Why Is Everybody Always Pickin’ On Me? (Charlie Brown, via The Coasters)
Woot ho! It has come to our attention that there are bullies afoot in the land! We know this from the reams of newspaper and hours of television coverage devoted to the problem. They’re everywhere, these bullies. Where did they come from, where did they go, where did they come from, Cotton-eyed Joe? Well, actually, they’ve been around for centuries and they never left. We just pay more attention to them these days because we have turned into The Wuss Society.
We had bullies in the old days too, you know. I remember once in the third grade Thomas Rys went marching up to Sister Mary Albert and told her he had been accosted by such a person. Now, Sister Mary Albert was a crusty old bird, not given to a wealth of sympathy even if your house burned down, taking out a quartet of kitties in the process.
“Well, Thomas,” she replied, characteristically, “we don’t like squealers much around here.”
The crestfallen Rys skulked off in ignominy but I noticed later in the day Sister Mary Albert tugging the bully by the ear all the way across the schoolyard to the fire escape, where she abruptly sat him down and gave him the Pointy Nun Finger, not a fate to be wished for under any circumstances. His ear appeared to be large and pulsing.
Later, in high school, Victor Nastasia, a big Greek-Italian kid who was the starting fullback on the freshman football team and occasionally intimidated other kids into doing his homework for him, also made a fatal bully’s mistake. He challenged a geometry teacher smaller than himself in front of the entire class, looking around for admirers, a nasty smile on his face. Very. Bad. Idea. We were taught in high school by Marist Brothers, most of them young and fairly fit. This one alternated between slapping Nastasia on one side of his face and backhanding him on the other all the way back to the lockers, where the bully collapsed in tears. Such an experience is guaranteed to take a little wind out of one’s sails and Victor seemed to become a nicer guy in the aftermath.
One day, out by the basketball courts, my freshman homeroom teacher, Brother Robert Eugene, a big lug with a testy disposition, noticed a couple of miscreants hassling tiny Brother Valerian, who spoke with a funny Eastern European accent. He picked the first one up and tossed him into a hurricane fence ten feet away. The fence came loose from its moorings and the bully fell another twelve feet onto a lower plateau. The second guy ran like hell. In our day, the Catholic schools had their own Bully Removal Systems. Worked nicely.
During non-school hours, you were on your own. Since we lived in a city where many of the kids’ fathers or grandfathers were immigrants, our elders also had a solution to the bullying problem. “Punch him in the face!” was the solution. No kid ever got in trouble with his father for fighting back. Even if you lost the fight, the bully was likely to move on to easier prey next time. Some kids had the advantage of an even better solution: introduce the bully to your mean older brother. Unlike the present, bullying in those days was pretty much a non-issue.
Of course, we didn’t have many kids back then who suddenly decided to dress up in all-black wardrobes (including overcoats in 90-degree temperatures), spike their hair and apply black fingernail polish and lipstick. And we’re talking about the males here. Then go sit off by the cafeteria and see if anybody notices. In the old days, we had a phrase for this sort of behavior. The phrase was “asking for an ass-kicking.” We would like to point out at this time that we are firmly of the belief that everybody should be left alone to perform whatever foolishness they like as long as they leave us out of it. Nonetheless, you will not find us visiting any African-American family reunions wearing our Klan robes or showing up at a Gun Show in a Charlton Heston Sucks! t-shirt. Asking for an ass-kicking, seems to us.
Anyway, these days some of the victims of this high-school bullying become seriously grumpy about the matter and return later with a boatload of automatic weapons and enough ammunition to wipe out Canarsie. Poor sports, I’d call them. Whatever happened to any eye for an eye? This sort of retaliation is like an eye for an eye bank. And then you, the avenger, are dead. What good did that do you? Back when we were hippies and beatniks, people laughed at us, too. We just rolled a joint and kept on truckin’. Our plan is better.
It’s A Wuss World, After All (Walt Disney)
Okay, time to cue up the sad music for today’s Politically Incorrect section. Bill has a special knack for Politically Incorrect. And he’s not even trying. It just comes to him naturally.
Now, everybody knows the sad and woeful tale of poor old Rebecca Ann Sedwick, a twelve-year-old sweetiepie from nearby Polk County. Seems that in this wonderful computer era, bullying has moved onward and upward and can now be actually conducted by on-line stinkers; ergo, Cyberbullies. One of them—with a couple of allies—decided to write mean things about Rebecca and post them all over the place. “Well,” decided Rebecca, fragile beyond description, “I guess my only option now is to go and kill myself.” Hold on a second there, Rebecca. What about the option of oh, say, not reading this drivel? There’s a thought. Or laughing it off as deviltry constructed by a nasty little troll with a promising future in the Tar Pits Of Hell. You could try that. Killing oneself is so….so….final, after all. Tons of people are persecuted in high-school. It’s almost a rite of passage. Janis Joplin told me one day that she was mercilessly pounded for her “beatnik” ways in school, the fact that her pretty sister Laura was practically Miss Port Arthur making the experience that much worse. In the depths of the morass, it is always satisfying to consider one’s eventual revenge. A few years later, Janis returned to town for a class reunion, now a superstar of which her former tormentors were in awe. Think that wasn’t fun? See? There are alternatives.
Unfortunately, however, none of them occurred to the delicate Rebecca, who began calling herself “that dead girl” and taking pictures of herself lying on the railroad tracks. Does anyone other than me think this girl was not too tightly wound and faced a difficult future, bullying notwithstanding? I mean, get a grip, Becky! Oh well, some black kids shoot one another over the tiniest of insults, some white kids shoot up P.S. 132 and Rebecca….well, Rebecca climbs to the top of a building and decides to test whether all those stories about gravity were true. Turns out they were. No more Rebecca.
