Power Only Yields, Never Surrenders, So You Have to Take It
I have been trying to get a handle on this essay thing since I started the site, and like that Christmas gift from a relative that defies easy explanation or utility, I keep turning it over in my hand without purpose or end.
Further, I have mostly avoided tapping into the broader outlines of my political frustration and rage not because I don’t think I could blow some fire, but because the Midway is already crowded with all brand of performers, and such literary pyrotechnics are often self-indulgent thirst traps. Oops, shit, I gave away the game.
Watching Michael Tracey perform public humiliation for clicks and losing to unrepentant jagoffs who’ve been doing it for even longer is the type of thing to scare your away from this behavior. You witness (Anyone’s Better Than) Exra (De) Klein interviewing nazis like Dick Cavett and you might think this is a gateway drug to moral decadence and ethical agnosticism if not outright nihilism. That's why it's no longer weekly. But I thought I'd take another shot for reasons that this essay goes into, but basically, not entering the ring becomes too much like not fighting.
We owe each other more than that, and we show that by standing up to social renegers as the truly poisonous, society wreckers.
So often I find myself returning to both the biblical verse, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone,” and the Bertrand Russell (accurate!) acknowledgment, “the fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
In such circumstances, outside the physical eyeshot of my peers and their potentially disapproving glances, do I want to stand and bear witness? Sometimes it feels we have no choice. Then again, we already have social media, do we really need MORE noise?
While I am very aware of the very broad sweep of what is happening in the world from the global uprising of a supportive authoritarian-axis against democracy with the help of the obscenely wealthy who remain somehow unaware they made their money off public-facing corps, but I guess they just don’t care because they feel they have enough now, inputs no longer matter, and they’re probably right about that.
So, yeah, sure, I carry inchoate rage. What ethical human being doesn’t? I get it, I’m male, so I am fundamentally part of the reason why this dysfunction exists and I can only say I am sorry. I can’t help but feel if I had been more dramatic and a better promoter as I beat up bullies at each new school I was forced to enroll in by my parents’ frequent moves, perhaps I might’ve inspired enough of a movement that many of my otherwise-overly-prone-to-sensiitive-songwriter-indolence-and-self-indulgence colleagues might’ve stood up to these paper lions sooner.
Of course, I have also discovered in my latter years that my neurodivergence (and undoubtedly my frequent childhood encounters with new-kid-bullies) make me relish a conflict more than most people do. (The ND/ADHD brain likes the stimulation, especially if starved socially.) I’m a defiant little fuck and I always have been. I got that “Failure to Communicate” gene where I won’t bend to somebody who hasn’t earned my respect and the belief that this is never so much a “Me” problem as a “You” problem.
Such continuous and early encounters with blustery bullshit artists my own age and size helped mold me into a stubborn and tenacious bastard, and the necessity to entertain and sustain myself made me much more willing to sacrifice comity that I often felt would not be forthcoming anyway, knowing that self-reliance was a more natural state than relying on others.
(So yeah, marriage was a real educational roller-coaster, and I hung on for a dozen years, and actually just three months short of two full seven-year cycles. Of course, 12 years happens to be the median length of marriages. If you go by the blobs of six, an interesting argument that the pace and length of modern life have modified the cycles of life somewhat, which seems reasonable.)
Had I not had the tenacity and capacity to fight those bullies off, time and again – with big, sent to the principal fights at every new school along the way (so 3rd grade, 4h grade, 8th grade, 9th grade). If I hadn’t been such a bright and gifted student I would’ve surely been marginalized as a trouble-maker, though, also it was always my first encounter at the school, and by not backing down a whit the problem always proved a one-time occurrence from the school’s perspective, because I made it clear to my peers that there were much lower hanging fruit. (Let me also note this was not a male-only issue; in middle school a klatch of popular girls attempted to prank the new kid by pretending one of them liked me.)
Looking back, it’s odd to realize that my 7th grade year, where there was no big fight (some attempted intimidation…) and I had a girlfriend and was kind of socially accepted from the start – even though I had a group of D&D nerd friends!! – as an odd turning point, followed by moving to the South where I had fights in middle school and high school. SMDH.
So I guess what I’m saying is that learning that I had to defend myself, but that if I did people would stop bothering me proved pretty useful, and gave me the sense of space that when I passed out of my twenties when one made friends like breathing, I had the kind of interior resources to survive in the much more anaerobic adult air of solitude and social malaise.
This is a very very long prologue to arrive at the idea that it’s hard for me, a social contributor through word and art, but very much a social outcast IRL to know what to say about this very perilous moment we confront. I know from experience that some people will only understand that you are not going to let you just grab them by the pussy by you not letting them get away with it. Some people, as the old Sebadoh song goes, are actively out there looking for a punch in the nose.
Living in Minnesota now I am often reminded that there is an under-current of social responsibility, the knitted fabric of community. I also know that the last big fight I had in my teens, in 9th grade, with – and his name has escaped me for the moment – the fellow came up to me at a pre-party for my 25th high school reunion and was nice and friendly and openly greeted me like I hadn’t once grabbed his shirt collar with my left to steady my aim while I pounded his jaw with my right, more concerned with delivering enough deterrence than anything he might do to me. In the end, he wanted to move past it. He felt the shame.
I suppose that’s perhaps the idea here. The reason, on some level, that we face these emotionally stunted ethnocentric aesthetic mids is because we haven’t been forceful enough heretofore. They are quite loud about their proclivities and we’ve avoided putting them in their place in the name of civility and because a lot of people are more worried about who will provide their next paycheck than who will trust a person who has no principles.
I am not preaching pugilism so much as fearlessness. People bluster all the time. They live on the knowledge that most people back down rather than escalate a confrontation. It’s hard though. You might get shot by some random. I’m not gonna lie. But mostly these people intimidate others because it’s a low-risk game, and then that TACO because they never really wanted a conflict, just the easy score, and they have so little shame, they have nothing to lose with the paper tiger extortion.
The other thing, and this applies particularly to this moment, is that rich people are so used to getting their way or Karen-threatening you into submission. They have no idea what to do with someone that is willing to call their bluff. You should try it sometime, just to feel what it is to put the shoe on the other foot.
You want to know what scares a bully? Someone that isn’t scared of bullies. Lifelong bluffers know better than to fuck with our type. The lumps, in the circumstances where it comes to that, will heal quicker than the loss of self-esteem from yielding, and the pain of those bumps won’t haunt you long after. The joy of seeing a bully cowed into crossing to the other side of the street? Priceless.
The value of anything is created by what people will sacrifice to have it. How much would you sacrifice to have misogynists and racists put back on the defense? To not have to wade through their slop on the regular like they're the majority and not an amplified freak show.
