Bullies

I can’t help but think about bullies lately. So many reminders. My all White, working class grade school had a surplus of bullies. The older kids bullied the younger and the tougher kids the weaker. As I had transferred from the north side of the city, which was tougher and Blacker, some of my second grade companions in my new school thought I must be a tough guy. I confess that I liked that image and adopted that persona, as much as a second grader can, but I didn’t bully anyone. Quite the opposite. I took on the role of bodyguard to our class sissy who was being bullied. Looking back, I think he was gay, but at the time none of us seven year olds had the faintest understanding of human sexuality or knew the usual pejoratives for gays, and the bullies settled for sissy. I liked the bodyguard role—it didn’t require any actual violence, and I liked the kid I guarded. We became friends and played together at his house for a few years until I got into sports. Still, we remained friendly throughout grade school and high school.

About four grades later, in my class of possibly 50 kids, the toughest kid had a coterie of bullies hanging around him. We played soccer in gym class and one of the coterie kids wasn’t a good athlete, but he was effective. He was a fat kid, bigger and heavier than most kids in the class. He aimed his kicks not at the ball but at the shins of weaker kids. That had the effect that the weaker kids cleared out when he and the ball were in their area. I also remember that bully groveling to the toughest kid, who I suspect had just groveled to the principal and was about to grovel to his parents. For a week or so the coterie kids went up to the non-coterie boys, including those in all the lower grades, during recess and, with an underhand motion, flipped the boys’ testicles. One of them did it to me. I didn’t punch him for two reasons: it didn’t hurt, and I had never punched anybody. But I was surprised and confused. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. A friend told me they were doing it to all the boys. Someone must have squealed. One at a time the coterie kids were called to the principal’s office where I assumed they were grilled and, under pressure, ratted out their coterie companions who were called to the office as the grilling continued. I further assumed that the principal called the parents of the coterie kids. I make that assumption because after school I witnessed the soccer bully groveling to the toughest kid, apologizing for, I assumed, ratting him out. The toughest kid was angry and punched the soccer bully knocking him down a few stairs. The soccer bully lay on the pavement and cried. I walked past him.

I only had one bullying experience in my four-year high school. When I was a freshman, barely 13, an older kid who sat in the back of the room putting in his time until his parents let him drop out and maybe get a job at the can company walked to the front of the room, ostensibly to sharpen his pencil, but when he walked back to his desk he called me a suckie and punched me. It was during science class, and I wish I could say that his action provoked an equal and opposite reaction. I tried to return his friendly gesture, but I was inexperienced and only got him on the arm. He was a difficult target for a novice: I was seated and he was upright and in motion. I liked science and excelled in that class, ergo the anger from the back-of-the-room kid. Although I refute the suckie charge, I confess that the teacher did like me. When he saw the commotion, he simply told the back-of-the-room kid to return to his place at the back of the room.

I don’t remember any other bullying incidents, but I seldom took school books home because I learned through osmosis that in my working class school it was generally OK to do well in class but not OK to take a lot of books home. Maybe I wasn’t bullied because I was athletic and maybe because I helped some of the older kids. I remember mouthing the answers during a test on the state constitution we were required to pass to an older and bigger kid who sat across from me.

In Basic Training we had two DI’s. One White—an alcoholic whose face was often red—and one Black. The Black sergeant was tough but fair, and we respected him. The White sergeant was a bully. Once, when we were doing push-ups on a cement patio the bully swore at the recruit next to me who had trouble with the push-ups and stepped on his head, banging it to the ground and causing his forehead to bleed, proving what we had learned in a first aid class: that facial wounds bleed a lot. The White sergeant was immediately sobered—he could have lost a stripe—but the bleeding recruit did not complain. The BR was an RA (Regular Army: he had joined), hiding the fact that he had had polio that resulted in one arm being smaller and weaker. I was a US (draftee) and had a hard time understanding the motivations of some RAs. Still, when we got up from the push-up position and stood at parade rest, rifles by our sides, the BR beside me, still bleeding, I felt a strong urge to whack that DI bully with my rifle, using what I had learned in a class on combat when you’re out of ammo. Knowing that I would be in big trouble if I did didn’t stop me because I knew that I was headed for Vietnam, which I viewed as bigger trouble. My innate pacifism stopped me, and I still hadn’t successfully punched anyone. Since escaping Vietnam I have avoided Vietnam movies, but did see Full Metal Jacket, twice. I especially like the part where the recruit wasted the bullying DI. I never claimed that my innate pacifism was perfect.

I saw racism in Vietnam, but not so much bullying. After all, in the field everyone carried loaded weapons everywhere except the showers.I take it back. Most officers were bullies. It’s the nature of the beast. And we lower ranking—ergo weaker—kids put up with it, although some fragged their commanding officers, sometimes with good reason. Which tended to have a pacifying effect on many officers, especially in the boonies.