I don’t know about you, but when we were growing up we had people to see, places to go. Nobody was killing themselves. It was baseball season or football season or the beach facilities would be open in a couple of months. We were out in the streets with our cohorts or over at the Boys Club or the ‘Y’, learning to swim or box. Kill yourself? Are you kidding? The new corn was up in New Hampshire in another two weeks. The amusement park at Canobie Lake was rockin’. We just got our driver’s license and we could drive around, chasing after girls. Who kills themselves, anyway? You gotta be crazy.
Maybe that’s what these kids today need, counselors like us. School administrators could set us up in little offices, where we would be available for conversation several hours a day. When these precious little flowers came in and started talking about suicide, we would have the perfect solution. “Turn around,” we would tell them to their quizzical little faces. And when they did, we would begin kicking them in the ass with reckless abandon. Kicking them til they hollered.
The Bully Of The Bayou or
There’s No CRYING In Football! Oh. That Was BASEBALL, You Say?
Because there is, obviously, plenty of crying in football, most of it coming from tiny little (300-plus lbs.) Jonathan Martin, an offensive tackle for the Miami Dolphins. Jonathan was emotionally distressed by mean things his offensive line neighbor, Richie Incognito, had been saying to and about him. Silly things like threatening to kill his family and poop on his head. Neutral observers aver that Jonathan said similar things back to Richie, who didn’t seem to mind. If you have ever been in a locker room, and I have, people in there say lots of stupid things. Most of the time, nobody takes it seriously, no matter how hateful it sounds to an outside observer. It’s just dumb locker room talk.
Not to make a case for Richie Incognito, a recognized scallywag on the field and most other places, for that matter. Richie is the kind of guy who will twist your nose (and other things) after a pileup. The kind of guy who will intentionally bump into you and spill your drink at a party. A puppykicker, if you will, who will never find himself on the A-list of invitees at Throckmorton’s Fine Arts Gallery. An actual dyed-in-the-wool bully, to be sure. If Richie Incognito happened to say, get razed by a bus, nobody but his offensive line coach would really care much. But none of this validates Jonathan Martin’s subsequent behavior.
See, Jonathan decided he was so shattered it would be necessary to leave the team and check himself into a South Florida hospital til he could settle his frayed nerves. Incognito was promptly suspended from the team for “conduct detrimental,” leaving the struggling Dolphins short two offensive starters. In a later television interview, Richie came across as confused but honest in his description of events. Heck, said Richie, “I thought we were best friends.” Just about everybody else on the team agreed with Incognito. Jonathan Martin will likely never return to Miami but wherever he goes he will be received with aloofness and, probably, snickers. Maybe there is a place for Jonathan in the origami business or in lace-making. He seems ill-constructed—psychologically—for football.
Sue The Bastards!
This story sounds like it came from California but, nope, it happened right smack in the middle of football-crazy Texas, where people should know better. Seems the parents of a player for Western Hills High School, upset over their team’s 91-0 pounding by rival Aledo High, decided it would be a good idea to file a bullying lawsuit against the opposing coaches. That despite the fact the Aledo coach had cleared his bench, inserting every possible scrub-team athlete and had played the latter part of the game with a running clock to shorten the misery. What more can you do—ask your kids to fall down on every play? We have seen this sort of whining before at all levels. When Steve Spurrier was at Florida, beating opponents 54-6, he caught a lot of flak for “running up the score.” Spurrier said it wasn’t his job to cease and desist and it might be a good idea for the poor, persecuted opponent to “get better.” Things never reached the lawsuit level, however, and nobody ever mentioned bullying, for God’s sake. Now, unfortunately, the notion of bullying is ubiquitous, rising up everywhere, saturating the Earth. Are there bullies out there? Sure there are. Are some of them particularly vicious? Undoubtedly. But every affront is not bullying and mollycoddling the easily offended is not a satisfactory response. The high-school psychos who have gone off the tracks, purchased weapons and shot up the joint were, in most cases, train wrecks waiting to happen, not just the poor sad victims of those terrible bullies. Suck it up, folks, the world is not guaranteed to be a permanent garden spot, a vale of fountains flowing with laughter and good will. Or do I have to come over there and beat your asses?
Bull(y) Ensign
Well, he’s on the track and liking it, so what more can anyone ask of his yearling colt, 45 days from turning two? Bull Ensign, purchased at the OBS August Yearling Sale, learned his lessons well at Eisaman Equine over the past two months and was promoted to the training track around the first of November. For the next five months, he will gallop six days a week and, eventually, start his works for an expected trip to Gulfstream around the first of April. Maybe we’ll make that around the second of April, just to be safe. Anyway, he seems to be a smart enough fellow, maybe a smidge nervous at new experiences, but so are we all. He has learned to change leads, sort of, and has put on weight. Bull Ensign does not seem to be the sort of horse who will blast out of the gate and win a 4 1/2 furlong race by ten lengths, but we are hoping he’ll inherit a little speed from his sire, Graeme Hall, and be adequate at the shorter distances a two-year-old needs to navigate. His very successful half-brother, Imawildandcrazyguy, gives us confidence he’ll excel at the longer distances. Cosmic Flash, by the way, should be back on the track soon and ready to give it another shot. All is quiet on our racing front but we are hoping it’s the lull before the 2014 storm. We are ready for a big year. We are avidly hoping a big year is ready for us.
