… His aliases tell his history: Dumbbell, Good-for-nothing,
Jewboy, Fieldinski, Skinny, Fierce Face, Greaseball, Sissy.
Warning: This man is not dangerous, answers to any name,
Responds to love, don’t call him or he will come.
—from “Unwanted” in Counting Myself Lucky by Edward Field (1992)
That’s the prize-winning poet Edward Field, a gay Jewish man who flew 25 missions over Europe during World War II, and went to school on the GI Bill — and who was a delightful writer-in-residence at Eckerd College — remembering the bullies from his youth in New York City. He’s still there, outlasting them all.
You know a topic has hit a national nerve when it lands in the funny pages, not to mention the dictionary (“cyberbullying”). Recently at least five wildly varied newspaper comics picked up the theme of bullying: Blondie, Lio, Luann, and Hagar the Horrible featured it in general ways (school, workplace, family), while Doonesbury ran a series following that forgetful gay-basher, young Mitt Romney. A movie documentary, Bully, is doing well in the box office.
Bullying’s not new, of course. In the 1930s my father bought boxing gloves for his bookish, diminutive and already-bespectacled son, so I could defend myself against the Big Bad Bullies of Flatbush. I mainly remember flailing at him like a pint-sized octopus — without my glasses everything looked underwater. Fortunately, I was “adopted” by our neighborhood nasties, the Kelly brothers, and never had to test my pugilistic skills. These semi-literate thuglets protected me from other predators in exchange for my reading comic books to them in between games of stoop-ball (their favorite was “Sheena Queen of the Jungle”).
Our current interest in bullying may stem from a growing realization that we Americans (sometimes considered bullies by smaller countries like Cuba, Granada, Guatemala, Iraq, Vietnam, et al.) are ourselves being bullied, a feeling kicked off by the Wall Street Occupiers, forcing us to look across the great 1%-99% divide. Someone’s kicking sand in our face.
Bullies don’t pick on class presidents or team captains. They go for the ones who look “different,” in various ways. It’s also a truism that economic distress often leads to bigotry and bullying, a search for scapegoats, be they witches (as in the Inquisition), anarchists (Sacco and Vanzetti), gypsies, Jews, Japanese-Americans, Christians (in Iraq), Armenians, blacks, gays, ad almost infinitum. Without saying anything about individual Republicans, here are specific actions their overwhelmingly white male representatives are doing that sound like bullying; this includes Paul Ryan’s “budget,” which takes dead aim on the poor.
They steadfastly work against Roe v. Wade, trying to make abortion — even in cases of rape and illness — more difficult and embarrassing for women. They’re trying to cut or eliminate both Planned Parenthood and family planning programs, particularly hurting poor women; and they’re steadily chipping away at Obama’s equal pay bill, recently blocking both the Paycheck Fairness act, and the renewal of the Violence Against Women act.
They’ve resisted gay rights from the Stonewall riots in 1969 to today — all of the Republican presidential candidates pandered to their base by promising to overturn same-sex marriage laws. They fought the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s with the same fervor. (Of course, in the ’60s many of the racists were Democrats — who switched to the Republican Party to protest the bill.)
While gutting programs like food stamps and minimum wage designed to help those 46 million Americans in poverty, they’re going to try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, although its ideas had been supported by President Nixon, not to mention Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.
When people feel bad about their own lives, they pick on those weaker than themselves. We’re better than that.
… Only later discovering this land is two lands
One triumphant bully one hopeful America
Sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart
Somehow or other still carried away by America
—from “America” by Alicia Ostriker (2012)
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2012.