I attack bullies here but what this weblog is really about is bully enablers and the sense of legitimacy they provide for domestic terrorists, serial killers, mass murderers, and other similar characters. Nothing helps the next Timothy McVeigh sleep at night more than beautiful women who whore themselves to the most violent asshole in the room and individuals who blame His Majesty's cruelty and violence on the victim.
But...
There may be a slight...ever so slight glimmer of hope for the American public.
You all remember how Richie Incognito the 320 pound sociopath treated his teammate Jonathan Martin? The usual result is for the bully to be deified as the ultimate example of the American male while the victim is scorned and ostracized.
It didn't turn out that way on this one occasion.
Jonathan Martin is an offensive lineman for the San Francisco 49ers (look for the big 71 on his jersey) and presumably being paid an awful lot more than most of us.
Richie Incognito is...well...where did he end up?
It appears that General Managers are avoiding him, hopefully because they feel that the fans are starting to get the message that asshole is neither an achievement nor a mental illness.
One can hope...
Fifteen years after Columbine, football obsessed parents are still criminally incompetent. This is just more Chicken Soup for the Terrorist Soul. I left a comment there. Time will tell if it gets approved.
ReplyDeleteIn another (possibly related) twist to the Sayreville story:
ReplyDeletehttp://newjersey.news12.com/news/ex-sayreville-football-coach-charles-garcia-waives-court-appearance-1.9487745?firstfree=yes
That link led me to the article but it was covered by an ad I couldn't get rid of.
DeleteHmmm. The link works for me, no ad.
DeleteAnyway, a former assistant football coach at Sayreville HS, Charles Garcia, has waived a court appearance.
He's charged with possession of steroids, testosterone and syringes.
Presumably for the HS football players.
I think most football fans like football because the competition is forced to be real. Fans demand real winners, not pretend ones. If it got out that football teams won or lost because of some kind of covert manipulative cheating, fans would move on to finance other entertainments.
ReplyDeleteI like Incognito because he’s a good poster boy for what happens to an organization’s chances to win when his kind are brought in.
I root for Martin because the more he excels, the more obvious it becomes what Incognito was trying to do to at Miami – cheat against all competition, especially on his own team.
Incognito won’t be able to use the usual bully excuse that he bullied teammates for the sake of the team. Or that his kind of asshole insanity creates winners.
It’ll be a lot easier for the rest of us to explain to our bosses that the “tough competitor” employee, is really a just self-serving destructive asshole who’s ruining that bosses organization.
And most enabler peers as well, I’m hoping.
Most forms of entertainment are facilitators. They facilitate the formation of fantasy. When you watched Private Ryan, were you not on the beach miraculously surviving when others were dropping all around you?
DeleteMale football fans fantasize that they are out there on the field crushing the competition to the roar and adulation of the crowd. Female fans fantasize that they are chosen to be the primary sperm dumpster of one player or another. I know...I purposely made that sound cheap and superficial. In both cases there is an instinctive attraction because our hunter/gatherer ancestors survived a lot more frequently if they were either alpha males or favored by alpha males.
We may live in the space age but humans have stone age brains. People have both feet firmly in the jungle. They're just violent animals covered by a thin veneer of civility.
That's why men like Timothy McVeigh can sleep at night. In their minds, they're just killing dangerous animals.
RE: Sayreville. “Dr.” Izzy sez:
ReplyDelete"Had the student simply been friendly and asked for intercourse, he could have had many buddies!”
Sucking up to the bully/alpha is the standard method of deflecting abuse onto someone of lower status, but once you've been chosen to be His Majesty's scapegoat/bitch, no one will utter a word of protest or criticism against His Majesty.
DeleteGo Rebels!
This is interesting, as I had been under the impression that successful socialized sociopaths were considered “smart” mostly because they saw situations clearly without any emotion or dogma clouding their thinking, and not I.Q. - like wolves being good at calculating risk vs reward but dogs needing training because survival is not automatic for them.
