THE FIGHTING OF BULLIES HAS ALWAYS INTERESTED ME. FIRST because I knew so many of them, and second because at times they were uncharacteristic in their approach. Or I might clarify this by saying that society has different ways to enable and reward intimidation that in essence it needs in order to remain a society. The idea of bullies being thugs and punks has a rather one-dimensional application. Not many of us think of sophisticates or academics as bullies. Yet most of them have had some leaning toward it—if not they would never have fit in. They may or may not have been geeks in high school—but they had their eye on the prize, and so often the prize was to become safe and snug, and accepted.
It is really the need to fit in that creates the bully. That is why they can often be seen as a parcel standing around and gawking at one who is alone.
In the university common rooms where I sat in the early eighties, the idea of fitting in was essential for those seeking tenure, and so the idea of holding predetermined opinions that may disagree with the opinions of those chairs who had the authority to offer you a job became very brave or very foolhardy. So, often people suppressed what they thought or how they felt, in order to maintain a decorum that was wholly or partly false. Falsehood is recognized as a lack of virtue, so I believe universities become institutions without virtue, teaching generations of young adults. Compliant students catch on to this, and succumb in various degrees—sometimes giving up their own ideas and ideals and opting instead for the sophist’s mantra that all is open to question. Therefore one does not have to suffer unduly for holding any value if all is open to question, for the value you hold is open to question, as well. And therefore it can become very tedious to others if you proclaim it too much.
This is what I discovered to be the endemic sophistry at the university level. Yes, all is open to question—except university cant and bullying and sophistry. If you question that, you become the outsider in the great union of freethinking men and women who often quibble for years over a chair or position.
I found that there is also an unindicted co-conspirator in all of this, and it happens to be the learned public, who on the one hand deplores lack of thought and on the other hand lacks the judgment to really think for themselves. The idea of their children going to university and in the end exhibiting much of the same wise folly of their professors becomes something natural and desired for hordes of people. The notion that people cannot think if they do not have a university degree is a spellbindingly popular one among much of the middle class, who insist our children go there. Does this mean I think university is a waste of time? Not at all! University at its best is a place of wonder and enlightenment, and I have never excoriated that. I am simply addressing the act of bullying in this world as well as others. And life away from university has the exact same pitfalls and I am simply saying our youth must be aware of all of this.
Because on the other hand there are thousands and millions of us who grew up among people who for years thought that anything to do with learning was discredited by “real people,” who had no time to study or to learn. The real people supposedly were real because they did not know, learn or particularly want to; were surly if actual book learning was mentioned as an ideal. They became shills for a society that laughed a great deal at great knowledge.
I find that both of these camps, both the intellectual and the anti-intellectual, can have a common trait, and that is an unwitting eagerness for the adherents never to think independently. I have seen it and registered it many times over the course of my writing. I have seen how, by these same people, outsiders are often targeted. I know as well as you that the examples are too many to count. I was sent to a physiatrist because I wanted to write, and strapped by the principal, expelled from school. My parents, as good as they were, were frightened lest I do something outside the social norm, worried what others might say.
But that was minor. I finished writing my first novel and published it at twenty-three.
Others were far less fortunate. We can think of Ashley Smith as the more terrible case, a girl caught throwing crabapples, and never to leave prison. An example of the pure mendacity of schooled ignorance, petty jurists and rigid, uncompromising witlessness that comes in part—yes, from a doctrinaire education and a social milieu that craves acceptance. Oh yes, she was no angel. Yes, she had problems. Yes, she did not fit. Still, what kind of bullying by society at every level did she experience? What kind of neglect, by unthinking knowledgeable people did she suffer, and wasn’t it worse for her that her spirit was so strong? You see, a lesser spirit would have acquiesced, but no—a fiercely independent spirit, whoever they are, mentally wounded or not, will fight back. And fight back. Fight to the end. What an uneven contest she had. Do you remember them telling her to back up into the cell when she was tethered by rope, and hooded, and shackled?
Was she the scapegoat that should end our need for scapegoats? Unfortunately that will not happen.
I mention her briefly because I have been caught in the middle of all or part of this, most of my life. Arrogance matched with ignorance and intelligence without compassion are the two forms of individual despotism. For years the idea that I would bring up a book I had read to certain friends meant I was pretending to be superior, and it would hurt their feelings, for as mechanics or journeymen they had no time for books. So I then went to certain university settings, where those with less than a doctorate, or a rather pedestrian understanding of wine and cheese, and a facile devotion to leftist principles, a glib acceptance of diversity without ever themselves being diverse, were considered less than others.
