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kpete

(71,900 posts)
Mon May 14, 2012, 04:23 PM May 2012

A Bully Never Forgets. Unless That Bully Is Mitt Romney.

A Bully Never Forgets. Unless That Bully Is Mitt Romney.
By Tom Junod
at 3:33PM


I was a bully in fifth and sixth grade. I wasn't one of the bullies — I wasn't strong or dominant enough to be one of the kids who bullied everyone in equal measure. I was a bully, in that I bullied a kid, whose name I won't mention here. My bullying was selective and personal. I was vulnerable, and so when I found someone more vulnerable than I was, I went after him with a directed fury. I didn't hate him; but I hated the idea of him, which amounted to his very existence. I punished his weakness as a way of punishing my own. That I wasn't articulate enough to poison myself with elaborate self-justification doesn't mean that I didn't try: clearly, my bullying was meant as a corrective of some kind, for both myself and my victim. He was weak and I was strong (though it's more psychologically accurate to say that I was strong as long as he was weak) and I took it upon myself to make a man of him. It was an infernal and infernally extended mission, but it succeeded to this degree: When I called him ten years ago for an article I was writing on bullying, he said, “I've had to overcome a lot of obstacles in my life, and you're one of them. Please don't call me again.”

It was a formative experience, then, for both me and him. For him, a trial by fire, administered from the outside, as the world's vengeance upon his innocence; for me, because I was not the innocent but rather the offender, a trial of a different kind altogether. He'll never forget me, and neither will I — that is, I'll never forget him but I'll also never forget myself and what I did to him. It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person. It stands in the way, and so although like all human beings I am powerless to expunge or undo an experience eternal to my past, I can try to remember it, and what it said — what it continues to say — about me. I have a mean streak and I am capable of cruelty. This does not mean that I am necessarily mean and cruel; instead, it means that I have to be vigilant about my capacity for cruelty and the mean bone in my body. It means that I have to subject my motivations to rigorous examination, especially since I am in a business that often rewards cruelty for its own sake.

And so it was with a shock of recognition and then, well, shock, that I heard last week's revelations that Mitt Romney was a prep-school bully. I am not running for president, but I've always known if I ever did run for president — or local dogcatcher, for that matter — the boy I bullied would and should arise as a necessary ghost from my past. And I have always known what I would say: that yes, I was a bully; that I remember each and every attack I originated; that the experience is burned in my memory as it is burned on my conscience, because memory and conscience are intertwined; that although the experience happened long ago, it has become part of me; that I acknowledge it as a way of surmounting it; that I hope I have surmounted it, and that every day I hope and I pray I am not that person, although the only way to avoid being that person is to admit that I am that person, the one capable of doing those things.

But Mitt Romney didn’t say anything like that. Mitt Romney blew the report off. Mitt Romney said that he didn't remember the incidents in question — that he didn’t remember orchestrating an attack on a long-haired classmate, that he didn't remember pinning the boy down and personally taking the scissors to him, that he didn't remember the boy weeping and begging for mercy. Mitt Romney apologized for “whatever pain” his “prank” may have caused. Well, it takes one to know one, as the schoolyard saying goes, and so my first reaction was that the so-called "presumptive Republican candidate for president" is lying — either to us or to himself. He remembers. Of course he remembers. He has to remember, because no one forgets doing something like that, and the ones who do forget....


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Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/mitt-romney-bullying-8835667#ixzz1usSeUDGd

4 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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A Bully Never Forgets. Unless That Bully Is Mitt Romney. (Original Post) kpete May 2012 OP
Kicked and recommended. Uncle Joe May 2012 #1
Thanks for posting. Bookmarking for later - n/t coalition_unwilling May 2012 #2
I don't think that is true hfojvt May 2012 #3
Emotion would sear the memory for both bully and victim. Uncle Joe May 2012 #4

hfojvt

(37,573 posts)
3. I don't think that is true
Mon May 14, 2012, 04:35 PM
May 2012

I think victims remember much more than bullies. A guy who picked on me for a year or more in the 8th grade came up to me at our 20 year reunion like nothing ever happened. (although I did not ask him if he remembered either). My brother told me about meeting the guy who bullied him for years in grade school, and that guy seemed to think they were old friends.

Further, I can see that if you did something you were sort of ashamed of later, that you would not want to remember. As the line goes "what's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget".

Uncle Joe

(58,112 posts)
4. Emotion would sear the memory for both bully and victim.
Mon May 14, 2012, 04:44 PM
May 2012

Aggression requires emotion unless the aggressor is a sociopath.

If Romney were ashamed and just didn't have the integrity or moral strength to confront the truth "when presented with it" then his actions and decisions in the most powerful office of the land could very well follow suit.

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