Hmm. It occurs to me that I have forgotten—possibly due to denial or senile dementia or a stunning one two punch by both—about my long-deceased father who was most definitely a bully. And a former DI. Only the DI connection made me think of him. Were he alive he would surely be an enthusiastic member of the MAGA coterie. He had very strong, often loud and dissonant opinions on the real man’s persona. Yet, as do many blue collar he-men, he often groveled before the bosses or anyone in a superior station—an attitude the army no doubt reinforced, even if the bosses were physically weaker or even sissies. He called me a sissy as well as many other things when he learned I was trying to flunk the draft physical, exaggerating—I prefer to think of it as emphasizing—my sports injuries. I flunked flunking—easy to do: remember the BR who’d had polio and still passed—and, 19 months later, when I got off that big silver bird that carried me home, wearing my dress uniform and ribbons, my father was proud of me. I was not so proud of myself, and my sympathy for anyone who tried to avoid military service had grown enormously. As long as they didn’t try to hide that grievous sin. I admired M. Ali, although he made his living beating up weaker people and bragged about it, but he stood up to the draft board bullies and lost his world champion standing. A great friend starved himself in order to flunk the draft physical and enjoys telling that story with great good humor, which I enjoy hearing, each and every time. All the real he-men, man’s men types were upset when Carter forgave the draft dodgers. In my world view, the draft dodgers were the ones who deserved commendations and medals. With two notable exceptions.

I am at a loss to understand why all the MAGA he-men simply gloss over the fact that their favorite bully used his wealth and his family’s influence to find a doctor who helped him flunk the physical. I have no great problem with a rich man getting out of military service. They all do it. It’s expected. Bush’s influential family got him into the National Guard, despite it being closed at the time, in order to avoid the draft. He put in a few months’ service before he went AWOL. For me, the problem arises when they play the bully but won’t ‘fess up, when they still lie about it or still gloss over their actions to avoid action in Vietnam. That is an act of cowardice. It’s the cowardly cover-up that bothers me. It’s what bullies do. Even knowing that Bush and Trump might well have cheated to avoid the draft and going to Vietnam, I feel certain that my father, had he not died young because he didn’t believe in science, would have voted for them, would have groveled before that dynamic duo, as did and do all the Bushies and MAGA types. Bush was a bully on the world stage. Think Afghanistan and Iraq and Liberty Fries. Trump is a bully on the national stage, the big fat bully who kicks immigrants/refugees and trans kids, the weakest in our society, in the shins.

Trump is far from being the toughest kid, but he is our biggest bully, a very rich bully, and all the MAGA tough-guy and –gal bullies signed up to serve in his coterie, and all the GOP politicians grovel before him. I fail to see the appeal. He does not outrank the MAGA types who are not in the military and are free and equal citizens, and he certainly can’t beat them up or even punch them for fear of being punched back. The valiant politicians do have a good excuse: if they stand up to him he will support their rivals in the primaries.

Anyway, Trump who has the knack of too often putting himself in the conversation was not the reason I’ve been thinking of bullies lately. Well, not the main reason. That honor goes to Bashar Al-Assad. The good news is that he has fled to a land where he must grovel before a bigger bully. The bad news comes from the unending reports of atrocities committed by his coterie. I cannot help but wonder what it is in the human race, what defect in our makeup, impelled Assad’s coterie to commit such repugnant crimes against fellow human beings on such a wide scale.

Last century, Stanley Milgram came up with his agentic theory, positing that humans will commit acts they would not ordinarily perform if they were under the direction of someone they perceived as more powerful. In his experiment, guards (students) brutalized prisoners (also students) at the direction of the warden (Milgram).  Psychologists apply Milgram’s theory to torturers acting as agents for higher ranking officers or a dictator. Assad was at the apex of the power pyramid in Syria with a great many different levels of bullies in his very large coterie. I don’t know of any evidence that Assad or his generals took a hands-on-approach to the brutality, but the famous photo of the Saigon execution, also last century, shows that some generals are not averse to getting their hands dirty. I have no trouble imagining a sadistic general or two in Assad’s coterie going down to the basement dungeons to pass a few enjoyable moments torturing a prisoner or two. The last century is replete with examples. However, I do believe that in this century American generals kept their dress white gloves spotless and left all the sadism to the troops at black sites and Guantanamo but were suitably appalled when the torture became public. And draft dodger Bush’s coterie tried to change the definition of torture.

The stories told by the quantity of human remains and mass graves in many parts of Syria are shocking enough, but, according to the accounts of survivors, Assad’s bullies not only murdered but tortured and raped on an astonishing scale. Assad may not have personally directed or ordered every grisly incident, or even the majority of them, but he and his officers condoned or ignored those crimes against humanity, leaving the details up to the lower-level bullies who did not require explicit directions from a powerful person. The lower-level bullies possibly acted in accordance with the agentic theory, but their own creativity led them to commit acts of dismaying depravity. They didn’t matter-of-factly imprison, torture, rape, and murder anyone they thought was the enemy, anyone they didn’t like, anyone whose wife or property they coveted. No, they committed this Syrian Holocaust with gusto.

The agentic theory does not explain why bullies so readily become agents for bigger bullies, why anyone wants to be a bully. I certainly can’t explain it. Although I believe that fear, ambition, and the desire to fit in with the in group all play a role. Syria is a hierarchical country where people at or near the bottom are taught from childhood on that they have to obey those higher up on the social ladder. But here in the US, it’s the MAGA coterie that shouts the loudest about their independence and freedom while they act as agents for the American Alpha Bully. Did they join the MAGA coterie because our Alpha Bully gives them permission to indulge their desire to bully a variety of victims, other genders, other races, other nationalities?

Sociopathy Swallowed Sympathy in Assad’s Syria.

Antipathy Trumped Empathy in our recent elections.

Why?