‘Bully’ is just a Synonym for ‘Pussy’

A snarling orgy of Republiklan victimhood.

You know: that “victim” thing that Ann Coulter says is a tactic to use to get your way and all that. (Not to mention the projection factor of it all). Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge’s webenuensis, provides the textbook example in the Washington Times today.

But first, allow me a very organic framing metaphor. Part Two will follow tomorrow …

Part One … anatomy of a bully

I want to tell you a true story that Susan and Dave will remember, from long ago — before, even, the invention of video games, when your television set only got two or three channels, and “interacting” with it meant walking over and manually turning a knob that clicked to one of the other two channels and only rich people had remote controls, which allowed them to click to one of the two other channels that you could watch without getting out of your recliner chair….

It begins in the first year of the Nixon Administration, when I was exiled to a very small central Kansas farming community of perhaps 300 souls because my mother couldn’t keep her panties on, and, finally, to escape the hideous carnal temptations of that hotbed of sex, sin and immorality, Laramie, Wyoming, we relocated in the dead of night. (I wouldn’t see Laramie again until 1987).

So: I found myself not a “stud” Ninth Grader at Laramie Junior High School, but once again relegated to the  low man on the totem pole, a freshman at a high school of about sixty students, so small that they couldn’t field a standard eleven-man football team, but played a variant known as “eight man football.”

And, I was one of the three smallest boys in a Kansas “jock” school filled with that low-level sadism that anyone who’s ever suffered in the locker room of that atheletic [sic] cultus (we played in the state football championship game that year) will understand the macho swagger that comes with a winning team.

And so it was that I suffered through being pulverized (as more or less a tackling dummy) through that year and into basketball season in an endless series of locker room hazings, braggadocio, and GOTT what horrible smells.

We were lucky. We had a new school. Some of the locker rooms we had to dress in had been rotting since the late Cretaceous. One of them was in a town that Peter Bogdonovich filmed “Paper Moon” in the next year — a land that time forgot, lost in the dust bowl ’30s.

‘Paper Moon’ Kansas (BG)

Anyway, my friend Dave also moved there that year, and even though it was from only ten miles away, he was subtly treated as though he’d just landed from Mars.

Dave was the SECOND smallest kid in high school. So small that he could fit neatly, albeit with great discomfort, into his own locker. Not by his own decision, mind you.*

[* The smallest kid in the school was home-grown and astonishingly mean. Unlike the second and third smallest kids in school, nobody dared to pick on him. He vanishes from the narrative entirely at this point.]

I, from a galaxy far, far away, was mostly useful, as a little kid, as a butt for jokes. An ugly reality, but, trust me, after the hell of the prior two years (never knowing which parent, if any, would be waiting when you got home, doors kicked in, etc. etc. — it was a Wagnerian version of a Soap Opera ‘affair’) the sadistic ‘normalcy’ of small-town dumbass Kansas was a step up. Don’t feel bad for me.

Feel bad for Checkers.

He was one of those upperclassmen who was part of the championship team, the championship class, but not quite a starter, if you catch my drift.

So, he was the ‘clown’ for the other guys — but in that hazing manner that only those not being hazed or having no conscience could truly appreciate.

And, since we were all in “chorus” together, he picked up on a line from a bad CALYPSO song that the part-time music teacher was inserting into the repertoire.

Then, and probably now,  schools were so small that art teachers basically “rode the circuit” driving between evenly-spaced ten-miles-apart farm towns in the limestone fence post country of virtually treeless central Kansas, on the checkerboard of endless north-south and east-west roads. Mornings, she taught us.

Imagine a bunch of Kansas farm kids, many of whom couldn’t exactly carry a tune in a bucket, and whose idea of ultimate music was Bloodrock’s “D.O.A” (pre-death metal, when I think about it), imagine these kids in their highwater jeans, white socks and penny loafers singing … a calypso song.

But old Checkers liked one line in it: “Play de beat for us, boy!”

And he thereafter got in my face and sang “BEAT YOUR MEAT FOR US, boy!” to the laughter and hilarity of all the jocks. Or, all the worst ones, to be fair.

You know them from every school in the land: the Prom Committee.

All right. There was nothing I could do. I was the third-smallest kid in the school — I had just hit puberty that year –  and this guy already had a thick black beard that he was shaving every day.

There was nothing that I could do. I just had to take it. Otherwise he’d twist me into a pretzel for the amusement and to win the approval of his jockesque overlords.

It was an accident that by basketball season this had been going on and on and on, and I had been wind-sprinted to death through the football championships, and then run into the ground in endless ‘laps’ for basketball.

