Hating the Haters is... So Cool!

Was somebody on the Internet mean to Stephen Marche?

The Internet has reached peak hate. It had to. At every other moment in history when there has been an explosion of text — whether through social change, like the birth of a religious movement, or technological change, like the advent of print — a period of nasty struggle ensued before the forces of civility reined it in. In the past few months alone, we've seen the catfishing of Manti Te'o, a professional tennis player quit because of trolling, and a rash of teenage suicides from cyberbullying alongside the by-now-standard Twitter hatestorms of various strengths and durations. The sheer bulk of the rage at the moment can seem overwhelming. But the fact that we recognize it and have acknowledged its unacceptability is a sign of the ancient process reasserting itself yet again. The Internet is in the process of being civilized.

Peak hate? Is that like "peak oil" - you think you've reached it, and then somebody finds a new source or finds a way to dig a deeper well?

Hate is a source of acknowledged pleasure. Hate-watching. Hate-listening. Hate-reading. These are all things that you, your friends, and your neighbors, not monsters, likely do. We deliberately expose ourselves to objects of contempt to stoke inner outrage in order to enjoy the release of fury. It's not just online, though the Internet is the most obvious theater of cruelty.

The Internet is "the most obvious theater of cruelty"? Seriously? I guess, perhaps, if the most dangerous thing you do is interview models and send tweets from your home office. But... seriously?

Marche then proceeds to imply that every mean thing said on the Internet is a form of cyberbullying, admits that he takes personal thrill in it, and suggests that we're headed down a road toward having anonymity legislated out of the Internet. He's a reporter, but I think he missed some foundational lessons on the First Amendment. Also, I don't think it's helpful to define bullying so broadly to encompass every mean thing posted on the Internet. Marche should take personal note here, given that when he argues that "Twitter and Web comments are really just new expressions of that oldest of monsters: the crowd", that "these hatestorms" against individuals on the Internet are a form of bullying, and "bullies and their victims both have a higher rate of mental illness for decades afterward", it's difficult to avoid the fact that he's describing his own conduct. I'll grant, he uses the term "we" a lot, but that seems largely to be a matter of projection.

Wildness is always followed by civilization, the root of civilization is civility, and the rules of civility have not meaningfully changed in two thousand years. Cicero outlined them in "On Duties": Speak clearly. Don't speak too much. Make sure everybody has a chance. Don't interrupt. Alternate topics so that everybody can talk about something of interest to them. Don't criticize people behind their backs. Don't be angry or lazy. These are the rules. You already know them. They've always been the rules. People are just going to start following them again.

Except the thing is, it's not as if human nature has changed over the past 2,000 years, and Marche himself admits that what he's describing is simply a manifestation of human nature, at times magnified by technology. Were Marche to look at the past 2,000 years of human history, he would quickly find that Cicero's rules are most often honored in the breach. That's not going to change, and the Internet is not going to be tamed by (imagined) legislation that requires you sign your real name to everything you post. If Marche wants to transform himself into a champion of online civility, a role model for us all, that would be great. If he thinks he can change others, or transform human nature through legislation, though, he has quite a bit to learn about the limits of his capacity.

Sorry, Romney, Some Things You Just Don't Forget

Although Mitt Romney has long personified the punch line to the joke, "How can you tell when a politician is lying," it remains worth commenting on his latest seeming prevarication:

Mr. Romney returned from spring break in his senior year to find that John Lauber, a quiet, offbeat type, had bleached his hair blond.

Mr. Romney, brandishing a pair of scissors, led other boys on a hunt for Mr. Lauber, teasing him and holding him down while Mr. Romney snipped off his long locks.

“As to pranks that were played back then, I don’t remember them all, but again, high school days, if I did stupid things, why, I’m afraid I’ve got to say sorry for it,” Mr. Romney, 65, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said in a Fox News Radio interview on Thursday.

