THE URBAN BULLY

Gramp's studies in urban fauna

Part 1 of Six

The bully is a person who looks around to find a victim for sport, not for survival. It is important to realize we are not dealing with someone who does this because they need to eat, or find shelter, or get warm. To bully is not to fulfill a physical need but this animal, the COMMON URBAN BULLY, treats it as a vital need of life. So we have to know that we are dealing with a person that is out of the normal range, one that probably is disturbed in some systematic way. A bully is not like the ordinary person.

The bully wants to find a victim that it is absolutely safe to attack. It will shy away if there is any chance at all that the apparently vulnerable prospect has strong allies, is in a herd, may have unsuspected powers, or responds with a level stare or angry words. Bullies are initially very shy.

It will run a test. In the workplace it will offer some mildly offensive comment, something that can be passed off as a joke, to see what the reaction is. There are two reactions it wants to see, ands the first is the one from the victim. Is there any sign of unsuspected strength, such as an insult to a woman producing the instant reaction that she loudly denounces the bully.

But that is not the main thing. The bully wants to see how it's first shot is received or viewed by the audience, which is all the other workers in the area. If their reaction is approval then the bully can go on to more intense comments and move in to really harass the victim, which is what it wants to do. A bully's most favored weapon is some fault or weakness in the victim that cannot possibly be removed, like a physical fault, or a small person, a weak person, or a person from a surpressed minority group. The bully will fasten on that, pull off the scab, and scrape the wound again and again, with knowledge of the damage it does and lusting for that exact result.

The bully will always be a terrific coward and it will turn back again and again to make sure that it still has the approval of its audience. A bully may forget to do this in the sheer joy it has in devastating a victim so it can sometimes be caught by setting up strong disapproval in the audience, such as an anti-bully policy in the workplace, so its actions may be followed by suspension or even dismissal of the bully. The bully will then beg borrow and steal every known legal device and procedure, exploit every opportunity to creep back into employer favor, ever ready to tell the most astonishing lies, anything to get back into the position it had. This would be viewed by the bully primarily not as a job but as an opportunity where it had something like a uniform (police) or a dominant role (foreman) or fawning approval of an audience (sports hero bully). But a bully will not ever change if allowed to return to such a role. The bully's emotional reaction to this loss is very strong but what it is regretting is the opportunity it had, and this is not genuine remorse,

Once it has a victim that functions as a victim and a safe situation with local approval, there is no limit and the bully will go on getting worse and worse. Its language will stray from the original topic and go ever deeper into personal insults, body references, and more and more remarks that involve body waste and sexual parts. This is because everyone is timid about these matters and slamming the victim with such references helps to separate the victim from the the audience and so enhance the bully's security. If there is an available type of person irrationally disliked at work, like a group politically out of favor, or an assumed sexual perversion, or knee jerk hatred of a human type, the bully's language will wander into that. So we see that where the situation starts up with reference to a work problem (lateness, alleged mistakes, methods of work) yet the bully will wander into "too busy whacking off to get up" or a"can't find his own asshole to stick his finger up" or " just like any other slut" as well as all the usual suspects such as homo, commie, whore, nerd ( a new one) and so on.

Probably the bully needs the audience but the bully is fearful it will turn on him, since his experience has been that he can get it to unreasonably turn on other victims he has worked on. The bully needs to feel safe among its audience since that is the safest place to be. And of course the bully needs to have a victim that will not threaten the bully, by failing to conform to the expected role.

The bully needs to have an audience that can easily be switched on, that will not think before it reacts to the call of the tricky word. A bully knows in some intuitive way that it need not function on the basis of truth, whether the project is to terrify a female employee with job loss, or get the crew to join in harassing a newby, or to make verbally violent attacks in various kinds of writing (review, polemics, e-mail). If the feel of the situation is that the bully is SAFE then there is simply no rational limit to the frequency of its assaults or the intensity and deepening vulgarity of its manner. One supposes that this is because the bully going at its pleasure is pretty much like a pig at a Smorgasbord restaurant. Will it stuff itself? Of course it will. It is a pig, isn't it?


Part 2 to follow

Gramps

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