-Caveat Lector-
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And Vindictiveness For All
The creeping lunacy creeps on, creepishly. It gives life a constancy comforting in an
uncertain world. For this we should
be grateful.
In the GreeleyTribune* of northern Colorado I see that Mitch Muller, a boy of
thirteen, has been expelled from school for
a year. Yep. Gone.
You might surmise that he committed some grave crime, that he assaulted a teacher
perhaps or was discovered to be
selling bulk-lot cocaine. No. He played with a small laser pointer-the sort that
projects a red dot onto maps during
lectures. It was, said the depressing drones who run the school, a "gun facsimile."
This is fascinating, like a rare and aggressive tumor. Let us think about it.
To begin, there is no substance to the charge. A laser pointer does not look like a
gun, no more so than a ball-point pen
or a lipstick tube. It isn't a weapon, doesn't look like a weapon, and is not
intimidating, being less dangerous than, say, a
fist.
Further, note that we are not confronted by a somewhat overzealous application of a
reasonable rule. If young Muller
had disrupted class and gotten tossed for a week, that would have excessive but not
absurd. (Excessive because
unnecessary: When you have a male principal who has not been administratively
neutered, he says, "Bobby, stop that.
Now." That's all he says.)
The child was suspended for a year, not for misbehavior but for possession of a legal
and harmless object that was
determined ex post facto to be gunlike. You see. Crimes carry harsh penalties, but you
cannot tell what things are
crimes until after you have committed them. That is, the authorities can find you
guilty at will, whenever they wish to
punish you.
This isn't discipline. It's sadism-sexless, boring, mean-spirited bureaucratic sadism.
The school's officials are seeking
to hurt the child because they enjoy doing it.
This Stalinism of the inadequate isn't a fluke. Across the country, time and again,
little boys (always boys) are
suspended for pointing chicken fingers and saying "bang," for drawing soldiers or the
Trade Centers in flames. The
schools are in the hands of sodden prisses, intellectual offal, who don't like male
children. Mediocrity loves revenge,
revenge on others for one's own mediocrity.
"Passive aggression," if memory serves, means an attempt to hurt others while
pretending that one's aim is pious.
Passive aggression, and its cousin misdirected aggression, dominate American culture.
Again and again, bullying is
packaged as high principle.
Consider the persecution of smokers-which is what it is. Yes, reasonable restrictions
on smoking are, well, reasonable.
To have a smoking section in a restaurant is an exercise in consideration, given that
having a stream of smoke in one's
eyes is unpleasant.
By contrast, putting signs in a subway saying that "second-hand smoke" shortens the
lives of children, which it doesn't,
with a picture of a piteous, helpless, wide-eyed child, is sheer hostility. So are
laws banning smoking within fifteen feet
of governmental buildings. The intention is not to provide for the common comfort, but
to make smokers as miserable
as possible.
The giveaway of a mean-spirited law is that it doesn't do what it pretends to do, yet
makes people unhappy. Consider
the agitations of the rabble opposed to guns. These vessels of rightness transparently
are not concerned to prevent
crime with firearms. You hear nothing from them favoring mandatory heavy sentences for
using a gun in a crime. Nor do
they criticize the drug dealer in the ghetto who kills his enemies. Their efforts are
aimed at law-abiding men who own
guns.
It is personal hostility disguised as concern with crime.
Similar spuriousness underlies the degrading searches at airports. The government's
policy isn't rational. If we armed
pilots, watched Moslems, and conducted searches, I might believe that security was the
motive. But we don't. Taking
nail clippers is ridiculous, like suspending a kid for having a laser pointer. The
searches seem designed to humiliate. I
have been searched by, among others, Israelis and Japanese. Neither had people
undressing in public, and neither was
staffed by hostile minorities getting even.
There is in all of this, in so very much of American life today, a vindictive meanness
enwrapped in moral pose-in hate-
crime laws, in careers deliberately destroyed over imaginary sexual harassment, people
destroyed over any trace of
racial incorrectness, fathers prevented from seeing their children by vengeful exes
and worse courts. Why?
I'll guess that the cause is a confluence of two social currents. First, the United
States is an angry, divided, unhappy
country, twisted by unresolved conflicts that it refuses to face. Racial tension is
ugly, powerful, and a forbidden topic.
Women are grindingly angry at men. Men, angry at the divorce laws, avoid marriage.
Universal divorce causes deep
strains that we don't talk about. Children raised as half-abandoned mall rats turn
into angry young adults.
The recently acquired American habit of distributing emoluments by race and sex rather
than merit rubs people raw. The
decay of the schools into centers of indoctrination angers many. The inability to
escape the filth that flows from
Hollyork grates. Perhaps more so does the inability in a mass, centrally run, not
particularly free society to influence
one's surroundings, raise one's children in one's values, or escape ever-deepening
regulation.
Repressed anger seeks outlets.
The United States is further, I think, a frightened country, or at least an insecure
one. People are afraid of terrorists and
crime but more importantly vaguely afraid of a life that isn't satisfactory, yet seems
uncontrollable by them. There is a
widespread sense that the country is sliding fast toward something undesirable yet
hidden in the murk Insecurity
breeds both meanness and a desire for control.
The feminization of society plays its part. On average, men prefer freedom to
security; women, security to freedom.
Women, having climbed into a male world in which they don't seem comfortable, seek
laws, laws, laws to control every
cause of angst. Men, hemmed in, feel trapped. Much of the tightening control seeks
security-helmet laws for kids on
bicycles, fear of smoke, seat-belt laws, ever-falling definitions of drunk driving,
warning labels stating the universally
known, the neurotic fear of laser pointers, the hostility of a female-run school
system to competition and rough games
beloved of boys.
The astonishing thing in the latter is that women, thought to be nurturing of
children, will destroy, will permit the
destruction, of boy children by an angry sisterhood in the schools. The instinct of
motherhood is perhaps overstated.
The answer? I suggest Cebu, Mexico, or Thailand.
*Greeley Tribune, Jan 8
©Fred Reed 2002
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