Bully

When I was a freshman in college, I was part of something that remains vivid in my memory. In particular, I remember the look on the face of one of the people involved: madness. Along with three or four others, he was tormenting another student on our floor, the only one in a single room, a loner, a little strange. Easy pickings. They were pounding on his door, screaming, and, insanely, lighting papers on fire and shoving them under the door. The victim, panicked, was leaning out his fourth-floor window, calling for help, banging a hockey-stick on the window below until it broke.

I was stunned: these were smart kids, privileged mostly, students at an ultra-elite East Coast college (I was their token West Coast heathen). It was Lord of the Flies in Pioneer Valley. As I ran down the hall, I saw that one kid, cackling, eyes blazing with something I'd never seen before, not in real life anyway, primal, like after a kill, a look I can still see in perfect detail. (Other than the victim, his is the only name I remember of those that were there.) Shouting stuff I don't remember, I pulled them one by one away from the door, and, after the others slunk away, convinced the kid to let me in, where I helped him calm down and clean up his room and the one below. That's when we became friends.

Turns out the mob's behavior would have been familiar to Mitt Romney, as we've all heard by now. I tend to forgive most kinds of adolescent stupidity, and I'd not generally argue that what people do in high school (college, too?) portends much about who'll they become. Pranks. Kids. All that.

But there is something about Mitt's behavior that concerns me: he claims not to remember. Attacking another kid, physically assaulting him, cutting his hair off: you'd think, whether or not it means he's evil incarnate (jury: out), that he'd remember something like that. Others who witnessed it say -- as is the case with me and my event -- they're still haunted by it. So when Rominee says it's simply slipped the surly bonds of his mind, I must conclude one of two things:

He's lying. That, of course, is his modus operandi, in virtually all matters. He's still at it, and always will be. In this case, it would be the least disturbing explanation. Because the other conclusion is that he really doesn't remember, which says something way worse. It says that the behavior was so commonplace, so not out of the ordinary for him, that it simply doesn't stand out. Attacking others, literally or figuratively, is just who he is.

To forget something like that he'd have to be entirely without conscience or empathy. He'd be the sort of person who feels no guilt in harming people, as long as it furthers the goal of his own self-interest. Among his life experiences, it simply doesn't rise to a level of remarkableness. Which perfectly describes his time as a businessman, and the way he ran his primary campaign, drowning his opponents in millions of dollars worth of attack ads.

It's what defines a sociopath. And the more I think about it, it's what seems to define Mitt Romney. Chilling. For once, he actually told the truth. (And if we should give him a pass for youthful indiscretion, his present reaction to it does say a lot about the man: it didn't even occur to him or the people who do his thinking for him to use the issue to address the matter of bullying. But I guess that's what liberals do.)

[Noted after I wrote the above, here's an opinion that goes with the lying explanation. Probably more likely, given who Romney is. And here's another take, more aligned with mine. Oh, and now another. (I often write this stuff days before I publish it. I don't claim unique insights: most of my thoughts are obvious enough that others have them, too. But I did write this before I saw the others. Like it matters, right?)]