The Enemy Within

It's about guns. No, it's about mental health. No, guns! No, mental health! And so on – the endless, swirling whirlpool of blame and accusation, insuring – as always – that rational discourse has been left behind and that any “solutions” will be both wrong-headed and ineffective. (But what counts – as the Obama administration taught us – is rhetoric, not actual results.) 

I'm not going to attempt to propose a solution to the school shooting plague, but will simply offer a few points for consideration.

#1, is the phenomenon new? Not brand new, in that incidents of this sort do appear in the historical record going back quite far. But yes, new in frequency and magnitude. And is this, in turn, a product of our fast-forward, media- and Internet-based society (and the hybrid of these, namely social media), which has, at long last, achieved the “global village” of Marshall McLuhan's dreams (or nightmares?). Because in that global village, information spreads as rapidly as it did between busybodies and gossips in the traditional village – except out in plain sight, and amplified. As such, it partakes of many of the qualities of mass hysteria, and in that sense naturally feeds on itself, grows, reproduces, morphs, and stimulates stable and unstable minds alike. And that, in turn, leads to not only “copycat” incidents, but copycat thinking, which is expressed, more often than not, in the social media, which offer the appearance of anonymity but which are, in fact, the digital equivalent of posting a sign in one's front yard. Combine this with the promise of instant fame (which has ever appealed to losers) and you have multiple accidents waiting to happen. 

So we have not only the copycat phenomenon, but also the gradually growing social acceptance of this form of “acting out”. Social acceptance? Surely not, in view of the universal condemnation of such acts. But I'm not talking about normal society here; I'm referring to a subculture made up of countless moody, isolated “weirdos” -- a fellowship of the bullied, rejected, and generally shat-upon – and we know it exists because we've seen ample evidence. And the operating base for that subculture is, again, the social media. In those circles, school shootings are seen as a form of justice – of getting even, of standing up to authority (both adult and that of the “in crowd” -- the popular kids – the cliques), of asserting oneself against an unjust and cruel world. Witness, even, the frequency with which the shooters (the ones who survive, or the ones who leave their thoughts behind in some form) say that their victims are better off dead – presumably because no one should have to put up with the offenses that the world dishes out on a regular basis. So they were doing their victims a favor by taking them out of this world. Deranged thinking? Certainly – but, seemingly, becoming more common. Combine that with delusions of grandeur – of a “superiority complex”, if you will, and again, it's just a matter of time. 

To this we might add – paradoxically, perhaps -- a more general phenomenon or trend, namely the erosion of individual self-esteem. And this seems wrong on its face, since if the public schools represent anything in lieu of academic standards, which have long since been left by the wayside, it's the unremitting obsession with, and provision for, self-esteem, “inclusiveness”, and all the other ways of describing the morphing of the public education system into a gigantic sociological octopus. The problem is that, clearly, these programs don't work – at least not for the real outliers, the truly marginalized. They work for the ones who are already in the system in some way – not necessarily whole heartedly but enough to be amenable to persuasion and manipulation by “agents of change” (teachers and school administrators in this case). But for the true rebel – the true outsider – these efforts will invariably come to naught, because those in question have already, on some level (consciously or otherwise), declared themselves to be non-players, bad citizens, and rebels – and if you survey the writings of many of the school shooting “perps” you will find this attitude in abundance. 

Another way of putting it is that these people do have self-esteem – but of a markedly different, pathological, and dangerous type. It goes beyond simple sociopathy, which is about being a rebel and a “badass”, and extends into hatred, resentment, and a desire for revenge – for “getting even”. (Please note that most of these shooters don't seem to have any other notable accomplishments – nothing that would merit being listed in a yearbook, say. Oftentimes the sort of hostile energy that motivates shooters is the same kind of energy that can, in some cases, be channeled into something more constructive and/or creative – but that would require some sort of talent, which these shooter types seem to lack.) 

Then there is that old stand-by, morals and morality – both of which have been expunged from public education because they are insufficiently inclusive... and, after all, “it's a matter of opinion”, as the cultural relativists never tire of saying. And heaven forbid anyone should start talking about morality in a public education setting; who knows, it might constitute a “trigger”; it would certainly be readily identifiable as some sort of “hate”. Not to mention which, how many public school teachers in our time would even be comfortable teaching morals, or even ethics, when it's much easier and less threatening (to their own self-esteem) to stick with “niceness” and “consideration for others”? 