DeleteBut now I’m seeing how domesticated humans (normal people who feel social values) still have some unconscious instincts which the SSS uses for their own benefit.
No wonder so many of my neighborhood’s pets get taken by coyotes. I’ve heard of situations where the coyote entices their victim with play or initial friendliness, before quickly killing and eating them.
Ah...you understand bullies.
DeleteMartin tried sucking up. And it was a catastrophic failure. I'd say the odds were excellent that if he tried punching Incognito, the creep probably already had his response planned out as one that'd be in his favor.
DeleteBullies probably already know how they're gonna respond if the victim fights, flees, or of course sucks up (since that's the normal person's instinctive response).
I don't think Incognito expected what actually happened. The common wisdom may be changing, I'd think thanks to the internet.
So what was different in that situation?
Thanks to the internet and to events like Columbine, Oklahoma City, Sandy Hook, etc. Without victims of bullying actually committing mass murder no one would take the problem seriously.
DeleteWhat was the 1974 scandal anyway?
ReplyDeletehttp://deadspin.com/5897809/this-is-what-happens-when-you-accuse-a-notre-dame-football-player-of-sexually-assaulting-you
Couldn't find anything on that but I did find the helpings to make more of that delicious, spicy chicken soup. :)
Unfortunately it's more of the same thing I've been writing about for years. If victims like herself committed mass murder/suicide instead of just suicide the Neanderthals and their enablers might pull their heads out of their asses just enough to see the light.
DeleteIncognito was a lot bigger, meaner and scarier than his victim. In a fight he likely would have won, and would have been able to use "self-defense" as an excuse for getting to beat up some black guy.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah, he also fondled and groped up some black girl at a charity golf event. Incognito seems to love targeting the blacks.
Another giant well formed stool emerges from the orifice of family character.
DeleteSo does exploiting his neanderthalic, terrifying size and powerful celebrity to fonde up a black girl at a charity golf event make him racist?
ReplyDeleteOr would a real racist only do that to girls of their own race???
A racist is merely a bully who targets a particular ethnic group. All of them have been raised the same way by the same kind of parents.
ReplyDeleteTruly amazing how this works. Somebody who never did anything to anybody suddenly turns crazy-violent. The obvious is rarely stated: that something broke in an otherwise normal, peaceful human being. And the obvious 2nd question: Why did it break?
ReplyDeleteNo. The media “experts” would always proclaim those people had always been bad somehow, and we just didn’t know it. Eric Harris was reportedly likeable and popular in his previous school before moving cross-country to high school hell. But I remember talk of his being a psychopath/sociopath. Talk about ignorant! P/S’s rarely ever kill themselves or are ever martyrs to any cause. P/S’s are all about selfish survival, and they never suddenly change, but refine and adapt their selfish survival skills.
Before the recent semi-enlightenment, mass shooters were always pegged as self-loathing haters. Most people had a helluva time imagining what they themselves, would do if they were continuously, publicly, unfairly harassed beyond their limits, and nobody did a damn thing about it (especially authority), and the harassers wound up rewarded somehow.
I think it might be mass media, especially entertainment. In these things everybody always knows who the good and bad guys are. And good guys usually win, with bad guys usually dying in some version of the flaming crash which they themselves caused.
People forget mass entertainment is a fantasy escape. I think somehow the fiction of TV/movies/books... gets interpreted as being the only way reality works, despite the mountain of historical evidence to the contrary.
These things might be too real, too painful, for the common man to think about... until they themselves have no other choice.
Movies almost always lie about the subject of bullying. The Karate Kid series of movies and "Never Back Down" were possibly the worst examples. I wrote a very scathing post on that one:
Deletehttp://chickensoupfortheterroristsoul.blogspot.com/2012/10/chicken-soup-reviews-movie-never-back.html
Eric transferred over to Jr. High in Littleton, not HS. I think it was 7th grade? Or maybe 6th.
ReplyDelete