The book I’m editing this week is about bullying in our schools and how to avoid it. The radio I’m listening to this week is NPR talk radio and it’s talking about politics. Suddenly I’m hit by the confluence of the two.

Politicians are bullying the public.

Here’s a definition of a bully, quoted from my book:

Bullying occurs when one or more individuals (bullies) impose their power (physical, social, and/or intellectual) over one or more individuals (victims/targets) with the intent to gain control over, to embarrass, or to inflict harm or discomfort. Over time, bullies repeatedly pick on victims (Olweus, 1993). Three primary elements distinguish teasing from bullying: (a) imbalance of power, (b) personal pain (physical, emotional, or social), and (c) persistence over time. In summary, bullies attempt to gain power or control over victims; bullies cause pain either physically, emotionally, or socially; and bullies persist in these attempts.

Now try substituting “political parties” for the word bully—and what do you have:

Bullying occurs when one or more politicial parties impose their power … over one or more individuals with the intend to gain control over, to embarras, or to inflict harm or discomfort.

This isn’t a perfect correlation, but I submit that’s mostly because they embarrass themselves more than they embarrass the average citizen. But the rest of it? It holds. For both political parties, I might add, but mostly for the Republican Party (because that’s the way I’m wired, though I’m trying to be kind of objective here).

Political parties definitely have more power than individual people, and they want to gain control over our votes, our money, our lives (“Vote for me!” “Send a donation!” “You’re not allowed to [fill in the blank].” (My mind fills in “be gay,” “have an abortion,” but you could also fill that in with words of your choice. I’m not trying to make this about Republicans and Democrats, but about our political process.)

But what about the “intent to harm or discomfort”? I think they definitely intend to do just that, under the guise of “knowing what’s right for us.” I’m NOT advocating anarchy, but at the same time, I think greed and fear of change are driving our political parties to say and do things that are not in our best interests. They need to go back to their roots and get their power FROM the people, not OVER the people.

Part of me says, “Those are just words, spun so that they confuse us.” (I admit to being easily confused, even going so far as to confuse myself.) But let’s look at the rest of the quote: “(Political parties) attempt to gain power or control over victims; bullies cause pain either physically, emotionally, or socially; and bullies persist in these attempts.”

Who could argue with that? That’s exactly what politicial parties do.

I don’t know what to do with this revelation that political parties are bullies. I suspect the answer is that we need to rise up as a group and do something about the bully, without becoming bullies ourselves (and therein lies the problem). But running away from a bully only makes him stronger.

There–do with it what you will, but this is what’s on my mind today.

Anything for Billy by Larry McMurtry

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

McMurtry’s books have never disappointed me. I picked up this and another, ‘Buffalo Girls’, at a flea market last month, without any sense of when they’d been written, and simply tucked into them one after the other. They were a well-chosen pair, in that both novels are concerned with converting the histories of rather unpalatable people into characters in a story worth reading, but with greater honesty than the dime novels of the early 20th century.

In ‘Anything for Billy’, McMurtry’s narrator, Ben Sippy, is, himself, a dime novelist, and arguably the true protagonist of the tale McMurtry has spun from the real history of William Bonney. Sippy’s voice and vision, his sense and durability, and the depth of his own experience provide the narrative grist that allows detail, clarity and perspective in the telling of events. “Billy Bone”, himself, proves too simple and erratic to make sense of his own being. Billy’s other trail companion, Joe Lovelady, alternatively, is too steady and phlegmatic to lend his voice. Sippy’s story, however, arcs out of an escape from genteel circumstances in Philadelphia, to land, finally, on the west coast of southern California, the two coasts of the American continent being the only “parentheses” broad enough to encompass McMurtry’s West.

If this book interests you, I’d strongly recommend reading  this review by Jack Butler in the New York Times  back in 1988.

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