I don't think I'm atypical in this regard: If I were confronted with a story of this type I would be able to clearly and unequivocally say, "That's false. It never happened." I'm not claiming that I was perfect as a teenager, or that I was never mean to a kid who didn't deserve it, but there are certain lines that I - and I dare say, any normal person - would remember crossing. The only way you would forget this type of "stupid thing" or "prank" would be if you engaged in that type of bullying so often that your episodes of bullying became indistinct.

Further, you have to have a certain character or disposition to engage in that type of act - if you were somehow confused about whether or not it happened, you should at least know yourself well enough to know if it is something you were at all likely to do. Romney's inability to defend his own character reflects that, in his case, it was.

If the defenses of Romney are to be believed, that this would have been atypical behavior from him, it's difficult to regard his denial - or his defense that this would be a "prank" or "stupid thing" that fit among his many others as opposed to being a particularly memorable incident of tormenting another human being - as credible.

In terms of the alternate defense, that "Even at his otherwise-strict school, pranks were tolerated with boys-will-be-boys indulgence", there may be truth to that. The continuation of that defense, that the concept of bullying was alien to that era, is nonsense, but there's no question that a lot of boarding schools, including elite ones, used to have an overt and deliberate culture of brutality and bullying. An acquaintance who attended an overseas, British-style all-boys boarding school in the same era recounts that physical brutality and hazing was part of the culture of the school, and was viewed positively by the parents who wanted to make sure their sons were either tough or toughened up. But Romney's not offering a "times were different" defense.

One of the other students who participated in the event doesn't believe the denial:

Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer in Michigan, who participated in the episode, recalled it in an interview on Thursday. “It started out as ribbing, sort of a pointed ribbing about his hair, but it very quickly became an assault, and he was taken down to the ground, pinned,” Mr. Maxwell said. “It all happened very quickly — it was like a pack of dogs.”...

On Thursday, his aides struggled to deal with the account, first telling The Washington Post that Mr. Romney had no recollection of it. Mr. Maxwell, however, said he was skeptical that Mr. Romney did not remember something that had haunted all of the other men involved, even years later.

“I would think this would be seared in his memory,” said Mr. Maxwell, who identified himself as an independent who tends to vote Democratic. “Certainly for the other people that were involved, nobody has forgotten.”

So as you would expect, this was not part of the culture of the school or typical of the "pranks" of the day, but was a particularly dramatic episode of bullying. The Washington Post was able to reach "several classmates [who] confirmed the account". The only person whose memory isn't working, it would appear, is Mitt Romney.

Movies About Bullying

When writing about bullying in schools, I mentioned a number of films that deal with bullying. Some movies that highlight the various forms of bullying come to mind:

The "Antisocial" Bully:

• Big Bully
• Max Keeble's Big Move (Also featuring a bullying school principal)
• Back to the future (Biff, of course, but let's not forget Principal "No McFly has ever amounted to anything" Strickland)
• Three O'Clock High

The "Pack of Bullies":

• Sometimes They Come Back (Horror)
• Hearts in Atlantis
• Stand By Me
• My Bodyguard
• Carrie
• Let Me In (And the original, Let the Right One In.)
  

(Lots of Stephen King here.) Bullying by the "In Crowd":

• Heathers
• Revenge of the Nerds
• Mean Girls
• Lucas
• School Ties (Exploring themes of anti-Semitism)

Bullying by Teachers and School Administrators:

• Scent of a Woman
• Sky High (Administrators support a social order of "heroes" vs. "sidekicks"; also includes a pair of traditional student bullies.)
• The Karate Kid (Kids bullying kids, but the root of the problem is a bully turned karate instructor.)
• Mr. Woodcock (The gym teacher is a relentless bully; the movie takes the incredible view that many of his victims became grateful.)
• Matilta (Worst principal ever?)
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off (Principal Rooney)
• The Breakfast Club (Principal Vernon)

There are films with teachers who bully, or have bullying tendencies, such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but it seems like bullying principals get a lot of screen time.

There are, of course, many more.