But again, the rebel – the badass – is only going to sit in the back row of the classroom and laugh at such foolishness. He knows these people are all hypocrites! And his sense of superiority dictates that he devalue them not just to the point of not caring whether they live or die, but being willing to help matters along. 

But – one might say – isn't the home where morals are, or should be, taught? Certainly. And that should be reinforced – or at least not directly contradicted – by the educational system. And yet too often we find the opposite, and I'm trying to think about at what point the public schools, and their “agents of change”, came into direct opposition with the values of families and the home. I suspect it was at about the time when the “60's” types got their teaching degrees and spread out across the land like a plague, determined to subvert American culture in all of its forms, because, after all, American culture had treated them shabbily and it had to go – and any totalitarian worth their salt will tell you that the program has to begin with the young, and the younger the better. “Anyone over 30” is a lost cause... and if you're going to be a rabble rouser, the most amenable rabble to rouse are people of high school and college age. 

But this argument assumes that the home and family remain a redoubt of proper training, ethics, and morality – but that would be a mistake as well. Lest we forget, the same “60's types” who signed up as agents of change are also the ones who raised the next generation – and are, in fact, the grandparents of the current generation of high school- and college-aged individuals. So we have, basically, a generation, or the second generation, raised up in a moral vacuum and then sent off to the public schools, colleges, and universities where that moral vacuum is even more complete, permeating, and insidious. And then we wonder where school shooters come from. They are, basically, externalizing their inner demons, which in earlier times might have been suppressed either totally or sufficiently by the collective influence of family, school, and community. But there are no such inhibitors now – it's as if we have a landscape of human nuclear reactor cores with missing control rods; there is nothing preventing the occasional meltdown. 

So yes, it's not about guns. Guns have always been with us, although it could be argued that “assault weapons” and the like have not, but those are an aggravating factor rather than a cause. And I'll even venture a guess that more American households 100 years ago – or 200 – had at least one gun on hand than is now the case, percentage-wise. There was certainly at least one gun on every farm... and at least one in the home of every hunter... and that included a goodly proportion of the citizenry back before mass industrialization and migration to the cities. And where are guns considered a problem, by the way? In rural areas, or the suburbs? No, in the cities, of course, where, allegedly, no one “needs” to have a gun but so many do. 

Is it, then, “mental health”? Well, yes – if you include under that heading being something other than a moral imbecile. And if you take into account a collective pathology which is more obvious than ever in society, namely the acceptance and depersonalization of violence. Acceptance? Yes – in fantasy mode, via video games and the Internet, where one can plow through platoons of enemies with weaponry that the U.S. military can only dream of. But wait, that's just “fantasy”, right? And everyone knows the difference between fantasy and reality, right? The problem is, a growing number of our citizens, particularly of the young type, don't. Their fantasy worlds constitute so much of their reality that when they're confronted with real reality, their fantastic thinking doesn't turn realistic, but remains in charge. 

Think about it. Is the human brain, especially the youthful human brain, really able to make this sudden, violent, many-times-a-day transition between fantasy and reality? Look at the screen... then at the world... then back at the screen... then back at the world... and so on, many scores, or even hundreds, of times per day. Isn't that expecting a bit too much of our perceptual and cognitive abilities? What “works” in one world (uninhibited violence without consequences) ought to work in the other as well, shouldn't it? Does anyone ever point out, to young people, the flaw in that thinking?

I recall a phenomenon that was pointed out by military psychologists back during the Vietnam era. It was sometimes referred to as the “cartoonization” of not only the enemy but also of non-combatants. And this was way before the advent of “realistic” video games or the Internet; all we had was TV and Pong, basically. And yet even back then, there was a tendency for young men in uniform armed with powerful weapons to see others (pretty much anyone not in an American uniform) as non-human... as no more than scuttling little creatures who could be picked off at will in a sort of grotesque form of target practice. While not claiming that this was a typical attitude, or even terribly common, we cannot ignore events like My Lai as examples. (And as someone said in the recent PBS series on Vietnam, there were “hundreds” of My Lais.) 

