Daily Inspiration Quote by Leslie Fiedler

A throwaway confession like this is Fiedler at his most mischievous: the critic playing amateur, the intellectual flirting with the body. "I used to be fond" arrives already nostalgia-soaked, as if the appetite has curdled into embarrassment or enlightenment. The phrase sets up a quiet reversal: not "I am fond" (present-tense enthusiasm) but a past-tense attachment to a spectacle that, once named, sounds faintly absurd.

"Indian arm wrestling" is doing heavy, risky work. It conjures a staged, exoticized version of Indigeneity packaged for non-Indigenous consumption: a parlor attraction, a test of brute force, a ritual reduced to a novelty act. Fiedler, who spent a career interrogating American myths and the way "the Indian" gets used as a symbolic prop, lets that discomfort hang in the air. The joke is not only on the practice but on the speaker who once enjoyed it. Taste becomes self-indictment.

The specificity matters. Arm wrestling is intimate combat, a clean metaphor for power relations: two hands locked, one trying to press the other down while pretending it's all in good fun. Framed as "Indian", it turns into a cultural arm-wrestle too, with the dominant culture insisting the terms, the rules, even the entertainment value. Fiedler's intent reads like a jab at his younger self and at a broader American habit: consuming otherness as sport, then retroactively calling it curiosity. The line lands because it's small. It doesn't moralize; it winces.