THE URBAN BULLY

PART NO 2 OF 6

Dealing with the Common Urban Bully is not all that difficult, but it does take work.

The best thing is to take away its audience, in the case of writing, or to threaten to do that, especially if the audience is fictional. So a writer who speaks of being read by millions can be dealt with by reference to any study showing the numbers of people who actually read any particular item or type of item in a publication. Size of the publication in press runs, or volume of a book run can be easily obtained.

How many persons are likely to read anything that appears on, say, the opinion page of a newspaper, set against the publication numbers of the paper. Do you read them, or editorials, much? Is the bully really pretending that its tiny bull horn is the same as that of the publication, where the owner of a publication chooses to let the bully give out a little squeak from time to time. One can ask the bully if he believes that more people read his offerings than say,the weather report, reports of a junior hockey game, the horoscope. He won't answer because common knowledge blows his claim. He knows further discussion on this theme will get round to the question of just why he makes such a claim and what it has to do with the value of what he does.

However, the fact is that the true audience of the bully who writes regularly for publications like newspapers is not the number of papers sold, or the assumed readership, but the editors. And this audience, numbering in the dozens to a few hundred at the most, and not in millions, is not necessarily interested in truth or the quality of writing. This can be seen by anyone who takes the trouble to read articles listing what prices are offered, and publication rights demanded by newspaper editors who have been solicited to pick up the offerings of self syndicated writers scrounging for spots to dump their copy.

The newspaper is just a retail ad flyer with features thrown in to catch the attention of possible purchasers. Editors will want to please the advertisers, mainly, and so they will favor right wing zealots whose writing caters to the cave dwelling and intensely parochial mentality that dominates the population of businessmen. Editors will choose "think pieces" or "color" as they like to say, that will reassure their advertisers that the paper really does belong in the cave with the "right thinking people." Editors select material for publications that are in the business of selling advertisements, and their first test will be whether their customers (not readers) will like it. The editors are most comfortable with sports page writing where a lot of violent language is used to dress up pretty dull game reports and fake controversies are endlessly raked over in Dick and Jane language.
If you doubt this just ask yourself why editors would choose op ed pieces that would offend their customers, if they want to sell papers. Consider how they use the word "color" in characterizing writing and whether that usage fits with any respect at all for literary values.

Beyond the momentary fun of throwing a few tomatoes at a bully, it is much more productive to attack the bully's audience instead of the bully. Letters can go to whoever buys his product or pays his wage, attacking the supporter as being out of step. The dwindling number of climate skeptics, for instance, who do not believe there is global warming or have a vested interest in saying so, are beginning to regard each other in a wary and furtive way as they sit around the table of their right wing interest groups. Who will be next to cut and run? Who will turn on a dime, as bullies so easily do, and use his knowledge of his colleagues faults to attack them? Why is everyone repeatedly glancing at the door marked exit? The general population has been thoroughly frightened by extreme weather events so that even though it has been dumbed down by the decades of anti-intellectual assaults from the writing bullies of the establishment it may be capable of turning on them very quickly. Telling the bully or his patron that they are out of step, with details, will send ice water through the veins of the bully, and will surely cause the patron to raise its head from the trough and re-appraise the situation.

What is suggested here is that even though it may be pleasurable to throw clever or carefully developed remarks at a bully, it not really useful to answer one directly. Go for the patron. If the bully feels safe in his location, among his supporters, with friendly greetings as he comes into his office or group, he will not be deterred by any number of merely verbal counter attacks on himself, no matter how untrue or venomous his material. That will all be like water off a duck's back. The squawking of victims may even entertain the bully's audience affording the bully a chance to really luxuriate in a perfect riot of scornful abuse.

But if the audience or patron has not been tested before, it may very well recoil under attack, and that will terrify the bully in a way that is truly astonishing to see. The bully will suddenly turn on a dime, it will plead that if the patron (usually an editor) will just tell it who is to be attacked the bully will do it right now, even if the new target was the subject of praise yesterday. The bully is not encumbered by ethics or a conscience. And a display of this startling flexibility by the bully will lower him a lot in the eyes of the patron or editor who will start looking for a writer made of sterner stuff.

Part 3 to follow