Now of course, the notion of the enemy as “the other” is pretty much universal in warfare, and has been reinforced by military and civilian leaders from time immemorial. But along with that there has been a tradition – not always honored but persistent – that civilians, i.e. non-combatants, were off limits. You don't have to hand out Hershey bars, just don't kill 'em. So when did this basic, and I would say honorable, premise, start to erode? We can point to the concept of total war, which is, again, not all that new – but which reached a kind of peak in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was one point at which “Kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out” could have been declared the unofficial motto of our foreign policy. And of course there are always justifications – and they may even have some validity. But justifications don't change facts. And they don't change the demoralizing effects of war – not just on the direct participants but on the civilians back home. (We always fancy ourselves as being so smart by confining our wars to overseas actions, ignoring the long-term impact on veterans and on our society in general, not to mention the corrosive effects on politics and economics.) 

But what does this have to do with school shooters? Well, let's not assume that they're stupid; in fact, many of them appear to be quite intelligent – mad scientists minus the science, if you will. And believe it or not, they might actually have done some reading and know a bit about history – with or without help from their official government teachers. So in a mush-brained kind of way, don't they have a right to reason that if something is OK for the government to do, then maybe it's OK for them to do as well? Think about the Waco massacre, and other causes that agitate the so-called “far right” -- who has more moral sense, the people who perpetrate these things or the people who protest? 

But wait! There's more! What about abortion? It's one thing to look upon “collateral damages” which is another way of describing the deaths of thousands of civilians (perhaps not all innocent, but certainly innocent until proven guilty) in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria – but death in the womb (or barely outside of it) in neat, orderly, sterile hospitals? And consider that, as has been pointed out, everyone born in the U.S. since Roe vs. Wade is a survivor of a massacre which is still going on. Now, once again, don't assume that these young people are stupid; on some level they realize this. They know it, and while they ought to be grateful to their parents for not turning them over to the mercies of abortionists, they also have to feel that “There, but for the grace of God...” Or if of a non-religious bent, they were just plain lucky. So they survey the landscape and see that everyone else of their age – or approximately so – is also a survivor. Are those others more or less deserving? Maybe some of them should have been aborted. Maybe I can step in and fix things where the abortion industry failed. 

Fantastic thinking? Delusion? Grandiosity? Certainly. All too common? Certainly. But we have paved the way through a thousand decisions, many of which seemed minor or inconsequential at the time – or not even like decisions, just casual choices. “Practical” or “sensible” choices. But to quote a great Greek playwright, “The boys throw stones at the frogs in play, but the frogs die in earnest.” Our “stones” are what is called social experimentation, and the “frogs” who die psychologically are youth, i.e. the victims of said social experimentation. We are so shocked when a young person “acts out” in a violent way, when in some sense he is merely doing the next thing in a perfectly logical chain of reasoning (or anti-reasoning). Our social, supposedly benign, sub-clinical pathology has become his malevolent clinical pathology, with dire consequences. So yes, “the enemy is us”, but until we realize and admit that, and do what is required to remedy the situation, we can't expect the Era of School Shootings to come to an end, no matter how many march and protest and petition those in charge.

The Birth of "Terror"

Have you ever had the experience of coming up with a new (to you) idea, or concept, or theory, and then you pick up a book and it turns out someone had it figured out decades, centuries, or even millennia earlier? (This alone is a good reason to delve into good literature, both “fiction” and nonfiction.) In this case, the insight is from R. D. Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist who was very popular with the hippies back in the 60s. The book in question (one of his many) is “The Politics of Experience”, and the chapter of interest is entitled “Us and Them”. Here is what he has to say about “terror”: 

        “If there is no external danger, then danger and terror have to be invented and maintained.”

Now, he is talking primarily about (negative) family dynamics here – but the concept can easily be extended to group, tribe, state, nation. What he calls the “nexal family” is “then the 'entity' which has to be preserved.... which one lives and dies for, and which in turn offers life for loyalty and death for desertion. Any defection from the nexus (betrayal, treason, heresy, etc.) is punishable...”