Bullying in Schools

On the rare occasions when bullying in schools leads to tragedy, we get a momentary flurry of activity - calls for stronger anti-bullying laws or policies. Then, for the most part, its back to business as usual. The Onion touched on this after Columbine, a tragedy at a school with a serious bullying problem, but that appears to be wrongly attributed to bullying (and the perps in which engaged in bullying):

Just like at any other school, the computer geeks are mocked, the economically disadvantaged kids are barely acknowledged, and the chess-club, yearbook and debate-team members are universally reviled. While these traditions are nothing new, from now on they will be much easier to preserve, thanks to the high-tech, draconian security measures that now dominate Columbine life....

Thus far, the beefed-up security measures have done wonders to restore the self-esteem of Columbine's jocks, who say they feel safer shunning, berating, belittling and picking on those who are different from themselves than ever before. And the jocks are doing their part to keep the untouchables in line, more than doubling the number of swirlies, noogies and wedgies doled out to Columbine's many outcasts since last year.

Happily, the many efforts to protect Columbine's jocks seem to be working. In fact, schools across the country have begun to pick up on the Columbine model, with many districts imposing measures even more stern than those at Columbine itself. These include mandatory dress codes, transparent book bags that are subject to random search, metal detectors, electronic handprint-identification systems and automatic expulsion of anyone who goes out of his or her way to "separate themselves socially" from classmates or "break the status quo."

That's a parodic look at behavior that is par for the course for most of this nation's schools. But even that is too narrow a look at bullying behavior. You can find bullying behavior within the "chess-club, yearbook and debate-team", or pretty much any other group context. Sometimes it's transitory, sometimes it's not. But often it's ignored, tolerated, or even encouraged by teachers and school administrators.

When we think of bullies, we often look straight to the stereotype of the angry, sullen, misfit loner who beats up kids for lunch money. When I was in ninth grade we had a kid like that at the school... I'm not sure if he ever stole lunch money, but he was big, he was miserable, and he was happy to share his misery with others. He disappeared from school until I was a senior, then reappeared as a tenth grade student. I found out, one way or another, that he had been incarcerated for much of the interim. I didn't have enough contact with him to know whether his experiences transformed him.

But in a sense, that type of bully is the easiest to deal with. No, not if he's sucker punching you in gym class, but in terms of psychic trauma. Nobody defends him, nobody joins him. If you can duck him, he's irrelevant. The more dangerous variant works in packs - a more social bully who has a number of tag-alongs. Think Jimbo, Dolph and Kearney on the Simpsons (Nelson can work with them, or work alone). Their pack behavior is not atypical of pack animals - identify somebody who appears to weak to put up much of a fight, isolate their prey, attack. These bullies are quite easily identified by school administrators who, in many cases, seem to ignore them. Perhaps that's because their typical targets don't matter much to administrators?

But when you look at the two instances of bullying that have received significant press coverage, the bullying of Phoebe Prince and the bullying of Constance McMillen, you're not going to find the bullies I just discussed. In the case of Pheobe Prince, the bullying appears to have been that described in The Onion - the cool kids turning on a peer, then ostracizing and hounding her. In the case of Constance McMillen, it appears that the bullying and ostracisim - the rejection of a teen due to her sexuality - was acceptable within the student body, the faculty, school administrators, and among parents. She and the special needs students (also special targets for bullying at Columbine) weren't worthy.

This piece from the AP is remarkably clueless:

Parents might not realize that the stereotypical bully of generations past — a swaggering schoolyard lout, low on self-esteem, quick to lash out, easy to identify — has become as anachronistic as the blackboard at many schools.

Educational psychologists describe a new kind of bullying. The perpetrators are attractive, athletic and academically accomplished — and comfortable enough around adults to know what they can and can't get away with, in school and online.

These bullies are so subtle and cunning it's hard for school staff to know if what looks like bullying really is, and what to do about it. "Some of it is so under the radar that without training, you can't see what's in front of you," says Marlene Snyder, a Clemson University expert on bullying.

Yeah, subtle. So subtle that it's been the subject of movies like "Revenge of the Nerds", "Lucas", "Heathers" or "Mean Girls" for generations. Snyder may have a point that some of their behaviors are not immediately identifiable as bullying, but the author of the piece is out to lunch.

