Category Archives: review

Bully-land

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Anti-bullying Respect Tour 2009 What would it take to eliminate bullying? Photo by Working Word.

In 2006, just about when we were all starting to see the light at the end of the Bush Administration, Sarah Vowell totally rearranged my perspective on U.S. politics:

High school … is the most appropriate metaphor for life in a democratic republic. Because democracy is an idealistic attempt to make life fair. And while high school is the place where you read about the democratic ideal of fairness, it is also the place most of us learn how unfair life really is. Who you are is informed by who you were then. And every nerd has an anecdote or two to tell about how Nerds versus Jocks is not just some epic mythological struggle but a pesky if normal way of life.

Vowell’s essay “The Nerd Voice” (originally published in as part of buy it over on The Partly Cloudy Patriot) starts from the observation that the differences between Presidential candidates Al Gore and George W. Bush are neatly encapsulated in the high school archetypes of Nerd and Jock, and from that spins an entire worldview. Alongside the Nerd are the poor kid, the undocumented kid, the disabled kid, the gay kid—the Democrats’ patchwork coalition of the unpopular lunch table. Arrayed against them: the Jock’s friends the rich kid, the casual racist, the popular kid who never has time for less-popular kids, the socially powerful who need not even acknowledge that they have power. Natural-born Republicans, every one.

More than a decade later, it barely counts as a metaphor to invoke the social strata of the schoolyard in reference to politics. The image of the Bully and the Bullied—the only slightly darker angle on the Nerd and the Jock—is routinely conjured by folks on both sides of the political spectrum to directly describe the actions They want to perpetrate against Us. In this atmosphere, where bullying is simultaneously a political issue and a unifying theory of politics even as the political discourse feeds back to shape the interactions of children in the schoolyard, Emily Bazelon’s book Sticks and Stones offers the hope of understanding not just our own high school traumas, or the experiences of children who are bullied today, but the way social power is wielded in American society.

Sticks and Stones grows out of Bazelon’s extensive writing on bullying for Slate. The book is structured around three specific cases: a girl bullied by upperclassmen for (a least initially) picking the wrong haircut; a gay boy in a rural school district; and a girl accused of contributing to a classmate’s suicide. The details of each case study inform Bazelon’s accounts of the others, and all three serve as starting points for discussion of broader context: the history of public schools’ legal responsbilities to protect students from bullying, historical and ongoing social research, and the evolving role of online media in teenagers’ social lives.

Bazelon’s handling of all this material is clear, precise, and cautious, even as she maintains empathy with (almost) everyone concerned in her three case studies. Early on, she establishes a working definition of bullying (from on the work of pioneering psychologist Dan Olweus), as “verbal or physical aggression that [is] repeated over time and that [involves] a power differential.” This allows differentiation between bullying and “drama,” or jostling for social status among near-equals.

That can still be a difficult line to draw, as the accounts in Sticks and Stones demonstrate—interviewing the bullies in her first case study, Bazelon rapidly establishes that what feels like bullying to the victim is percieved, by the bullies, as normal and necessary social interaction. They’re concerned to learn that the bullied girl, Monique, couldn’t handle their taunting, but not that they’d done something inappropriate.

Monique, in the eyes of these girls … hadn’t learned how to play the game; how to mock other kids and be mocked by them. This was the key to scaling the heights of middle school, if that was your goal. If you wanted to be one of the popular kids in Aminah’s mental chart, you had to learn how to trade barbs, to give as good as you got. … “You have to defend yourself,” Gianna told me.

Sticks and Stones also draws a distinction between kids who bully from positions of social or physical strength (think Mitt Romney, the son of a governor and CEO), and those who bully to shore up a precarious position low in the social pecking order. As Bazelon recounts the case of Jacob, a gay kid dealing with anti-gay bullying in a rural New York high school, it emerges that his chief antagonist may fall into the latter category, the “bully-victim.” Jacob’s bully goes after him in a broader social climate in which queer kids are fair game—where a school administrator can shrug off reported harassment by blaming the victim: “To the extent that the child isn’t ready to project their sexuality in a responsible way, the peers may not respond appropriately, either.”

In that context, a socially marginalized boy looking to prove his toughness has an obvious target.

Bullying Photo by JLM Photography.

Bazelon also finds that the roles of bully and bullied can shift rapidly, as demonstrated in the experience of Flannery Mullins, one of several students at South Hadley High in Massechusetts who were accused of bullying a classmate, Phoebe Prince, until she committed suicide. (Bazelon wrote extensively about this case for Slate.) However, it emerges that most of what came to be understood as bullying in the wake of Prince’s suicide originated as interactions that could have looked like nothing more than standard high-school drama over dating relationships—until they interacted, tragically, with Prince’s family life and fragile mental health.

Except, what does that say about what we’re willing to consider “standard high-school drama?”

The picture built in Sticks and Stones suggests that although bullying has become strongly associated with particular parts of society—queer kids, most notably, in the era of “It Gets Better”—there is something about bullying that is quite independent of any particular characteristic that may currently attract bullying. That is, to borrow a thought from Tony Kushner, it is conceivable that some future American society might treat queer young people just the same as it treats straight young people—and still allow all its young people to bully and be bullied, as part of the “normal” cost of growing up.

