The sight and sound of someone screaming in pain as a cop shoots 50,000 volts into him, well, it Tasers my soul.

Now I have a new trauma: the sight and silence of hundreds of students at the University of Florida sitting quietly and obediently last week as a young man was wrestled to the floor by a gang of cops, handcuffed and then repeatedly given agonizing zaps that made eerie clicking sounds. The student had no gun, only a loud voice. For this, he was tortured with a hand-held cattle prod?

Only one young woman approached the lynching and screamed at the police to stop. I don’t know who she is, but I salute her. In fact, I’ll adopt her if it turns out she’s orphaned and having trouble paying her tuition fees.

I can cope with the speaker, John Kerry, not racing down from the podium to rescue the young man. That’s Kerry. But he released a statement in which he expressed hope “that neither the student nor any of the police were injured.” What a coward. As anyone watching on YouTube could see, the police didn’t even scuff their jackboots.

Uniformed thugs

If you’re a senator and married to fantastic Heinz ketchup wealth, you don’t have to grovel to uniformed thugs. So why does he volunteer?

But the sedentary, nay inert, group that watched the student screaming, oh my. For all that liberals like me deplore human aggression, it’s worse to watch human passivity and cowardice. One of the things I like about Americans in general is their loudness in expressing their wants. They don’t sneer like the French or apologize like Canadians. They’re honest about it. So what has happened?

In 1963, Mary McCarthy wrote a novel called The Group about eight Vassar graduates. So acute was McCarthy in her painting of collective female cruelty that I have deplored single-sex gatherings ever since. Groups behave worse than individuals do. In the Tasering video, they egged each other into inertia.

There is something truly terrible about a group watching an individual being seized, harmed and dragged away. It’s very Lord of the Flies. It’s very Nineteen Eighty-Four with Winston Smith’s ultimate humiliation, finally telling his torturers, “Do it to Julia! Not me!”

It doesn’t help that the student, Andrew Meyer, is Jewish. For those who wonder how Germans stood by watching, some curious, some laughing, while Jews were stripped and humiliated in the street on Kristallnacht, while Jews were forced to eat grass, while their shop windows were broken and their goods stolen—this is how it goes. As long as it’s happening to someone else, there will always be citizens, safe and secure at that moment, watching calmly from the sidelines.

Blame the victim

After the incident became public, there was a wave of blaming the victim. Meyer was loud and obnoxious, and deserved what he got. (In fact, Meyer is a good writer. His blog is quite intelligent, as these things go.) The lovely Bill O’Reilly called Meyer a wimp, although my understanding is that all humans, including O’Reilly, react identically to electric shock. Their muscles contract instantaneously and they collapse in pain.

That O’Reilly, always so blasé about the pain of others, so sensitive when it comes to his multiple humiliations. But many of us are like that.

Next month, Dr. Jack Kevorkian will be speaking at the University of Florida. One shudders to think what campus police will do to anyone who interrupts him.

As anyone who gives and attends public lectures knows, there are always audience members at Question Time who hog the microphone, who don’t ask a question but deliver a statement of their own beliefs at great length, who mumble and miss the point. This is a given at public events. When it happens, I remain polite and answer as best I can.

I don’t have the man electrically shocked, mainly because this is the type of person most likely to buy my book at the end of the reading. But also, it’s just not done, in the same way that one does not use the same toothpick to repeatedly dip one’s shrimp in communal sauce; it’s not hygienic. It may be thrifty, it may even be harmless, but it is beyond the pale.

These are the rules of socializing en masse.

Wrong message

Two years ago, Britain’s New Labour Party manhandled one of their own delegates, an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor, out of a meeting for heckling. In the U.S., people are barred from political meetings for printing the wrong message on their T-shirt, or having the wrong bumper sticker on their car. In Canada, your fellow demonstrators with rocks in their hands may well be undercover cops who didn’t think to change their damning jackboots when they went into disguise.

Surely it is time to remember that free speech is free speech; that people are allowed to behave badly, even grotesquely, in public as long as they obey the law. But then I was born snarky, always poised to disagree with groupthink. Indeed, I spend a good deal of time disagreeing with myself and deploring my bad attitude.

Would people race to help me if I were in Meyer’s situation? I think not. Perhaps the University of Florida should offer a class in The Mechanics of the Group, with reference to Kitty Genovese and Emmett Till. If you don’t know these names, Google them and be harrowed.

Which makes me wonder, what is YouTube for? Now that I can no longer watch Steve Carell in Produce Pete skits from The Daily Show, YouTube is good for horror and shame.

This Week

I re-read Decca: The Letters of Jessica Mitford, ed. Peter Y. Sussman, to prepare myself for the newly published Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by the accomplished Charlotte Mosley. The Mitfords rode madly off in six directions as the Second World War began. Two became Nazis, Decca a Communist, Debo a duchess, Nancy a francophile novelist and snob, and Pam a lesbian farmer. But the lesson of the Mitfords (bar the Nazi ones, who were fanatically humourless) is that political disagreement is not relevant to all human relations. Life is at base extremely funny. Laughter is all.