What it all boils down to is the age-old Us and Them dichotomy, which serves as the ideational source of most, if not all, wars. Conflict, on any level (right down to a fistfight with your neighbor), is always predicated on the idea of an “Us” (or a “Me”) versus a “Them” (or a “You”). And it always involves a judgment of some sort, i.e. that I or We are somehow superior, and You or They are somehow inferior – based on pretty much anything (traditionally race, religion, ethnicity, tribe, social class, etc.). Has any warrior, in all of history, when fighting hand-to-hand with an enemy, ever seen that other person as having equal moral standing to themselves – equal validity, equal “human-ness”? I doubt it. There is always a judgment, and it may be nothing more than “Too bad, they chose the wrong side, or the wrong cause, or whatever, but in any case they have to go.” There are plenty of examples in history of giving respect to fallen enemies, much as one might give respect to a fallen opponent in an athletic contest – except for that factor of judgment, which is always present.

To the notion that wars are often, if not always, fought for “practical” reasons like land, resources, living space, etc. I offer that most people who start wars already have enough of all these, and then some. (It's this, in fact, that provides them the resources to go to war at all.) Are you telling me that the Mongols and the Huns didn't already have enough land? Please. It was a zeal for conquest that drove them; acquiring new goods was just a fringe benefit – a by-product of their victories. Germany in the 1930s could have left well enough alone, and become a prosperous nation all on their own, but no, they had to have “Lebensraum”, because, after all, the Master Race needed unlimited space to grow and prosper, and eventually to dominate the world. And take our own country, with its concept of Manifest Destiny, that required us to conquer and displace all the previous inhabitants. (The sparsely-populated states on the Eastern Seaboard were still way too crowded to suit the rugged individuals and pioneers, so they headed west.) Take Israel vis-a-vis Palestine too -- “a land without a people”? Please. Once any nation, or people, decide that they “need” more than they have, you have the foundation for war, just as – to stretch a point – individuals who “need” more than they have wind up enslaved to whomever they borrowed money from – banks, credit card companies, loan sharks, retail establishments, etc. And have we not become slaves to war? Are we not serving our creditors night and day as a result of our zeal for war, and empire? (Note that those creditors do not care about empire themselves, since they already have one – the empire of debt.)  It's notorious that one of the things that bankrupts a nation most readily is its over-investment in war.  So what do we say, then, about a nation that has invested -- politically, economically, and psychologically -- in perpetual war?  Is that not a virtual guarantee of early demise?  

Now, you might say, this is just the natural course of things – not only is it ubiquitous throughout human history, but in a sense it is human history. What is “history”, after all, but a narrative about conquerers and the conquered? OK, fair enough. But let me introduce something that is more closely germane to our time.

In all “traditional” wars – with which we are all too familiar – there is, as there must be, an Other – a Them. And they are not only “the enemy” -- a very real one at times – but are always judged as being inferior in some way – respected to some degree (for skill as warriors, for example) but ultimately found wanting. The most obvious symptom of this is in the process of naming: They are not merely the enemy, or opponents, or the other side, but they also have to be Japs, Gooks, Slopes, Russkies, Krauts, etc. And in our time (drum roll, please) “Terrorists”. They have to be rendered less than human in our minds – to be “thinged”. And this is pretty much a universal phenomenon, since who, after all, is willing to simply kill – in vast numbers at times – people they consider their equals? Human nature forbids it – and this is actually, in a strange way, a point in favor of human nature. Our prisons are bursting at the seams with murderers and those convicted of major violent crimes; how many of them looked at their victims and said (or thought), “Well, here's someone just like me, a fellow human being – a fellow traveler – a bunkmate on a very large ship in a vast ocean – but they have to die.” Talk with these convicts – you'll find that, on some level, they were convinced (at least at the time) that whoever is was not only had to die, but deserved it in some way. And when you get to the hard-core psychopaths, everyone deserves to die. (So many victims, so little time.) And this doesn't have to be a subtle or nuanced point of view; the inferiority of the victim may have been something as simple as this: They had no gun, and the murderer had one. But simple or not, there was always a reason... a justification. Later on, they may have second thoughts – and I guess this is part of human nature too. Self doubt – perhaps my “reality” was not, is not, the only valid one. But by then it's too late.

That's on the individual level. But the individual level gets rolled up, more often than not, to the group level, the tribal... ethnic... national... etc.  And in the process it becomes more extreme.  Nations will do things that individuals will never do.  Thus we find ourselves cursing whole nations... whole peoples. Not just the Japs and Krauts, but the “heathens”, the “thievin' Injuns”, the “nigras” (note the slightly less crude wording there, courtesy of upper-crust folks in the Old South), the “wetbacks”, and so on.

