To Behave Like the Fallen World

[Posteritatis]

(Wasn't sure if this was better suited here or in Good Reads, but it's current-eventsishly relevant in a number of ways and figured there'd be more discussion here.)

A friend just pointed me at this rather amazing article by Steve Almond about the debacle with Romney's bullying.

Quoting from the middle of the article; it opens right up with a detailed description of a combination instance of bullying and sexual assault that might be pretty triggering for some of you, so I didn't feel comfortable using that part as the excerpt.

As I read about Romney’s adolescent exploits, I found myself thinking about Tobias Wolff’s sad and lovely novel, Old School. The narrator of that book is an insecure and manipulative scholarship student trying to pass at a fancy prep school, a kid who understands the prerogatives of wealth: “You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world; that is already reserved for them.”

But I don’t think Romney feels this way, not deep down. I think he has more in common with Wolff’s striving narrator, actually. By which I mean that he seems to display, as an adult, the same need to scheme and maneuver to get ahead. Like George W. Bush, he was an essentially frightened, unloved young man who came of age under tremendous pressure to live up to a famous father, who failed to distinguish himself as a scholar or an athlete and was relegated to the sidelines, whose desperate jocularity was shot through with a kind of unexamined sadism. Both men have forged a path to success via an alarming absence of self-reflection.

I don’t mean to suggest that Romney is without compassion. I believe, for instance, that he loves his wife and his children, and that he believes in God and the flag. But there is something in his character that I am starting to get frightened about, an unwillingness, or an inability, to feel remorse, to simply own up to a moral failing, to apologize not just if “somebody was hurt” but because you know, deep down, that you hurt someone.

One of the big focuses is on that, but it also spends some time on bullying in general, and on the ways it's handled - or not handled - by bystanders.

The last sentence of the article struck home in more ways than I would've expected it to, and is one of the more heartbreaking ones I've read in a while. I'm glad I read this one, but I'll never be able to say I enjoyed doing so.

[snagglepuss]

1. You're absolutely right. It's an amazing article. In fact I just put a hold

for a Steve Almond book at my library (I hadn't heard of him but I love how he writes) and a hold on Old School.


K & R

[Posteritatis]

2. I'm thinking I should do the same. (nt)