. It's like if you're... Speaker 2 (8:13) In a staring contest with somebody and you're trying not to blink, you can feel when your eyes want to blink. Speaker 3 (8:19) But Speaker 2 (8:20) if you're not thinking about that, you're just going to blink. It just happens so quickly that you can't really stop it. Speaker 3 (8:27) Right, yeah. Speaker 2 (8:28) By the time you're aware that it's coming, it's already happening. Speaker 3 (8:32) But back then, when Song was 8, 9, 10 years old, it was all just new and confusing. Were you, like, scared? I don't know. It's funny. I remember, like, Speaker 3 (8:43) Because, and I'm not equating these things, but like growing up, I had a lot of like OCD compulsive behavior. And I remember this one time doing this thing with my hands and my friend saying like, what are you doing? And I was like, embarrassed, but I had to do it. And I just was like. First I was like, what? I was trying to deny the thing that was happening right there. And then I was just like, I don't know. And I really didn't know. Speaker 2 (9:17) Oh, wow. That's so similar, what you're describing, that compulsion. And you're not wrong in equating OCD and Tourette's are comorbid. But yeah, that's what it's like. People would be like, why are you doing that? I'd be like, I don't know. Speaker 3 (9:38) Song didn't know, and for a long time, his parents didn't know either. They thought he was just acting out. Song remembers conversations between his dad and grandmother and aunt around the kitchen table, them all talking about him and his tics as though he weren't sitting right there. Speaker 2 (9:53) My mother was a little more proactive. Speaker 2 (9:58) to put it in a positive light. Speaker 3 (10:01) Wait, wait, what do you mean? Speaker 2 (10:03) Well, she, you know, she thought that she could punish it out of me, you know, so like her and like my stepdad used to be like, this is how much money I'm going to spend for... Speaker 2 (10:17) And every time you make one of those noises, I'm going to take $5 off. Speaker 3 (10:23) Yeah. Speaker 2 (10:23) Yeah. I remember her recording me and playing it back and being like, this is what you sound like and stuff. Maybe she could embarrass it out of me. I don't know. It was always the idea that I was doing it on purpose. Speaker 3 (10:40) It wasn't