on bullying

Music: Radiohead: The King of the Limbs (2011)

Thursday the Obamae hosted a conference on anti-bullying at the White House to bring national attention to a problem that is perceived to be escalating in youth culture. Every major national news outlet---networks and cable stations---devoted time to reporting the conference. The central message underscored by Obama in a highlighted address, and echoed by newscasters to screens in homes suitably tuned, was that bullying is no longer a "rite of passage" for young people. Most folks reading the Rosechron were smart kids in school, and most of us know that, in the United States, being the smart kid---or artistic, or "husky," or queer, or all of the above---means that you likely grew-up with lots of taunts and teases. Most of us were taught by our parents that this was "normal" and to "brush it off." Many of us were coached on how to throw a punch (not me). That getting picked on for being different was a "norm" growing up in my generation goes without saying. What this conference was saying, however, is that the norm has been distorted far beyond what parents think they see.

Last year's seemingly endless series of young person suicides---caused by bullying---was the exigency.

"Now" bullying can lead to death. I'm not sure that wasn't always the case, however, there is something to be said (as I've been saying for some years now) about the increasing trend toward psychotic cultures---cultures in which the gravity of hurting another human being doesn't quite register, as when thinking about social life as video game. I was impressed with the White House's symbolic display, which reflects a recognition of the rhetorical power a statement made by the presidential administration can have on social issues. I suspect many pass off the conference as a gesture only, but listening to the statements from the conference, something deeper is at stake in all of this. Values are at issue, inclusive of types of disposition or our orientation toward those who are different. The conference was both earnestly devised for practical discussion and a salvo in the subtextual culture wars that rage not-so-subtly in contemporary (media) politics. Unquestionably, this conference on bullying is articulated in the popular imaginary to a psychotic's rampage in Tucson and the Obama birther conspiracy and border-issue xenophobia.

Last week Professor Jeremy Engels spoke here at the University of Texas, and this image was central to his talk:

Engels analyzed this image in relation to the "politics of resentment," which he argued has become increasingly visible because of the mainstream media (and by implication, the speed of circulatory networks), but which has always been seething at the core of "American" statecraft. The face of hate in this image betrays an all-too-familiar logic of victimage, which many scholars have argued has been the emotional-stop gap solution for solidarity absent a peopled history (it's identitarian logic on a stick---American Indians, African Americans, Japanese internment, etc.). Absent a common ancient heritage, the logic goes, we can bond over whom we elect to exclude. At bottom, this is also the basis of contractarian thinking (whether the excluded is the hated or understood as property; "who gives this woman to be married . . . "). Cue Agamben on homo sacer, press play.

Filtered through the media coverage of the anti-bullying conference, what Engels' talk caused me to think about was audience. Resentment in an of itself connotes a kind of individual indignation; but a politics of resentment implicates the social---the spectacle of resenting another. In this respect it seems to me that bullying always has an audience, which is what makes it distinct from fighting and its attendant ecstasies. I have never been a fighter (always a lover), but I was in at least eight fights growing up (I remember them vividly, even as I turn 38 today). All but one was an instance of bullying. I was in a fight with my best friend Guy once, and it was just us two going at it. In retrospect I know now the fight with Guy was about sibling rivalry (his dad and mom often called me their "number two adopted son"). And even then, if I think about it, our fighting had an audience (his parents, even if it was only his parents installed in my head).

The bullying I endured was always about some guy showing other guys (and girls, but rarely that) that he belonged because of a mutual recognition of my difference. I registered the social dimension of bullying even as a young person; I knew that if it was just me and the bully alone I would be, pretty much, left alone. I was a persuasive young fellah, and could often spare myself a punch one-on-one with a potential bully if there was no one around to watch me get beat-up (as a young person, my gift for gab led a number of my friend's parents to predict I would be a politician one day). Which is to say, bullying is about recognition, about being seen being sadistic, which is in itself a cry for love. Bullying is the politics of spectacle, writ small and interpersonal.

When I was in grade school there was a kid who constantly bullied and harassed me on the school bus. I forget his name, and to be honest I had barely remember the situation (repressed as it is). I was talking on the phone with my father today, who reminded me of the situation: "you were so scared you purposely kept missing the bus!" He revealed that he packed a revolver and went to the kid's house and told his father to discipline "the shit" or he would be back with a vengeance (my father is a very large man, and back then, pretty much the spitting image of Brutus from Robert Altman's delightfully strange Popeye film). Apparently the bullying stopped. I don't remember very well, honestly. But I do remember the kid came from a broken home, often smelled, and didn't have clean clothes.

The more I dwell on it, the more I realize that part of the reason I chose the profession that I have is because of being bullied. In childhood, I was called "weird" or "faggot" in every context but the academic, so it makes much sense to me that I would build a life around the space and place in which such labels are not common or a bad thing. And I also know this: even when I was getting my head bashed into a rock in the ground in 8th grade by the new kid trying to "fit in" at Snellville Middle School, I never once considered suicide, nor ever worried that I would die. The thought of pulling a weapon out to defend or off myself never occurred to me either; that fantasy didn't exist.

Bullying today is different than it was when I was a kid, and that's not just because I am older. It has taken on a more intense and deadly character, and for reasons I'm not quite sure how to make sense of. Drastic fantasies are more intense. When I was growing up, the film My Bodyguard supplied the map of meaning; today, it's high school shootings. The common thread is a yearning for recognition---for another to see the bullying as a display of power. I think if we are going to address the problem of bullying among young people (or between nation states), we need to understand it less as a pathology or font of aggression and more as failure of recognition. Does aggression happen without an Other? A bully is "acting out in groups," to borrow a phrase, and it's a learned technique of belonging; bullying shunts hormones into a meaning, and that meaning is perverse.

The art of diplomacy is the management of bullies who are acting out for love.