In October of last year, there was quick succession of suicides committed by young gay men, mostly American teenagers, that caught the public eye. Seth Walsh hung himself in his backyard. Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from George Washington bridge. Billy Lucas, 15, hung himself, and Asher Brown, only 13, shot himself. Instead of coming to the obvious conclusion that these deaths, while self-inflicted, were commensurate with a culture that still tolerates publicly sanctioned bigotry so long as it is directed against gays and lesbians, America in her infinite wisdom decided to have a conversation about something else. We decided to talk about bullying. It might not be as likely that a child being picked on for a bad haircut would tie a rope around his neck and jump from a high place, but this way we could all manage to have a conversation about our own insecurities and feelings of harassment rather than the obvious reality of well financed and strategically positioned hate groups that sanction explicitly or implicitly the harassment of gay youth and yet are accepted as legitimate participants in our “democratic conversation.” Instead, we decided that we are all harassed. And who befitted from this rhetorical strategy the most? Parents who raise their children on the basis of these homophobic doctrines, who were able to separate instilling hate into their children from the fact that they "didn't raise them to be bullies."
Like all serious moral and political issues, the semantics of "bullying" can only be drawn out properly with a long digression into pop culture...
If there's one thing belatedly discovering the Rebecca Black anti-song brought home for me, it the re-appearance of this single meme, "bullying." America's least favorite eighth grader deployed the term masterfully in an interview with Katie Couric, hitting all the right notes. According to CNN's narration,
"Those hurtful comments really shocked me," Black, 13, tells the Daily Beast. "At times, it feels like I'm being cyberbullied."The worst words she's received? " 'I hope you cut yourself, and I hope you'll get an eating disorder so you'll look pretty,' " Black said on Friday's "Good Morning America." "When I first saw all the nasty comments, I did cry ... I don't think I'm the worst singer, but I don't think I'm the best."
The human desire to revel in the embarrassing follies of others is all the more mysterious for how well the sting of cruel laughter is known to us all. Yet while it might be satisfying to blame Ms. Black's (fortunate) bad fortune on a universal human failing it might also be nefarious. As with the "October Suicides" explanations that rely on infinite and tragic follies generally all suffer from the same symptom, that they obscure more obvious exposition. The true villains in Ms. Black's story are not the infinite, tragic, "all of us"--a literary concept finally personified in the pixilliated form of anonymous YOU TUBE comments. They are rather more finite. The villains here are Rebecca Black's parents.
Not only did the Blacks 'drop a few Gs' for their 13 year old daughter to film a music video with a strange organization offering make believe stardom to the super young, they allowed her to appear alongside other scantily clad children singing about "Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah)
Partyin’, partyin’ (Yeah) Fun, fun, fun, fun" in what looked like a mix between a more suggestive Disney channel movie and one of Humbert Humbert’s more benign dreams. Oh, and Rebecca Black (code, in the child star's world for Rebecca Black's parents) are currently raking in $27,000 a week from the fruits of "nasty comments." (see my linked article)
Yet the older Ms. Black had the gall to say this of her daughter's detractors to Katie Couric,
"In all honesty, I probably could have killed a few people....but that probably would get me nowhere!"
No! Especially when the same people are lining your pockets with thousands of dollars every week you venal fucking sap.
But of course our sympathy for the "bullied" blinds us to all of this. Malevolent, cruel, and preying on the weak, bullies make perfect villains for our time. If there is a single defining feature in the semantic apparatus of “bullying” in contemporary ideology it is that bullies are not political. Bullies lack ideological and financial interests; they are mean for the sake of meanness, cruel for the sake of cruelty. While the contemporary mythology of bullying suggests the bully as a proto-sociopath, in traditional Freudian terms the bully is a man without a subconscious. Unlike the rest of us, the bully’s personality is in this sense precisely not “split.” He is cruel because he really wants to be cruel. Bullies are the perfect enemy of a culture that (according to its autobiography of itself) has ceased to have an ideology, because they pose an enemy with no ideology as an opposite. “Hegel’s basic insight,” as always, is that we are our own opposite. As President Obama might put it, we are the bullies we've been looking for.
Here is where the Rebecca Black’s two thousand dollar karaoke video becomes an important lacuna. We are all bullies now!
And indeed, is this not basically the problem with the current intervention in Libya? In our military’s desire to “impose the no fly zone” without “directly supporting rebel forces” with further military action we not up Colonel Gadaffi to portray the US as “a bully.” Just like the biggest kid on the playground, we still have no idea what we want from Libya, or, more troubling still, from ourselves.
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