Knocking the bully out
Over the years, I had a lot of bullies. A neverending series of mean boys and girls had fun with me. But Henrik, I think that was his name, was the most prolific among them. He was explosive like a grenade and unpredictable like a pinball. You never knew where he was going to hit you next. I got very good at avoiding bullies, because they all had their pattern, they all had routines, except Henrik. With him, you had to be on your toes all the time.
We only went to the same school for one year, ninth grade, small town, rural wasteland, and it was the year after we had moved to West Germany. Not only did I look ridiculous in my drab communist outfit, I also was really good at school, uncool, and socially hapless. A killer combination. It was absolutely the best year for bullying me. One day Henrik decided he was going to sit on the bus next to me. I was shell-shocked. He hit my legs. We talked about music, or more accurately, he talked, and I tried to guess the right answers, the answers that would make him stop. I didn’t even understand his thick accent. To my credit, I didn’t even have to lie that much. Guns’n’Roses, I threw that out, and he stopped for a moment, surprised, a glimmer of hope in his eyes, in my eyes. Maybe we got something here. ‘You are afraid your parents find out’, he asked, and I nodded, and for a few peaceful seconds we had a deal.
‘I just knocked the bully out.’— That’s how Kevin Garnett described it, moments after winning the NBA title with the Boston Celtics, when asked what it feels to have the championship. ‘And you’re kind of shook. And the next morning when he’s not there, it’s like a sigh of relief.’ Of course the bully will come back, or some other bully, they always come back. But it feels good to get rid of the bully, even if it’s just for a few hours. I have definitely knocked a few bullies out, and it wasn’t even a plan, more an instinct. He was just sitting there on the floor, surprised, just like I was surprised about the unexpected turn in our relationship. It felt real, like going outside after a thunderstorm, and more bearable than the usual routine of negotiating, of sucking up, of seeking protection from someone else. In hindsight, most of my best friends in school were chosen to provide protection. Real friends, but also imaginary ones.
Sometimes it is a punch, in an emergency, the kind of punch people throw who never throw punches. More often it takes on a different form. Sometimes it is an insult, sometimes a mindgame that changes the relationship, the power structure, temporarily. Sometimes it’s peaceful protest, staying where you are when asked to make room. Sometimes you simply outrun the bully, a way to shift the competition to a different discipline. No law states that it’s always fists that determine the hierarchy. ‘Knocking the bully out’ is a multifold strategy, including sabotage, subversion, solidarity. Knocking the bully out is always a political act.
Every evening before school, I prayed to my child God to stop them from being mean to me, to prevent very specific things from happening the next day: snow in my underwear, shoes taken away and thrown in the tree, teeth knocked loose. I believed in a meticulous, bureaucratic God. I was hundred percent sure that I had to list every possible bullying strategy so that God was able to stop it. If I forgot one thing, it was guaranteed to happen. The list grew longer and longer. There was a lot to go through, as if the creativity of the bullies had to be beaten with a perfect memory. It was hard to stay awake while praying for bully protection, but I had to. The worst part about being bullied is not the act itself, it’s the constant tremor, the fear, the tension. Constant, every day, except for the few moments when I knocked the bully out, like Garnett, I ‘knocked his ass clean out’. A sigh of relief.
Knocking the bully out is such a powerful feeling that I applied it many times, even when there was no bully in sight. Once the imaginary friends faded away, those who protected me from real bullies, I created an army of imaginary bullies, and I knocked them all out. Giving the right answer to Henrik or finishing a PhD, really exactly the same thing. Every achievement was minimized to a single sentiment, the idea of standing up to an imagined mean adversary. Most of the time I was lacking imagination to actually create bullies from scratch, instead, I used other people, well meaning friends, ex-girlfriends, parents, advisors, total strangers, and turned them into fantasy bullies. I went to school, to university and then to grad school with hands clamped to fists, and didn’t notice that nobody was threatening me anymore.
It was a powerful force. When Michael Jordan was inducted into the Hall of Fame of Basketball, he talked about a series of adverseries, real and imagined, who forced him to get better and better, his coaches, his teammates, the journalists, even his family. I knew exactly what he meant. ‘Just another log on the fire’, every perceived denigration just another motivation, getting better just to show off the rest of the world who hates you. When I was in high school, I made up entire TV interviews where I am talking about my anticipated success and thereby taunting my imagined enemies. I saw this on my inner TV screen from the perspective of people back home, the bullies, the classmates, the teachers, who would sit in their sofas, still in the same place, still with the same problems, and wish they had me back. That’s it, people, I am famous, I am great, and you are not. And now you wish you hadn’t been so mean to me. It’s a powerful force, but it’s also incredibly stupid.
If you are going to use the ‘I beat the bully’ narrative, at least do it like Kevin Garnett, not like Jordan. In Jordan’s world, he is a tough guy. He is a winner. He’ll always be a winner. He is just knocking out people along the way, people who have done nothing wrong. He doesn’t even include the real bully in the narrative, the starting point. Maybe Jordan was never actually bullied. Maybe he was a bully in school who thought he was being bullied. But if you do it like Garnett, you start from a losing position, as someone who is not cool at all and gets beaten up a lot.
In Garnett’s story, he is the weak kid in school who some day figures out that the world doesn’t have to be like that. It’s incongruous to see a gigantic, tall, muscular man talking about being bullied at school, but Garnett has a face that is genuine and deep and sad and he can pull it off. The ensuing success is then not a way to show off, to put the others down, it’s a sigh of relief, the relief that it is possible to leave the ordinary cruel world behind and to enter something else entirely. Both are stories about overcoming obstacles, but while Jordan’s is just about getting better, a neverending cycle, repeat and rinse, Garnett’s is about being in a better place afterwards, a transcendental state-of-mind that nobody can ever take away from him.
The real problem of course is not the struggle against imaginary bullies, it’s the bullies themselves, those that make it into adulthood. Schoolyard bullies are never a real problem, and the schoolyard hierarchy bears little relation to real power structures. In real life, the schoolyard bully was always more vulnerable than me: on the way to a shitty monotonous precarious job in a village where nothing ever happens. Made redundant by the next economic crisis. Unemployment. Bread with cucumber for dinner. Death.
And I think this will be the only thing I am ever going to say about Donald Trump. I’m convinced that Trump is not really a fascist or a right-wing nut, and the American neo-nazis, the real ones, can smell that, too. For them he is a tool, a stopgap, a means to an end. Trump does not seem to have convictions or opinions like anyone else. But he is a bully, first and foremost, that means, he is abusing power to gain an advantage, or to gain pleasure, who knows, and he is doing that by exploiting vulnerable people. He is either strategically or instinctively rejecting positions that are undermining his bully goals. In the current world, this means he will almost by default, at some point, end up in the far right corner.
In this current world, the rise of Donald Trump is a clear signal that the bully will always be there. You cannot leave the classroom, this ugly space where expression, knowledge and freedom are limited by intimidation, by pretension, and by violence. The real bully will always be there, and we have to knock him out over and over again.