But now we're on to something at least somewhat new – although our Cold War battles with the “commies” were certainly along similar lines. Communism was (and continues to be) a concept – an idea – an ideal... with implications for a system of government and for foreign policy. But it was an abstraction before it was a reality, i.e it existed in the minds of its originators long before it was implemented. But it at least had the conceptual advantage of having a political/economic/social theory behind it – wrong as that theory turned out to be. But now we are engaged in battle with “terrorists”, but not only that – we are fighting a War on Terror (officially dubbed as such by the Regime). But what is “terror”? It's a feeling -- an emotion. So are we waging war on a feeling, an emotion? Apparently so. Actual “terrorists” are, after all, people – solid, flesh-and-blood... and thus way too tangible, not sufficiently abstract. Some questions might arise as to the wisdom and validity of fighting “terrorists” at all times and in all places – not the least of which are: What is a “terrorist” anyway? (Once in a while the media slip up and refer to them as “fighters” or “insurgents” or “rebels”, which is at least somewhat objective.) Do we know them by their race, ethnicity, or religious beliefs? But we have plenty of “allies” of the same race, ethnicity, and religion, so that can't be it. And what are their motives? Are they all fighting for the exact same thing? But these questions imply nuance, and that's way too much to ask of our leadership and those who aspire thereto. So, bottom line, we can fight “terrorists”, but it's much better to be fighting “terrorism”, and best of all to be fighting “terror”. (It wouldn't have any less meaning if we just referred to as “It”, or “The Thing”. Yes, we're going to war to fight “It” -- flags flying, bands playing, handkerchiefs waving, etc.)

But if we want to talk a bit more objectively, about strategy and tactics, what distinguishes “terrorism” is (apparently random) attacks on civilians, for whatever reason. And this did not begin on 9/11 or in Afghanistan or Iraq, or with militant Islam. We've had, recently, the Caucasus, and previously Ireland, Algeria, and – yes – Israel itself, or Palestine in the 1940s. And back about 100 years ago we had the anarchists; picture some wild-eyed guy with a black beard and a long coat tossing a bomb with a lit fuse through an embassy gate. (At least he was somewhat focused; his targets were, by and large, appropriate.)

And again, there is always an Us vs. Them issue, and the terrorists, or whatever one might call them, are as guilty of this as anyone else. What they are not guilty of is defending their homeland against an invader, any more than the resistance fighters and partisans during World War II. This is considered respectable – nay, heroic – activity when they're on our side; when they aren't, they're called “terrorists”. I would venture to say that anyone who attacks anyone in uniform is, technically, not a terrorist but simply a solider (with or without a uniform). Did we considered the Viet Cong “terrorists” when they were fighting our troops? Not that I'm aware; they were simply an opposing force, even though I have yet to hear of one wearing any sort of uniform.

So in this sense, fighting in a “military” context, as defined by “rules of war”, is respectable – honorable, even. But picking on poor, helpless civilians – that's another matter, right? And no one can accuse us of such a dirty business. Well, unless you want to bring up Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki... but , to quote Hillary Clinton, what difference, at this point, does it make?

I'm not deluded enough to say that “it's OK, as long as we're the ones who do it”. I'd rather say that it's wrong no matter who does it. But war is war, after all. (And let's not bring up Atlanta, while we're at it.) It's just that the minute we start mouthing words about “terror” and “terrorism” we should, first, look to ourselves.

But that's not yet the whole story. I've discussed, in previous posts, the idea that the War on Terror is the ultimate Golden Goose in that, since it's a war on nothing and everything, and can never be said to be “won”, it's a dream come true for ambitious politicians and armaments makers. And again, we get into the business of naming. If we're honest, we will say we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan for our own reasons, and anyone who got in the way, well... it's their own fault they're dead. Brutal, crude, arbitrary – but accurate. We could even say that no, we don't hate them... we don't even mildly dislike them. But they got in the way. (And unlike Mr. T, we don't pity the fools that get in our way.) But how much support, especially of the emotional and political (assuming there's a difference) kind, would you get for something like that? Much better to create this thing – this entity – called “terror”, and call those who perpetuate it “terrorists”. Ah, that's the ticket – an emotional hook, a threat so ambiguous that Americans can be made to fully believe that there are armies of “terrorists” right across the Rio Grande, just itching to swoop down on Texas. We've become like hippies on a bad LSD trip who see snakes coming out of the wallpaper – except that the snakes are terrorists and the wallpaper is our paper-thin “borders”.