However, both of these camps can at times exhibit the same tendencies, of schooled arrogance, assumption and ignorance. The boy who tried to light a book I was reading on fire as a joke is one example. The professor stodged full of books who would not stand up for a friend in his department for fear of standing alone is another. One was narrow-minded enough to think I believed education made the man, and he would have none of it. While the professor was a clear example that education does not make the man—the soul does.
So now I must talk about a time gone by.
Long ago, as my father walked back and forth to school, he was bullied, because his mother was considered rich and, too, because she was an outcast—which made the idea of his being persecuted a wholly natural one. And I say “natural” in this way: that it would be only the bravest and most independent who would not take up the cause against him. As we know, psychologists are always trying to determine why the world creates misery for those out of step, and yet no one wants us to be in step more than the psychologists themselves.
There is a picture of my father in school where he is the only one dressed in a tie and white shirt. His mother, who had been born and brought up in Injuntown, and had amassed wealth by operating a moving picture theatre in the twenties, was unaware of what animosity she promoted against her children by her sudden wealth. She positioned her son as a scapegoat and target—and her younger children, too; who he would have to turn about and protect. Worse, thinking of herself as having moved up a notch on the social carousel, she did not allow him friends he was naturally inclined to have. Nor was this completely her fault. Many of the families she targeted had initially targeted her, as being a single mother with a business, and therefore terribly disreputable. There is nothing so uncharitable as the pure. And the pure are both secular and religious, and I see no real distinction in the harm they can unleash.
Since they had belittled her, she would have nothing to do with them, but the price had to be exacted from her son. She was by far too tough for the mothers to ever tackle her, and indifferent to the children. Consequently her son was the chosen sacrifice. I wondered many times if she knew this.
For she might have understood this by the very movies she played at her theatre. So many of these movies—especially the ones the children of that day flocked to, in the thirties and forties, from the cowboys who took on the dandies as much as the First Nations, to the gangsters who had no use for the sophisticates, to the East Side Kids movies starring Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, like Angels with Dirty Faces—were movies that played to the notion of scapegoat; that is, the rich snots getting what they deserved, because the audience had become emotionally attached to the popular idea of defending their own.
In the audience’s mind their own were good guys, of course—those who did not read, and had no reason to learn, because they knew already the street, the neighbourhood. They could spot the stranger, the one out of step, a mile down the road.
In the East Side Kids movies that played when my father was a boy, it was diabolically precise—at least concerning his supposed social strata—a rich boy taken care of by a nanny, who for some reason wanders into the turf of the East Siders, who in league with the audience in the theatre would know this boy needed a good comeuppance.
And so the boy is given what he deserves. He is always a weak boy, a nanny’s boy, unaware of the ways of the world and the implications of being him. He is left without his money, with a black eye, sitting in his underwear. How hilarious this supposedly is.
Of course the entire set-up is a complete reversal of a heroic stance, but is always fraudulently positioned as such. (There is in these movies a sense of antisemitism here, as well, played out under the cloud of acceptable 1933 European Fascism.)
I take these movies as the template of that which followed for decades, in one way or the other, lying about who the outsider really was, and therefore conforming to a societal ideal that needs sameness and uniformity.
The East Side Kids films and dozens of other movies are actually forever in league with the movie-going public in blind obedience and self-congratulatory conformity to taking on the rich snots, who have gone or go to Ivy League schools. There is a built-in cultural dynamic at play—and it buffers the audience with a coat of armour, as surely as Solomon’s shields. It is the idea of being a “regular guy or gal” that cleanses the East Side gang from responsibility no matter how they themselves retaliate against the world, and bully and demean.
The regular guys—and yes, gals—show up everywhere in these movies, and today are seen in dozens of movies each year. Movies that continually tell you how you must act in order to be free. Oh, what I am saying is it plays out day to day, as well, on every school ground and in almost every classroom. Classifying who is justly a target, and who might target them.
