Mahatma Gandhi was a punk-ass bitch. Like peace? Yearn for a more nurturing world? Fine. A little advice, then: Lock and load, and let love rule.
Luke Woodham, a 16-year-old Mississippi high school student - described by reporters as "chubby," and tellingly characterized by other students in the horror-of-teen-horrors terms "weird" and "not popular" - would certainly appear to understand the transformative gentleness of the violent act. On 1 October, the kid with the New Testament name preached an Old Testament schoolyard sermon, allegedly killing two classmates with a rifle and wounding seven others. The dead on campus were both girls, one an ex-girlfriend who had recently dumped him; the loss, police say, was probably what set Luke off. Luke was so upset, following the romantic rejection, that he (allegedly, again) stabbed his mother to death before heading off to school - single-handedly legitimizing decades of deeply lame Freudian psychotherapy.
"I am not insane," Luke wrote. "I am angry. I killed because people like me are mistreated every day."
The kid has a perfect ear; in killing children to oppose their mistreatment, chubby little Luke Woodham plugged straight into the spirit of the times. Federal government killed children at Waco? Park an enormous fertilizer bomb under a nursery! Life-affirming, anti-abuse-of-power message sent! Jewish settlers parked on your piece of the postage stamp? Strap on a bomb and head for the market! Palestinian settlers acting like they actually deserve a place to live? Take an extra clip to worship service!
Curiously enough, he also seems to have plugged straight into the spirit of his school. Following Luke's lone-gunman routine, cops arrested no fewer than six other teenagers in his home town, five of them classmates at Pearl High School. One was the 16-year-old who had provided reporters with the "I'm not insane" letter purportedly penned by Luke, making you wonder if the alleged killer wasn't working with a ghost writer. Hell, everybody else is, these days - why not him? The students picked up in the new wave of police action were said by police to have been plotting to kill other Pearl High students; a school-district lawyer said that the students "loosely referred to themselves as 'the group,'" a name that makes them sound quite a bit like some kind of Allman Brothers cover band. Remarkably, the police didn't say - not in public, at least - that the arrests were related to Luke's rebel-without-a-hall-pass murders. To which we can only say: Go figure.
It's no accident, of course, that the contemporary opponent of unbalanced power turns to the unbalanced use of power to make his point. With the statement made, and the bully dead, the bully's heart beats on inside the bullied - just as it did when the bully was still alive.
Experts on bullying - a real career option, apparently - note that the bullied tend to work awfully hard to provoke their tormentors, meticulously pushing all the right buttons before complaining about their treatment at the hands of the person they've just provoked: "I flipped the 'on' switch, and somehow the machine started running! Help!" For a chubby, unpopular kid, the genuinely extraordinary pain of being a target must surely beat the extraordinary pain of being not very much at all, stuck in a corner and largely ignored; rage beats emptiness simply because it feels like something rather than nothing.
So the suicide bomber, the clock-tower sniper, the gunman on the subway: All are powerless, mowing down the powerful like so many slats in a picket fence. They don't understand the contradiction in their acts because, for them, there is no contradiction; the point of the game is to make the other team fumble the football, drop the power, so the home team can pick it up. A play that ends the game leaves the players with nothing to do but go home. Given the addictive drama of the whole cycle, it's hard to expect that the bullied can ever see the ironies that arise when they turn the tables. (Maybe somebody could whisper it into their collective ear - or, failing that, pound it into their fucked-up heads once and for ... whoops.)
Nations play the same game, at home and away. Governments twist arms to help us get over bad habits, drop bombs to wage peace, destroy the village in order to save it. The most obvious explanation for Luke Woodham's behavior would be that somebody snuck a big pile of George Will's hawkish Reagan-era Newsweek columns into his locker, leaving an innocent 16-year-old mind with the impression that Mutual Assured Destruction was simply a thoughtful policy choice.
Delightfully, the always-good-for-a-laugh British (who are, after all, the seminal Canadians) have even dragged the full weight of the state into the battle against schoolyard bullying, organizing a formal central-government browbeating effort to combat the problem of children who give hot feet and wedgies to other children. Makes you wonder what Tony Blair was like as a prepubescent. ("Mummy! Those beastly lads have pasted my buttocks to my bullocks once again!")
Back on this side of the pond, the notion that unbalanced power is the best solution to power imbalances is, after much practice, well-ingrained into our tiny little pea brains. We understand quite well that, being the only superpower left, we have an obligation to knock the bullies of the developing world down with a plentiful dose of firmness.
True to our understanding of ourselves, the America of popular media puts down the carrot so it can swing the stick with both hands. In the recent Air Force One, soldiers swarm into a building and kill pretty much everything that moves, then drag the sleeping president of a former Soviet republic away to his punishment. Some nations might consider the kidnapping of their chief of state by foreign troops - from the presidential palace, no less - a form of international bullying, but remember: This Eurasian nutball was a big ol' meanie, and his kidnappers flew Old Glory into battle. We're the biggest, the strongest, the most heavily armed ... so we have to stop the powerful from exerting their power on others. Hmmm.
A final anecdote about our bad-ass, anti-bullying selves. The day after Luke Woodham's display of impotent rage, the district attorney responsible for seeing the teenager brought to justice expressed disappointment that Mississippi law wouldn't permit him to seek the death penalty for a weird, unpopular, chubby 16-year-old, who had finally had too deep a taste of power out of balance. It's a shame; like most consumers of morality tales, we prefer that the ending be consistent with the rest of the story.
This article appeared originally in Suck.