Going back to something I touched on before, the victims of concerted bullying don't typically draw much concern from school administrators. That can be because they're different and the school administrators sympathize with the bullies, as appears to be the case with Ms. McMillen. But if we move from transitory bullying, something most kids experience at one time or another, into situations of chronic or repeated bullying, you'll usually find a pattern of reactions or behaviors that make it easy to blame the victim. The child is hypersensitive. The child responded to the bullying by calling the other kids names, then got upset. The child withdraws. "They bring it on themselves." Sometimes the kid is targeted because he identifies as gay, or is perceived as gay - if that type of intolerance is acceptable within the school, it's really hard for the kid to reshape his reaction to end the bullying.

More accurately, they show pain. Psychic pain. They don't have good defense mechanisms that allow them to either shrug off the attack or hide their hurt. If you can shrug off the attack, give as good as you get, hide your pain, you're not a rewarding target. (This is true for physical bullying as well - a kid who doesn't overreact to pain and hits back effectively isn't a good target; bullies will seek weaker prey.) A display of emotional pain is blood in the water for bullies. It's possible to teach kids to resist bullying, but these kids' parents are usually (no offense) clueless (or worse) and school administrators, again, indifferent.

Again, it's not just kids. How did Pink Floyd put it? "When we grew up and went to school, there were certain teachers who would hurt the children anyway they could". That's perhaps a good child's-eye view of the bullying teacher, and yes, there are teachers who inflict pain indiscriminately. But teachers who are bullies are adult versions of the kids I've been talking about, although they'll typically pick their prey differently and bully their kids by less obvious means. I recall a couple of my gym teachers from high school, one of whom was the same bullying jock he had been during his own teen years, and the other of whom viewed bullying as a natural rite of passage - something you put up with until you have a growth spurt or graduate. No big deal. Time for dodgeball!

I recall the second teacher's lecture about fighting - it's not that it's a big deal to get in fights, but things can get out of control and somebody might get kicked in the head or break a limb, so don't do it. This was before schools widely implemented "zero tolerance" policies on fighting; his approach might be deemed the "tolerance" approach. He was the school's front line person for addressing fights, ahead or instead of the vice principal, and I don't recall anybody ever facing a serious consequence.

I expect that the parents of the kids from the Phoebe Prince case see their kids as "good kids" - jock and cheerleader types, "leaders", popular.... Odds are that their parents value success in the high school social scene and implicitly, perhaps explicitly, send the message that their form of bullying is simply part of the social order. The reaction to the case is seen as disproportionate to the crime. But if the reaction to similar bullying around the country is used as the measure, the parents have a point - the kids are being vilified and prosecuted because of the outcome of their bullying, while thousands upon thousands of kids around the country are "getting away with" the same thing.

If we're serious about eliminating bullying in schools, it needs to start from the top down. Administrators who turned a blind eye to the bullying of Constance McMillen should face consequences - perhaps career-ending consequences. If they don't, you'll know exactly how seriously their school districts take bullying.

In other schools, I'm not going to call for "zero tolerance" of bullying because I don't think that's achievable - and I expect it would be abused. A kid who is hounded until he lashes out should not be treated equally to the kids who do the hounding (and no, I'm not talking Columbine here - I'm talking about a normal reaction). A child who is upset with a friend and pulls the "You're not my friend" routine or attempts to get others to ostracize her "former" friend, should be viewed in an age-appropriate light. You can deal with that range of behaviors by establishing a culture of kindness within a school - setting a range for what's appropriate in interacting with other kids, then interceding and correcting behaviors when the rule is violated. And you can also teach kids from an early age how to respond to bullying behavior, and how to bring in an adult when necessary. And school administrators need to allow for serious sanction, to the extent of placement in 'alternative' schools, of even "cool" and "popular" kids who get off on bullying kids from outside of their social circle. Even if they're star athletes.

To put an end to the worst of bullying, teachers and school administrators need to be 100% on board with the new ethos. There is room for a "zero tolerance" policy toward teachers who turn a blind eye toward bullying behavior, and ample cause for such a policy toward teachers who engage in bullying.