My father was supposedly not poor—his mother certainly had been. But my father was poor. For he was left alone, many days and nights, and protected himself and his brother and sister as best he could. The idea that he had money made him a pariah that is a poverty bred if not born. As long as he lived, he remembered a teacher who was nice to him, kind to him, because almost no one else ever was. He was the solitary rich boy—and they his enemies were, for lack of a better example, the East Side Kids.
Still if you watch these movies closely, the poverty that these East Side Kids experience is never alone or lonely. That is, though they are set up as underdogs to the audience, who can sympathize over the injustice perpetrated against them, their experience of being underdog is blessed with the audience’s compassion, unlike that of the rich boy. It is understood that there can be no compassion for him.
He in fact is the real scapegoat. The audience as far as I can remember never catches on.
That is, those watching can laugh at his mortification, for they have long ago been taught to conform and, in a way, never to stand alone. To never be a rat. That is the one true secret of their inheritance. They can belong to the real society but only if they obey the tenets of that society. If one of them crossed the floor to offer his hand to the rich boy, it would confuse the movie patrons and cause a moral questioning no one wanted.
For it is the audience who in the end becomes the moral scolds.
“Ha ha ha—he got what he deserved.” The gloat is Fascistic, of course.
In the way of the street the rich boy is dupe and mark ready to be conned by the real people—that is, the real Americans.
In fact they are the ones shouting orders at each other, at times loud and boorish, all of which is considered liberated behaviour from the constraints of society.
Yes, I know I have watched a lot of movies from all ages. Nothing shows society less tolerant and more bigoted than this rehearsal of democratic value. I suppose one of the movies that elicits this, and exemplifies it as much as any, is the 1944 movie Laura, with Clifton Webb, whose character’s persona, the prissy intellectual murderer Waldo Lydecker, heightens our prevalent notion of the cerebral man as being powdered by effeminate and cowardly cunning.
The mob can cheer—and we all do—when he is finally done in and the femme, played by Gene Tierney, is safely in the arms of the rugged detective, played by Dana Andrews. This is American value at its highest mark.
But as Lord Byron expressed it: “I wish men to be free / As much from mobs as from kings.” He knew that both have an equal jurisdiction toward malice.
Of course I have found terrible and stringent intellectual malice at university, happy to create the same pestilence for the scapegoat.
The Waldo Lydeckers have their moments, too.
A scapegoat is a good person to torment. Scapegoat coming from the Jewish tradition of the selection of one animal to be slaughtered as tribute for the entire flock.
Most people in our society pick scapegoats. Like I say, my grandmother, scapegoat herself because of being a woman with a business back in the 1920s, should have understood these implications. But she either did not know, or did not believe, it was a serious matter. It was a serious matter to my father.
When he was a child, he was left in the care of nannies who tormented and abused him, for certain private reasons. Beat him and scolded him. One reason being that my grandmother, by then widowed, had married a Protestant and my father was in part English. Which is exactly what the scapegoat in the East Side Kids movies is often portrayed as. Nothing made my father less a part of the small-town values of the time, and the very gregarious values shown on her screen. Movies she travelled to Montreal to buy, in order to play to people who could be reinforced in their dislike of her and my father. A strange transference, you may say. But nonetheless one I myself became aware of before the age of eight.
I really do not think my father ever caught on.
Then when my grandmother decided to remarry, my father was a stark reminder to his Irish stepfather of whom my grandmother had married before. That is, the English pianist. My father was often beaten when his stepfather was drunk, and many times putting his two siblings behind him, my father would try to stave off a beating by holding up a knife. But since he was just a child, there was little hope of it.
“He tried to protect us but was just too little to help us,” my uncle, tears in his eyes, told me at my father’s funeral. “He never told you, but he was beaten like a dog from the time he was five.”
So now you can ask why Ashley Smith—determined to fight to the end—as a Canadian scapegoat is important to me.
Like her, my father had in many respects no one in the world to care for him, and none to care for his brother and sister unless he do so. I am not saying my grandmother did not love them. I am saying, simply speaking, she did not know how to show it. She was long before women thought it fashionable, independent in a way that made her unfashionable.
The tendency to demonstrate willingness to be the same has always been something most of my family fought against. That is the primary source of two things not mutually exclusive: independence and hardship. But my grandmother had no ability to juggle the family at the same time. Nannies were hired, and often the children were left alone with young girls as sure in their ignorance as in their vanity. There was a thrill to belong to those who hated wealth, but worked for a woman who had some; good Catholic girls who would rush to tattle.
