The democratization of bullying: Education officials seem perplexed over what to do about online attacks by Toronto high-school kids against a vice-principal. Welcome to the world of mass media.
Bullying has always typified the media. Red-baiting went on for decades during the Cold War. Left-wing union leaders or artists were vilified and couldn’t even get letters to the editor printed. I’ve always felt reviews are largely a form of bullying. They tend to have judgments lacking evidence and recommendations (or stars) that can close a show or restaurant simply because a reviewer says so.
What the Internet does is extend the mass media platform to far more players. Instead of grousing about a reviewer in the bar after a show, or a teacher during recess, actors or kids can now react before a mass audience. It’s no surprise that when people who feel persecuted get a chance to strike back, they do so lustily, as the history of Stalinism shows.
Injustice usually spawns mirror reflections, rather than compassion for others badly treated. It’s nearly impossible to resist a chance to exercise power of the kind a media platform allows. Rather than mitigating any original injustice, it’s likely to increase the range of damage.
There’s a special problem in schools. They present opportunities for serious abuses by staff, as I was recently reminded by Brian Doyle’s novel Spud Sweetgrass. At the high school I attended, the principal shut down the student paper over a headline about him that read, “Mr. Mosey is a paper tiger.” Note the “Mr.”
Personally, I had good experiences with Mr. Mosey, based on challenging his authority and the way he responded. But authority has to engender some respect or there’s no point challenging it; and it must have enough confidence that it won’t just expel kids or throw people in jail. I’d say there’s a deficiency in this area at the moment, even though I consider myself anti-authoritarian.
Officials at Toronto’s Pearson Airport expressed dismay this week about a huge new sculpture there being defaced since the moment it opened. They seemed more shocked than appalled. They weren’t ready for it. The problem with a widespread breakdown of respect for authority is that it leaves no obvious way to improve things. You end up angry at them, inter alia, for their inability to be firm and nasty enough to give you a solid target.
If you think I have a solution to this dilemma, please let me know what it is.
Whither national liberation? The decline (though hardly the demise) of the Parti Québécois is part of the decline of a vision it shared with Third World national liberation movements in the mid-20th century. Québécois as nègres blancs d’Amérique. That vision was never about mere independence: It saw independence as a precondition for a left-wing, egalitarian society. It didn’t quite work — independence came more readily than socialism elsewhere; and in Quebec, it never came, so it remained the central demand.
They were part of their time, like the Quebec nationalism of the Duplessis years before them, which partook of the right-wing nationalism of prewar Europe, fed by terror of social breakdown, the carnage of modern war and economic collapse. That was a different Quebec nationalism.
What about Mario Dumont’s pinched nationalism? It may share some of the Duplessis quality, but it, too, is part of its time: the era of globalization. It feeds on fears, but they are fears of massive waves of immigrants who won’t “accommodate” and threaten to take jobs in an unregulated, cruel economy. The day after Monday’s election, two Montreal T-shirt factories announced relocation to Central America. They hastened to add that there was nothing wrong with Quebec’s work force; the market simply dictated a move.
Does any version of that larger national liberation vision remain in the world? Well, there’s Islamic fundamentalism. Leaving aside the rather large (I grant) religious component, Islamic fundamentalists do promise freedom from foreign, Western control and the creation of just, egalitarian societies. Some forces just seem reluctant to drop off the historical stage.
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