So you see, now we're back to Laing. “Terror” is a feeling – an emotion – that is occasionally based on reality, but in our time serves as a tool with which the leadership subjugates the citizenry. “Terrorism” is no longer a specific set of strategies and tactics, but an entity in its own right – infinitely threatening, omnipresent, and impossible to resist unless we fly to the arms of the government.

      “If there is no external danger, then danger and terror have to be invented and maintained.”

Was the current War on Terror based on a real external danger? Or was it ginned up in the minds of politicians and armaments makers, with the enthusiastic support of the military, the bankers, the Evangelicals, and the Israel lobby? The answer to this depends to a great degree on what you think about 9/11 – and I've dealt with that issue extensively in prior posts. But even if 9/11 was what the Regime says it was, it's not at all clear that the response had, inevitably, to be invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with puppet governments and military occupations that continue to this day. The events of 9/11 were dramatic enough to, basically, soften everyone's brain to the point where they accepted anything, even the wildest claims, that the Regime had to say about clear and present danger, “existential threats”, threats to “the American way of life” and “our freedoms”, etc. etc. Not only was there danger, but there was “terror” in that we never knew what disasters would befall us next – not when or where – and from sources unknown. So even if the events of 9/11 were “real” to the extent that certain things did, in fact, occur (I don't think it was all done with mirrors) – the resulting narrative and overwhelming propaganda campaign was what got us into Iraq and Afghanistan, and got the Patriot Act passed, and the TSA established. 9/11 didn't force any of that; we forced it on ourselves.

So once the danger and terror are invented – once they've implanted themselves deeply in our consciousness – how are they maintained? Well, think about booster shots. You get the initial vaccination, which is a big deal, physiologically (and may cause permanent damage, to some) – and over time the effectiveness starts to wane, so you get a booster shot, which is not as big a deal – not as traumatic – but which serves to refresh the body's memory as to what it's supposed to do about this particular disease agent. So what do we have in our time but the occasional, scattered “terroristic” act, or plot, or threat... typically by “lone nuts” (or a handful of them), but you never know! They might be working for ISIS! Or, they might be ISIS sympathizers. They might have tuned their mental radio receivers to the 24/7 ISIS frequency -- “all terror, all the time”.

And then there's, once again, the language factor – the “narrative”. And what is propaganda without language? So anyone, anywhere in the world, who points a gun at our troops, or at American citizens, or at troops or citizens of our allies, is a “terrorist”. By definition! Never mind the motives. Never mind if all they were doing was protecting their olive orchard. When someone shoots someone anywhere in the U.S., the first thing that comes to mind is: Was this an act of terrorism? That ticket has to be punched first, before anything else can be done. When someone threatens to punch their neighbor in the nose, what is that? A simple, crude argument? No! It's a “terroristic threat”. So the process I've been discussing is not limited to declaring war between Us and Them – it's now to the point where each of us is a potential Them, which means that we are each making war, or threatening to make war, or have the potential to make war, on the others. Can anything be more ideal as a substrate for totalitarianism? And as you may recall from reading about communist regimes, it was, in fact, a war of all against all at all times – suspicion and paranoia were ubiquitous, and that is the very thing that feeds the Regime. Make every citizen suspicious of every other, and you have the perfect formula for everyone running back to the mother hen (AKA the Regime) to find shelter under its wings.

The point is that when it's Us vs. Them, it eventually becomes Us vs. Us. We become greater enemies to each other than any external threat. It's this point which we are rapidly approaching, as witness the scandals and crimes of the IRS, CIA, NSA, DEA, and so on. It won't be long before we fear each other more than we fear ISIS; in some respects this is already the case.

See, we don't need any more 9/11's, because “mission accomplished”. The American public is terrorized – in the deepest sense, and permanently. All that's needed is the occasional reminder that we're never safe, and that the Regime is our only hope. In this, “terror” in our time serves the same purpose as the Depression during the New Deal – it sustains the Regime, and that is why it will be perpetuated as long as possible, until something even more terrible comes along to take its place.