In other words, the problem of bullying is not about who, specifically, suffers the slings and arrows of life at the bottom of the social ladder. It’s about the existence of the ladder, and what we—parents, school staff, peers—allow teenagers to do and say to establish and enforce their places on it. Sticks and Stones surveys efforts to change exactly these things, and while Bazelon’s description of some specific programs seems hopeful, it’s also clear that they require sustained effort by teachers, administrators, students, and parents—and everyone involved must start from the shared realization that a school’s culture needs to change.

And, on some level, cultural acceptance of bullying is not about particular schools (though, of course, some are worse than others). It’s about our expectations for the very experience of high school. Fixing that will take more than local anti-bullying programs, or legalized marriage equality, or even the best anti-bullying laws. It will require Americans to re-examine how we treat each other, and how we treat those less powerful than us, in the schoolyard and beyond.◼

I was able to read Sticks and Stones for free in advance of publication, via NetGalley.

You should read: Redshirts

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Redshirts.

You’ve already read my fanboy glee in anticipation of John Scalzi’s new novel Redshirts, so it’s only fair to report that I have already finished the book, and I can honestly say it was everything I hoped for.

“Redshirts,” on the original version of Star Trek, were the nameless, red-shirted security officers who’d beam down to strange new worlds alongside the stars of the show—and, if danger should present itself, it usually did so by killing a redshirt. Redshirts, the novel, is about what happens when some redshirts start to realize that their mortality rate is more consistent with a campy TV show than actual military service, even military service in space.

The result is a short novel that might be what you’d get if an episode of Star Trek were exposed to exotic radiation in an ion storm and spontaneously developed self-awareness. Although many of the resulting jokes have been made before (notably in the also-excellent movie Galaxy Quest, which is required viewing for the thoughtful Trek fan), Scalzi draws them out of genuine characters caught in a plot that ventures deep into the weirder end of Trek‘s repertoire without going off the rails.

I can’t go into any meaningful detail about that plot without spoiling it, so I won’t. I can say, however, that Redshirts is hilarious and humane. It’s a story about decent, rational human beings trapped in an indecently irrational universe, which is nevertheless the very kind of universe that human beings routinely imagine in every possible venue for fiction. Scalzi’s ultimate conclusion—that an author has something approaching a moral obligation to tell good and worthy stories with the characters he imagines—gives the story far more depth than mere fanfic.◼

You should read: Reamde

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Reamde. Photo by jby.

Neal Stephenson’s latest novel, Reamde, opens in a self-consciously stereotypical image of rural America: three generations of the Forthrast family engaged in recreational firearms practice in the midst of an annual reunion on an Iowa farm. The next thousand pages follow two members of that family out of the Midwest and across the globe.

Reamde zips from Iowa to Seattle, the mountains of British Columbia, urban China, the Isle of Man, the Philippines, a trailer park in Missouri, and a survivalist compound in north Idaho. The engine driving this jet-setting plot is a computer virus, the eponymous Reamde, propagated through a fictional massively multiplayer online game. Reamde reaches out across the Internet to entangle the creator of that online game and his niece with Russian gangsters, a Hungarian hacker, Chinese professional gamers, a Wales-born Al Qaeda terrorist mastermind, British and American intelligence agents, rural U.S. militia members, and two fantasy authors—one outrageously highbrow, the other hilariously low.

I’ve never read a Stephenson novel I didn’t enjoy cover to cover, and Reamde draws on what I like best about his work. There’s incredible attention to detail, whether in the workings of a fictional online game, the layout and choreography of spectacular action set pieces, or the cultural details of Chinese internet cafes. There’s a delightful slew of nerdy in-jokes, particularly in the simmering feud between the two fantasy authors working as creative consultants for the online game. And there’s an international cast of smart, dryly witty characters risking life and limb in a succession of perfectly rendered international locales. It’s a great read, but it’s also interesting for its perspective on the world we inhabit today.

The first-blush gloss on Reamde is that it’s a William Gibson novel set in the present day. But it even more strongly recalls the sub-genre of international/intercultural dramas that were popular as Oscar-baiting films a couple years ago, like “Babel” and “Crash.” Those movies would pick a selection of seemingly unconnected people across greater Los Angeles or the entire world, and attempt to demonstrate how their lives were really interconnected on some profounder level via apparently insignificant links propagated across the karmic ether. Reamde achieves the same effect organically, accumulating each new player by following the next thread in the widening web of Reamde, and (mostly) doing so without breaking the plot’s techno-thriller pace.

What’s remarkable about Reamde (though not surprising coming from Stephenson) is its unabashed optimism in the midst of circumstances that shade from trying into horrific. Our unprecedented global interconnectedness creates the chaos that propels the plot; but apart from the obvious bad apples (did I mention Al Qaeda is involved?) the wildly disparate people snagged in the web of the Reamde virus react to each other with the open-handedness of friendly strangers meeting in an online comments section, rapidly identifying their common interests to work together across cultural, economic, and even linguistic divides. Even as the body count racks up, the people who need to avoid potentially tragic misunderstandings manage to do exactly that, and see to it that the folks who need comeuppance get it. When the Forthrast reunion reconvenes at the end of the book, the attendees include members of a newly assembled global family. ◼