The football coach (who was now the assistant coach, with the assistant football coach now the basketball coach) would throw a basketball at anyone lagging behind on laps around the gym during basketball practice. If it hit you (and it did) it would send you tumbling across the floor and bouncing off the bleachers like an empty Coors can thrown from a pick-up truck on a windy day; the unforgiving impact of a sweat-stained Wilson basketball stinging at your hip, and a lovely temporary tattoo of the reversed logo for you to admire later that night before going to bed.

Basketball season was well underway.

And I was showering and changing into my “official” team costume of a white shirt and black pants (we were DIRT poor that year, and I had exactly ONE white shirt, which is important in what follows) — a shower that was essentially pointless, since,  on the Junior Varsity, or “B” team, I was still the third smallest kid in the school, so I rode the bench mostly all the time.

Well, that game, ALL the time. The shower was pointless but required, and I had finished and put on my black pants, my shoes and socks (nothing worse than standing barefoot on a locker room floor) and was facing the far wall, buttoning up my only white shirt so I could return to the gym and watch the ACTUAL game that all the screaming locals had come to see: the A Team.

And Checkers’ mouth suddenly blared from behind me, loud, right next to my ear, “BEAT YOUR MEAT FOR US, boy!”

I broke his nose.

I really don’t exactly know what happened. If it was the insanity of the last three years of living hell, or being ridden by an upperclassman all through fall and into winter; I don’t know if it was just an instinctual reaction to the invasion of my personal space.

Something snapped, I turned and broke his nose.

I can’t even say how I did it. I just know it was one blow.

All I know is that Checkers was looking at his hand, in shocked amazement and probably a good deal of daze, as he saw blood on it. His expression was utter disbelief.

Which was nothing, compared to the amount that was gushing from his busted nose. I mean … gushing.

All over my only white shirt.

And so, I ran like hell out of there back home (all of two blocks away) because by then I knew that if you didn’t immediately wash it in COLD water, it would set, and you could never get it out.

And I ran in the door, breathless, and my Mother was standing there and saw me, panting and covered with blood, and I could see the horrible thoughts forming in her head — I had been shot, been stabbed, you know. Maternal Instinct thoughts.

And I had to quickly calm her down, even as I made a beeline for the bathroom to wash the blood out of my poor white shirt.

I said what I thought was the best quick calming truth to her, but which, for obvious reasons backfired hideously:

“It’s OK, Mom. It’s not my blood.”

And you can imagine the thoughts that formed then, but by then I was in the bathroom, door locked, washing my shirt.

OK. I explained what happened. She accepted my explanation.

And the next day, when I got to school … NOBODY SAID ANYTHING.

And nobody ever did say anything, except, just once, when one of the Sadistic Über-Jocks “disciplined” Checkers by saying “you let a FRESHMAN break your nose.”

And he was suitably chastened and abased before his Liege lord.

For being a VICTIM.

And, as the harmonic to that rearrangement of the killer ape hierarchy, I was still the Omega Male in the pecking order, but nobody fucked with me, except superficially — which couldn’t be avoided. I was still an alien, and still the third-smallest boy in that high school.

But the “physical intimidation” issue had been decided in that split second.

Which was fine, because I REALLY didn’t want to fight with anybody over anything. I’d had enough of schoolyard brawls back in Wyoming. But not these kids. Hell raisin’ was a national sport, and “manly” confrontations over meaningless issues of manly “honor” were considered very manly.

And nobody ever talked about  — or, rather, it wasn’t acceptable to talk about in the public commons of the high school. What was said behind closed doors and down at Mrs. Stenkorian’s Beauty Parlor cannot be known with any certainty. But all news in that town was disseminated through Mrs. Stenkorian’s Beauty Parlor, and I would imagine that there was some discussion of the matter, as in “That horrible alien child broke poor Mrs. Miskorsky’s son’s nose!”

But nothing in public.

This is how bad it got: Checkers was in a nose-splint for a good month or so after that, and was in the Class Play that year playing a detective, a role which the splinted busted nose actually enhanced. I am not being ironic or sarcastic. It actually fit the character and the role stole the show.

But you won’t see that in the yearbook anywhere.

The yearbook staff “re-staged” scenes later, with his cast off. And THOSE appear in the yearbook as the only record of that Class Play. A rewriting of history to wash out the bad stuff, like I’d washed Checkers’ blood from my only white shirt.

If you ask anybody about it today, no one remembers. By common consent, the alien kid from a galaxy far, far away breaking the championship football player’s nose was just too weird to talk about and so they didn’t, and, eventually, it never happened.

Except that it did.

And that is the metaphor for what follows, because the dynamics are pretty much the same.

2. the dumbest thug and his followers  (who would be even … uh, er, ONWARD!)

Today, or, rather, toadie, Andrew Breitbart  (self-proclaimed as “Matt Drudge’s bitch”) leads a snarling orgy of Republiklan victimhood.

(continued tomorrow) …

And a tip o’ the hat to the curious grasshopper for invaluable help herein….

Courage.