The Real Bully Pulpit

Bullying is in the news -- especially as it has, allegedly, resulted in a rash of teen suicides… all connected, of course, with the arguably borderline-psychotic atmosphere of the public schools. When you have a system that is crushed by political correctness and which preaches “consideration for others” -- but where the teachers are deathly afraid of the students (and the parents are deathly afraid of the school administrators) -- bad things are bound to happen. It’s like any other highly-stressed, and stressful, environment -- it brings out the worst in all parties. And imagine the distress of those targets of bullying who have gay or lesbian tendencies -- here the teachers, and the media, and the entertainment industry, have been telling them for years that there is nothing wrong with their “tendency”… that it is, indeed, something to be “celebrated” (along with all other forms of “diversity” -- except, of course, being a white male heterosexual -- that’s a form of diversity that we can’t tolerate!). So after being told all this, and reassured over and over again that “you’re fine just the way you are”… suddenly this posse of dominant, alpha-type heterosexuals -- your peers! -- goes out of its way to assure you that, in fact, there are all sorts of things wrong with the way you are, and that you deserve only contempt.

And what sort of message does it convey when this sort of thing is, to all appearances and despite claims to the contrary, tolerated by the system? They preach one thing but have an attitude of benign neglect when people start behaving in a primitive, atavistic way in the hallways and stairwells of our hallowed public schools.

So what does it mean? What it means is something primitive and atavistic indeed -- which is that the “bullies” are, in fact, the dominant social group in the school/neighborhood/town… and that everyone, from the school board down to the janitor’s assistant, is scared to death of them. Because, even if they are junior sociopaths, they nonetheless have “rights”… and you can be certain that they have parents who will not hesitate to invade the principal’s office if they detect the slightest threat to the self-esteem of their little gems. For this is also a meme, inculcated by the public schools -- that everyone deserves “esteem” -- that all have won and all deserve a prize. But now they are experiencing blowback from that impossible position.

But here’s another way of looking at it. The facile assumption is that these bullies are outliers -- antisocial, hostile, undesirable… and if they would only mend their ways, life would be so much better. But I say, au contraire! They only _seem_ to be outliers; in fact, they are the designated enforcers of the social norms of the larger group -- the school, neighborhood, town, whatever. And by “social norms” I don’t mean the ones that we pretend to have -- the ones that are reinforced (supposedly) and given lip service non-stop by the schools, the media, politicians, etc. I’m talking about the _real_ social norms -- those primitive motives by which the group has always protected itself against “the other”, the stranger, the alien. Every subgroup, group, or society has these real (vs. claimed) norms, and every group has its enforcers -- and they are never well-liked by the community, but they are deemed necessary and hence tolerated, if not actually encouraged. When I was a kid it was the village gossips - say what you want, they kept everyone else on their best behavior (in public and often in private as well). One of my mother’s (bless her soul) most oft-repeated expressions was “They say...” And there was always a “they” -- which meant everyone else in town… or at least the polite people… others of our kind, in other words. And believe me, the people who worried about “they” could become, in a heartbeat, one of “they” if the situation warranted it. Or vice versa. So yes, the community was self-policing in that respect.

The thing is, the unstoppable migration from small towns and rural areas to the cities -- and the corresponding migration from cities to suburbs -- has made severe inroads in the mission and reach of the gossip. They still exist, believe me -- especially in the suburbs (“desperate housewives” country) -- but they have been significantly de-fanged and de-clawed by the great number of social options (which is to say, competition among various sources of social approval). Even in the ’burbs, if you offend one group, you can probably move on to another group -- whereas in a small town, there really is only one group… at least only one to which any given individual has a credible claim to membership.

So who gets to step in an fill the gap? Who takes on the burden of enforcing social standards that was formerly the property of little old ladies with a bun on their head peeping out from behind lace curtains? Why, public school bullies, and none other! It is, in fact, a strange evolution and an anachronism of sorts, but it is occurring, and has occurred, in virtually every corner of the nation -- including, I have to assume, the most isolated and out-of-the-way.

And this, I hope, helps explain why nothing is done -- I mean nothing of consequence (as opposed to hand-wringing and mouthing words and expressing “concern” and “regret”). It’s not that nothing _could_ be done; it’s just that the dirty little secret of the “society” that is represented, in its rawest form, in the public schools is that we need these people. We may not like them -- because they are, after all, a threat and represent a tyrannical ruling class. But we need them, because without them who is to enforce the real standards?