STICKS AND BRICKS
There is also a carnivalesque quality to a riot, where the usual everyday rules and prohibitions are suspended. Who doesn’t want to throw a brick through a window?
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It’s remarkable anyone survives their childhood, I thought, as the physio barked in my face.
A year ago, and I am in the hospital gym with a bulky, middle-aged physio, a likeable man who worked well with other patients, some of whom could barely move. I am sitting on a bench, leaning over a table, making big circles with my arms as he roars at me, “Harder, harder, faster, further! Further! Come on man!”
His face is now a few inches from mine and he is shouting. The other physios become concerned as I try to match his demands. I want this to stop. I want this fucking man to leave me alone. I want to get out of here.
It is difficult to imagine a world without intimidation. We anticipate love but are born into coercion. As a child, I expected a warmer welcome, but it is our parent’s duty to teach us to control our crying, toilet behaviour, and when to get dressed and sleep. This acculturation is to our benefit, but it will be experienced as hostile and sadistic. Then we go to school.
Schools are institutions of domination and cruelty, that break pupils before sending them out to work. The teachers torture the children and the children torture one another. I remember being pursued in the lunch hour by a particularly vicious skinhead, whose mother was a friend of my mother. He would force me into the cloak room, cover me in coats, and kick the shit out of me until I collapsed.
On another occasion, I attacked a vulnerable and often-bullied pupil with a handful of berries, soiling his shirt and making him upset. I have felt awful about this incident my entire life, but guilt and remorse can be an engine for change; how else can we develop sympathy?
Reading my biography by Ruvani Ranasinha, and the material around the time of my father’s death, I was shocked to see – and she had read my contemporaneous diaries – how angry and aggressive I was with my father. I now have a mostly benign view of him; memory working to smooth out historic conflicts – but at times he could humiliate and degrade me like no one else.
The word bullying probably comes from the Middle Dutch boele ‘lover’. The original use was a term of endearment, and later became a familiar form of address to a male friend. Only later, in the 17th century, did it become what it means now.
Bullying was a central part of the relationship between Omar and Johnny in My Beautiful Launderette. If Omar had been racially putdown by Johnny, their love was an attempt to replace hate with eroticism. The bully can’t leave his victim alone, his violence a displacement for repressed desire.
The erotic games that we play are attempts to transform trauma into something pleasurable; with BDSM, participants enact polite representations of childhood horrors. Sport also, with its fetishisation of winning, intimidating and beating the rival. Humiliation is essential to competition. You might say that sport, like politics, or certain kinds of sex, is an attempt to domesticate violence.
Donald Trump is the apex bully. His jouissance, in which his acolytes share, is almost entirely to do with intimidation and humiliation. With Trump, the other must be degraded; women, minorities, and anyone he deems a ‘loser’. Some people identify with his lack of inhibition, his freedom to say whatever he likes. All of us have fantasies about punishing people, but rarely, if ever, act on them. Trump is the fantasy manifest.
Carlo was playing basketball in the park when a jacked-up man with veins in his biceps came onto the court with his little boy. The boy was meek and afraid, and the father admonished him for his cowardice, making him cry.
Carlo wondered if the father’s build was a direct result of his likeness to his son at that age. Our egos are defensive and constructed around a fear of fragility, the adult being created out of early terrors. The father might have imagined he had escaped his own pathetic vulnerability, but there it was, staring up at him with tears in its eyes.
The so-called mindless thugs out on the street this week destroying shop fronts, torching cars and attacking mosques are some of the most neglected, disaffected people in the U.K. They are vulnerable insofar as they are not integrated into the country’s economic model, having no stake in the culture, no High Streets and no future. The white working class have good reason to riot, except that their aggression is facing in the wrong direction. Without leadership or ideology, authentic desire for political representation morphs into pointless violence.
Typically the bully orients himself around a more defenceless target, whom he can persecute without fear of retaliation. Migrants aren’t, as it is often said, ‘taking your jobs’; there are no jobs. The thug is now as insecure as the migrant, they are both adrift, and it is this identification that fuels the aggression.
The rioter, like any bully, briefly buys into the exultation of power, which otherwise he excluded from. There is also a carnivalesque quality to a riot, where the usual everyday rules and prohibitions are suspended. Who doesn’t want to throw a brick through a window? But the riots are only reactionary, a purging of resentment rather than an opening up of the political field. The single progressive outcome would be for the fascist, person of colour and the migrant to organise and see what they have in common.
If you don’t succumb to the bully - becoming a bully yourself, or compliant and dominated – you can become more powerful. If you were ever a victim, you might find that creativity provides you with authority over your experience. Even now, in my current predicament, unable to use my arms and legs, I use writing as an urgent reinstatement of the self.
Fabulous writing. The connections that you make across all of the different spheres of life: sex, school, parenting, so wonderfully articulated.
I have been watching the civil unrest over the past few days as it has played out. I have been avoiding as much of the commentary as I can and have instead been looking at the abundant footage, which I think is the best way of crystallising an informed opinion.
Some of what has occurred has been appalling, made worse by its apparent foundation on a bedrock of prejudice that is ironically extraordinarily diverse in its expression. Those who have carried out these acts of violence are well deserving of any prison time they are allotted.
I have also witnessed very uneven policing that has turned a blind eye to violence in particular cases. I cannot deny that I have seen this, no matter how much the ruling Party of Airstrip One might want me to.
I hold an opinion that, up until quite recently, was regarded as sensible: That if someone has committed an act of violence, their race, their creed, their religion, and so on, should not be deciding factors in whether they are arrested and put on trial. I formed this opinion when I was a young boy during the 1980s, when I began to get a sense that black people were more likely to be arrested and punished more harshly for committing the same crime as white people.
I have to couch this very carefully because people are starting to go to jail for having the wrong opinion.
I have come to believe that these riots are a sideshow. There are tiers of bullies. Those who rage against each other in the streets would serve themselves and their communities better by standing shoulder to shoulder against the burgeoning authoritarianism of the State that has become more disquieting in recent days.
When the faces currently cycling through our juiced-up legal system belong to unsympathetic characters there is the temptation to engage in a little schadenfreude, though some take it too far. Labour Councillor Ricky Jones calling, at a street rally, for throats to be cut, while a lady standing in the background, wearing a day-glo Amnesty International safety vest politely applauds this call for mass murder, is an image that I will not soon forget.
There are some who will laugh at the young man who was bitten on the bottom by a police dog and who will spend the next two years nursing his injury in prison. As the crimes become more innocuous and the punishments more disproportionate some uneasiness might begin to creep into that laughter.
I read today in The Telegraph, about an 18 year old who was denied bail simply for being an onlooker at demonstration that he left when it became violent. He didn't hurl racial abuse. He didn't engage in violence. He was just there.
It begs the question, how far away one needs to be from a riot to avoid arrest. Is line of sight enough for a conviction? What if I am watching from a distance through binoculars? Is staring in the direction of smoke rising from an urban centre enough to make my complicit?
It is again my opinion that we are living in the early lines of a variation of 'First They Came' by Pastor Martin Niemöller.
An authoritarian state is relentless in its search for new transgressors. The hand that is used to silence your enemy today will be the same hand that will eventually be held over your mouth.
I can only say what I will do. I will always stand against violence no matter who the perpetrators might be and I will not turn my head away from inconvenient truths.