0708blog
Bully, Bully
It was the start of ninth grade lunch period at Eastbrook Junior High School and Robert H. had just sat down when, out of nowhere, Edward “Butch” D., the baddest bully in school, cold-cocked him twice in the face, bam, bam.
Robert was a skinny kid. He went down like a sack of rocks, his nose bleeding, his glasses and books went flying and everybody else in the cafeteria was dumbfounded, except for Butch who picked up his sneakers and casually left the lunch room with a smirk on his face.
Robert’s crime? Butch had asked or rather ordered Robert to pick up and hand him his sneakers. Robert apparently wasn’t quick enough and Butch did the only thing that a bully does.
I’m not using full names partly to protect identities but mostly because I don’t want Butch to read this, if he can read and if he is still alive and to find me and beat me up.
In my research, I found that there was an Edward D. with the same last name as the bully Butch. But he was a urologist in Freehold and I don’t think that bully Butch was in the medical profession.
Bully Butch’s father was a teamster and freight elevator on the docks of Jersey City and Butch was last heard of in 1970 when he escaped from the Annandale Reformatory where he’d been serving an indeterminate sentence for a bar shooting.
As for Robert H., he did fine in life. He recovered from the assault and soared to the ranks of vice president of the Teterboro School of Aeronautics in Teterboro before he died in 2015.
There were other tough guys at the school but for some reason, they never bothered me. To my knowledge, none of them were very successful later in their lives when they could no longer do what they did best, bully.
Among the tough guys was Richard A. aka “Paste” who was a pretty good wrestler and was the first on the team to wear panty hose to practice and nobody dared to make fun of him. He died a few years ago.
Then there was a guy named John C. I recall the talk of the school one day concerned a fight that John planned after school behind the high school. It turned out to be not much after John sucker punched his classmate who quickly cried uncle and gave up. John C. later worked in construction and died in 2003.
James “Jimmy” L. also hung with the tough guys but I never heard of him bullying anyone. He was a pretty accomplished pole vaulter for the track team and served a tour in Vietnam. I last saw him in 1975 and he had shaved his head.
Bruce C. , who died a few years ago, came from a family of tough kids. Under his photo in the school yearbook were the comments “there’s nothing like a dame” and “always in the soup.” Campbell used to relentlessly pick on my friend, Fred, who later developed schizophrenia. Campbell had a pretty good career as an electrician.
Victims don’t like bullies but the rest of us have a perverse affinity for them. It’s every student’s fantasy to be tougher than the rest and to win at any cost. They may use their muscles and bluster to win in school but bullies invariably have lousy homelives, including abusive fathers and usually don’t amount to much after they leave school and their bullying ways.
I bring up these recollections to make a few points about President “Bone Spurs” Trump, who would fit right in with the Butch, John, Jimmy and Bruce gang. If the latest tell-all by his estranged niece is to be believed, then the president’s father was abrasive and harsh, shorthand for a bully and that Trump learned his lessons well.
Trump is hugely popular among the wannabe bullies. They see Trump as a romantic gunslinger who will simply take the woman he wants and rub out anyone who gets in his way and stop at nothing to win, which includes cold-cocking his foes.
And that was and remains Trump’s style. He was tremendously successful when he taunted, insulted, ridiculed and demeaned Hillary Clinton. She didn’t stand a chance against the barbarian as he paced behind her like a hyena who smells blood.
Joe Biden will be crushed if he debates Trump. Trump will no doubt mock Biden for his age and his stutter and he will be relentless in telling lies about everything from the shining economy, to the COVID 19 “hoax“ to the terror of the Antifa and Black Lives Matter movements.
Biden would be raw meat and he would spend the debate reacting to Trump’s assaults leaving little precious time to give his own points of view.
And the headlines on Fox the next day will be “Trump trumps ‘Sleepy’ Joe.”
New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has some good suggestions about how to defang the predator in chief. In his column, Friedman said Biden should agree to debates only if Trump produces his income tax returns and agrees to independent fact checking immediately after the debates end. Otherwise, there’s no debate.
It’s about as likely that Trump agrees to both caveats as he will agree to name Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the Supreme Court.
But Trump’s popularity is subterranean and he needs the stage of the national debates to churn up his base and strut and spout his twisted, angry versions of reality like some deformed peacock.
Biden’s popularity is rising and he may not need the debates as much and certainly does not need to go toe to toe with the bully in chief. The only way to defeat a bully is to return the behavior in spades and Biden is too much of a nice guy to pull that off.
Of course, it is a calculated risk. If Biden won’t debate, the right wing will surely try to crucify him as being wimpy and afraid of Trump. And Trump is surely salivating over the chance to claim that Biden won’t debate because he’s afraid the nation will learn more about the “scandal” involving his son.
Either way, you can be sure that the Trump team will resort to slime and hopefully, this time, it will be in a losing effort. Get out the disinfectant.