I Was a Teenage Bully; or Terror in the Time of Tea Bags

The idea that anything can have a spirit is make-believe. The thought that any part of time can have a spirit is even more fanciful. But it’s an easy thing to believe in because it gives an excuse for thoughtlessly moving through life doing what feels appropriate at the time. Zeitgeist then is not a spirit but a first attempt at describing the direction the largest identifiable herd of people are moving in socially, culturally, politically, or romantically. Being able to differentiate right and wrong is more about herd identification and the consensual abandonment of individual responsibility that comes with it.

The first necessity of any evil business is the creation of a channel through which other people can be made to flow without independent thought. It’s hard not to think of this watching two political supporters restrain a woman trying to reach their candidate’s car with a sarcastic sign, throwing her to the ground, calling angrily for the police, before steps on her head and shoulders in what can only have been disgust. It’s painfully ironic that Tim Profitt, the man who delivered the foot to the Lauren Valle’s head, said after the fact that he thought it was the sarcastic reporter who owed him an apology.

That feeble indignation is endemic among those susceptible to outbursts of brutality. “You shouldn’t have been talking shit,” is the common rejoinder when looking at a bloodied face lying on the ground. This unspoken social rule has been the norm in male culture for as long as men have had penises requiring the kind of adrenal cocktail that, through the law of unintended circumstances, also makes the call to violence so persuasive in the right setting. The idea that a man becomes his truest self after having made a physical show, either in a playground punch flurry, in running over opponents on the sporting field, or staring down someone’s false threats without flinching has long gashed at American society. It’s the blood blister of freedom, a constant irritation that causes useless anxiety and overcompensation.

It sounds more like Ike Turner than Abraham Lincoln when a man expresses indignation about a woman who thought she could safely bring a sign to the attention of a political candidate after a public debate. There is never regret at the atmosphere having been needlessly and sickly aggressive, but rather that this ignorant reporter should have known what violent response she was baiting by making an incoherent joke about Rand Paul’s fealty to the Grand Old Party. These are men who see a wig and sarcastic sign as a foreboding assassination omen more than a comic challenge to Paul’s erratic political image. Valle was seen as a worst case scenario that fearful enough to ignite a worst-case response.

While this kind of behavior is marginal in action, the preparation of a rhetorical channel wide enough to provide reasonable cover to it is not. It’s an accretion of long-running and formerly disparate threads of social unease that, through the luck of downturn and an increasingly elastic news reporting industry, has fused into a trough through which libertarians, republicans, Judeo-Christian ethno-nationalists like Glenn Beck, and a throng of undereducated working class Amercans with foreclosed homes and expiring unemployment benefits, more drawn-in by dire storytelling than fact-finding, can flow.

When I was twelve I remember committing a terrible act of bullying. Some of the details have dithered into the ether after two decades but I remember one disgusting moment when I realized how reptilian I’d become. There was a chubby boy in my 8th grade class called Glen, he was pale, had gotten acne early, was eagerly nice to everyone, and looked soft all around his short body. I hung out with a group of indignant metal kids who smoked their parent’s cigarettes and had improvised mosh pits during recess every day.

We’d haze each other in absurd extremes. One day when I came to school with a new pair of shoes one of the alpha’s in the herd pressed me against a metal ladder used for PE class and tied me by my ankles to it. As the recess bell rang, everyone went back to class laughing at me like a village idiot. The ties were so tight I couldn’t pull my foot out of my shoe and instead wasted half of the class period squatting painfully in the dirt trying to undo the deviously haphazard knots.

It was with great pleasure during these days that I’d encounter fat and weak-seeming Glen wandering the halls. I really liked him, but I also understood he could be a social utility for me. So I’d laughingly push him into corners and punch him in the shoulder searching for the boniest spot, poke his mushy belly to watch him clench, and send my knee stealthily shooting into his thigh to give him a temporary limp that I could laugh about with the other beta’s I skulked around with.

These were all forms of abuse I’d become familiar with from my older brother’s cackling assaults and they were secondarily reinforced through the heavy metal alpha’s I was infatuated with. Every physical assault I shot at Glen had a precedent, I wouldn’t have dared to try something new. I laughed as he winced and limped, trying to make peace with confused laughter. It was funny to see him in the same hobbled slouch that I’d stumbled in, now luxuriously free of any pain of my own.

One day in the locker room I found Glen late in changing back into his street clothes after P.E. class. Almost everyone else had finished changing and had escaped outside to squeeze in another few minutes of loafing before the next class period. Punching Glen in the shoulder had become almost instinctual at this point, something I did with no anger or acrimony. It had become a bored and insecure way of acknowledging him. It was how I said hello.

Something was different about Glen when I walked up to him in the locker room, he stepped away from me with a new expression that I’d never seen. He was in a white t-shirt and white briefs. He backed into a corner with his back to the thick cement wall, his hands raised against his chest defensively, the wrists bent at 90 degree angles like hamster paws.

There was no audience behind me to join in my sadistic ventilation. He looked right at me, his big blue eyes sharpened in his blotchy, pimpled face. “Come on, man,” he said. “Please.” He was afraid, and I was the sole cause of his fear. He wasn’t just afraid though, I’d seen that in him before–the shallow aversions to discomfort that puberty exacerbates. He was terrified of me. It felt to me like something quivered in his face, like a ripple made by a fish that never actually breaks the surface of water, spreading suddenly with no seeming cause.

I’d long been used to causing other people pain. It was a kind of social economy that my brother and I negotiated in. I felt whatever rough earnings I’d beaten out of him could be worn proudly around school, an affect that my dirty-faced friends would surely value. I’d never yet caused anyone terror, true, helpless, defeated terror.

“Please,” he said again. “Don’t.”

I felt filthy inside, and confused about what was happening. I left him alone and went outside to find my friends. I wanted distraction from that sudden feeling, to wash it away like the unexpected spillage from playing too roughly with a stuffed animal that now suddenly appeared to have blood and guts inside. I didn’t hit Glen after that day. The year after he went to a different high school and I haven’t seen him since. But he’s out there. And I remain an anecdote in his life, a darkly traumatic menace or maybe a barely remembered irritation from our days of 2% milk and ignorance.

It’s said that timing is everything. We give up our right to struggle for something because the time is wrong, it’s not the right moment, the era conspires against us. The best we can do is look backwards in the flow lamenting the places we’re being pulled towards. This may well be true, the flow of time is beyond our control, but the channels into which it’s funneled aren’t. We build them and fight over whose should be wider. In love and politics and friendship there is nothing so reassuring as knowing you’re floating in the direction of your own choosing and with someone who’s committed themselves to the lowly art of digging troughs on faith that someone further downstream will have built the connecting piece to keep the stream going a little further.

So go vote today. You might even smile at someone in line.

*Images via twbuckner and Life is a Wonder