The
creeping lunacy creeps on, creepishly. It gives life a constancy
comforting in an uncertain world. For this we should be grateful.
In the GreeleyTribune* of
northern Colorado I see that Mitch Muller, a boy of thirteen, has been
expelled from school for a year. Yep. Gone.
You might surmise that he
committed some grave crime, that he assaulted a teacher perhaps or was
discovered to be selling bulk-lot cocaine. No. He played with a small
laser pointer-the sort that projects a red dot onto maps during
lectures. It was, said the depressing drones who run the school, a
"gun facsimile."
This is fascinating, like a rare
and aggressive tumor. Let us think about it.
To begin, there is no substance
to the charge. A laser pointer does not look like a gun, no more so than
a ball-point pen or a lipstick tube. It isn't a weapon, doesn't look
like a weapon, and is not intimidating, being less dangerous than, say,
a fist.
Further, note that we are not
confronted by a somewhat overzealous application of a reasonable rule.
If young Muller had disrupted class and gotten tossed for a week, that
would have excessive but not absurd. (Excessive because unnecessary:
When you have a male principal who has not been administratively
neutered, he says, "Bobby, stop that. Now." That's all he
says.)
The child was suspended for a
year, not for misbehavior but for possession of a legal and harmless
object that was determined ex post facto to be gun-like. You see.
Crimes carry harsh penalties, but you cannot tell what things are crimes
until after you have committed them. That is, the authorities can find
you guilty at will, whenever they wish to punish you.
This isn't discipline. It's
sadism-sexless, boring, mean-spirited bureaucratic sadism. The school's
officials are seeking to hurt the child because they enjoy doing it.
This Stalinism of the inadequate
isn't a fluke. Across the country, time and again, little boys (always
boys) are suspended for pointing chicken fingers and saying
"bang," for drawing soldiers or the Trade Centers in flames.
The schools are in the hands of sodden prisses, intellectual offal, who
don't like male children. Mediocrity loves revenge, revenge on others
for one's own mediocrity.
"Passive aggression,"
if memory serves, means an attempt to hurt others while pretending that
one's aim is pious. Passive aggression, and its cousin misdirected
aggression, dominate American culture. Again and again, bullying is
packaged as high principle.
Consider the persecution of
smokers-which is what it is. Yes, reasonable restrictions on smoking
are, well, reasonable. To have a smoking section in a restaurant is an
exercise in consideration, given that having a stream of smoke in one's
eyes is unpleasant.
By contrast, putting signs in a
subway saying that "second-hand smoke" shortens the lives of
children, which it doesn't, with a picture of a piteous, helpless,
wide-eyed child, is sheer hostility. So are laws banning smoking within
fifteen feet of governmental buildings. The intention is not to provide
for the common comfort, but to make smokers as miserable as possible.
The giveaway of a mean-spirited
law is that it doesn't do what it pretends to do, yet makes people
unhappy. Consider the agitations of the rabble opposed to guns. These
vessels of rightness transparently are not concerned to prevent crime
with firearms. You hear nothing from them favoring mandatory heavy
sentences for using a gun in a crime. Nor do they criticize the drug
dealer in the ghetto who kills his enemies. Their efforts are aimed at
law-abiding men who own guns.
It is personal hostility
disguised as concern with crime.
Similar spuriousness underlies
the degrading searches at airports. The government's policy isn't
rational. If we armed pilots, watched Moslems, and conducted
searches, I might believe that security was the motive. But we don't.
Taking nail clippers is ridiculous, like suspending a kid for having a
laser pointer. The searches seem designed to humiliate. I have been
searched by, among others, Israelis and Japanese. Neither had people
undressing in public, and neither was staffed by hostile minorities
getting even.
There is in all of this, in so
very much of American life today, a vindictive meanness enwrapped in
moral pose-in hate-crime laws, in careers deliberately destroyed over
imaginary sexual harassment, people destroyed over any trace of racial
incorrectness, fathers prevented from seeing their children by vengeful
exes and worse courts. Why?
I'll guess that the cause is a
confluence of two social currents. First, the United States is an angry,
divided, unhappy country, twisted by unresolved conflicts that it
refuses to face. Racial tension is ugly, powerful, and a forbidden
topic. Women are grindingly angry at men. Men, angry at the divorce
laws, avoid marriage. Universal divorce causes deep strains that we
don't talk about. Children raised as half-abandoned mall rats turn into
angry young adults.
The recently acquired American
habit of distributing emoluments by race and sex rather than merit rubs
people raw. The decay of the schools into centers of indoctrination
angers many. The inability to escape the filth that flows from Hollyork
grates. Perhaps more so does the inability in a mass, centrally run, not
particularly free society to influence one's surroundings, raise one's
children in one's values, or escape ever-deepening regulation.
Repressed anger seeks outlets.
The United States is further, I
think, a frightened country, or at least an insecure one. People are
afraid of terrorists and crime but more importantly vaguely afraid of a
life that isn't satisfactory, yet seems uncontrollable by them. There is
a widespread sense that the country is sliding fast toward something
undesirable yet hidden in the murk Insecurity breeds both meanness and a
desire for control.
The feminization of society
plays its part. On average, men prefer freedom to security; women,
security to freedom. Women, having climbed into a male world in which
they don't seem comfortable, seek laws, laws, laws to control every
cause of angst. Men, hemmed in, feel trapped. Much of the tightening
control seeks security-helmet laws for kids on bicycles, fear of smoke,
seat-belt laws, ever-falling definitions of drunk driving, warning
labels stating the universally known, the neurotic fear of laser
pointers, the hostility of a female-run school system to competition and
rough games beloved of boys.
The astonishing thing in the
latter is that women, thought to be nurturing of children, will destroy,
will permit the destruction, of boy children by an angry sisterhood in
the schools. The instinct of motherhood is perhaps overstated.
The answer? I suggest Cebu,
Mexico, or Thailand.
*Greeley Tribune, Jan 8