So no matter how he aimed to please as a child, he would lose. And his torment was an outing of grievous nature that my grandmother did not see, and could not fathom. Or perhaps she was just too concerned with other matters.
She certainly had other matters to be concerned about. Other businessmen had tried to put her out of business by getting a bank manager to foreclose on her mortgage after her first husband died. That she was able to get a loan from a lumber baron, and repay it, by getting a monopoly on talking pictures, which put her competition out of business, made her a serious target.
They tried to blow her theatre up in 1930 when people were inside. It did not happen because her brother-in-law found the dynamite.
I suppose this is looked upon as fantastic. But not to my family. She became a target, and wealthy and reclusive and bitter. In some ways I can’t blame her. But looking closely, I want people to know that my grandmother and my father were looked upon as the victimizers, not the victims. With the lie that the incensed mob always uses to pursue the victimizer into the ground. It is a horrible thing to admit that our society still uses scapegoats to call out shame across the aisle against those they target. That pitchforks and torches are still carried in the night against some poor man or woman running away. Our churches might now be empty, gospels laughed at, but the zealots are still here, as many as before. The truth of the first stone that Christ gave us is as true now as it always was.
And when I look back at the portion already written, I understand that my father lived in a world of violence every bit as consuming as some of the boys who lived in dire poverty ever did. So he became what he was: a man alone.
It is all gone now, of course. That generation is dead. The deeds they did are done. The hopes they had are gone. The hilarity of the scapegoat in the end might not have been so hilarious after all. When he turned and fought back one day, he beat three of them silly. They stopped bothering him then. I don’t think it was in time.
Yet what I want to talk about, in some small way is the lie.
The lie of the movie hero as scapegoat.
How strange it is that the man alone in our society is often cherished—often after the fact—and that the idea of standing alone is something coveted by those who wish to prove themselves, to say that their lives have meant more because they have struggled that much more against the common physics of the herd.
That is the real secret of those East Side boys—of all those American movies, isn’t it—you know, the hero triumphs in the end. John Travolta dresses in leather because he is a rebel; a rebel with a pack of followers always behind him.
The hero and his audience secretly know the dynamite will be found and the crowd will be with him when he rushes the bunker unarmed.
He will not be beaten like a dog by his stepfather without recompense, or choke on the floor like little Ashley Smith being watched by guards who wanted to prove themselves immutable to one another.
You see, I have learned that very often in real life the audience is the one to put the dynamite there. And to continue to kick when someone is down in the university common room. To run away and not stand up for a friend. To be the guard smirking behind the glass.
You see, beaten and bound Ashley Smith was the real deal. My beaten and abused father was the real deal.
The real scapegoat—the real deal—is tarred with brush so thick no one would want it. That’s the real truth. He/she as scapegoat is alone in satin sheets or not. No one cheers my friend. And often the pain, no matter how one succeeds in life, does not go away.
In so many respects our culture, which relishes individuality, can’t stand to be alone, and needs someone who stands alone to hate. The mob crowds together and calls itself “brave.” And hate and division mark our society from top to bottom, everyone now is categorized, and make no mistake, all categorizing is used not to celebrate but to damn. Rural men are bigots, learned men are weak. Sometimes, oftentimes, neither is true. Ashley Smith was sad, and hurt and alone, and fought—fought to the end, and there was no help at all. Those who watched her die actually thought they were the ones who were free.
The posture of freedom is not free if it accuses what it does not take the time to understand. And you will always recognize what is posture in the end.
In the movies I refer to, the “supposed” loner always gives himself away by wearing the ducktail, is adorned with the right leather jacket, blessed by the right tokens of rebellion, storming into the office to tell the boss to go to hell, and smirking with his friends just before the final curtain falls.
Oh, but the real scapegoats are unheralded until such time as the mob disperses. They are arrested and tormented for throwing crabapples on a street, and by the mendacity of justice persecuted unto death. They are beaten and kicked like my father trying to protect his little brother, without a friend in the world to help.
No one wants to be alone, but some of us—well, some of us have to. We have no choice. Alone or die. Strange, I know. I do know. But here’s the secret: as long as we’ve been alive, those who stand alone have never been given the other option.
Christ wanted us to realize few are brave enough to cast the first stone—but anyone and everyone in a mob of “regular gals and guys” will freely cast the second.
2011–2015