Page 12 THE VILLADOM TIMES II • March 21, 2012 woven and the knuckles facing straight down to the floor. Ian Wright, on the PBS show “Globe Trekkers,” recently interviewed a former classmate of Elvis Presley who told Wright Elvis was a nobody because Elvis knuckled under a lot in school. However, no Elvis film seems to have been complete without a fist fight that Elvis won. My own contact with bullying also took place in school. The bigger guys felt they had a right to push the smaller guys around. Since the dump I attended was full of guys who had been left back two or three times, life was made miserable for people who associated class time with education rather than hanging out, picking on smaller kids, and insulting those teachers who tried to teach. The place was a nexus for the torment of bright youngsters, and of respectable teachers who needed the money and could not afford to just walk off the job in dismay. The Jewish kids got it worse than the rest of us because they were subject to religious bigotry of a type that appeals to the ignorant and envious. Absolute hell descended on anybody who was different in terms of looks or actions. In some cases, the teachers bullied kids who had learning disabilities. A lot of these people had to be taken out of school, and some of them ended up addicted to heroin or alcohol. School bullying is not a joke. Since my father preferred spending his spare money on amateur athletics rather than seeking a better neighborhood with better schools, I made a joke or two to avoid being bullied. However, I sometimes answered the teacher’s questions instead of wise-cracking and even read the assigned reading. I was branded as “intelligent.” This was not a good thing. One mild bully was named Frank. He was bigger than I was and would regularly demand to borrow a pencil, which he usually forgot to give back. One day, I saw him nibbling the eraser at the reverse tip of the borrowed pencil and saw my opening. “Hey, Frank, I wouldn’t nibble that eraser if I were you.” “I though you were so smart you never made mistakes,” Frank said, which was an insult where we went to school. “It’s not that,” I said. “I’ve got a cold and I sometimes stick the eraser up my nose to clear my sinuses.” I got the pencil back, and he never borrowed one again. Rod was more trouble. Rod had been left back three times, but his mother was on the board of education, so he was expulsion-proof. He once cut off a girl’s ponytail with a switchblade. The knife was confiscated by the vice principal, an ex-Marine combat veteran with a sense of honor, but the principal was a scared political type, and Rod stayed in school. Then Rod made a mistake. He tried to sell me “protection,” which meant that he would refrain from beating me up if I handed over my lunch money. “Logically, you could beat me up,” I admitted. He was three years older. “But look here...” I held up my compass with its long spike, an instrument Rod had probably never seen before. “Every morning before I head for school, I milk my pet cobra, Kala Nag, and keep the venom in a hermetically sealed bottle. All I have to do is dip this compass into the venom and scratch you with it, and in 10 minutes your arm will swell up to the size of your leg. Half an hour later, you’ll be drooling and howling like a dog, and an hour later...” He backed off, but a friend later heard that Rod meant to kill me and had a gun in his locker. The do-nothing principal laughed it off. My friend’s mother called the cops. The chief of police, another ex-Marine, came in with a couple of patrolmen, shoved past the whimpering principal, sprang Rod’s locker with a crowbar, and found a 38caliber revolver and a box of cartridges. The police chief summoned Rod, showed him the revolver, and then got him in an arm lock and somehow dragged his face along all the steel locker handles while taking him in for “questioning.” He was not seen in school again. What’s the point? All this bullying originated in school. Most of it originated because people displaced aggression against willing learners, and the system failed the people whose taxes paid for it. Schools around here generally are not like that, but some of the kids I tutor report that bullying still exists and they find that intolerable. We need to remember that school is an educational function, not an alternative to the adult society that takes violent people off the street and treats vicious or willfully ignorant people as wastes of oxygen. One answer to bullying could be to shorten the school day, another could be to de-glamorize contact sports and emphasize academics, and still another could be to provide vouchers on demand, without recourse to the court system, for anyone who prefers religious or private school or for any adult college graduate who is qualified to home school the kids. My education taught me considerable respect for the U.S. Marine Corps. When schools are troubled, do NOT authorize yet another study. Send the Marines. Imaginary Kipling cobras also have their uses. No one who lives in northwest Bergen County can be oblivious to the problem of adolescent bullying. No one with a heart, soul, or mind can help but wish the problem would go away – but it will not go away by itself. One of the best answers to the problem is so simple that it is generally overlooked. Let’s creep up on it slowly so we can get a good look at it before we decide to do something. Most of us first encountered serious bullying in school. I leave out here the problem of family child abuse, which was a serious problem a half-century ago, and still is, thought probably less in northwest Bergen County than in places where people live from paycheck to paycheck and take out their tension on the kids. The schoolyard bully was the stock villain of stories from the time of “Tom Brown’s School Days.” Flashman, the bully from that much-filmed tale of upper-class English adolescence, became a world-class scoundrel in a series of comic novels that took him from the Crimea to the Little Bighorn. English “public schools” – which were private schools for future public men – operated under what was called the “fag system.” The context of the word in public school jargon was “fatigue,” and meant that toffs and snobs of the near future were allowed to order toffs and snobs of the more distant future to run errands for them so they could “study.” A toff is a man who wears a top hat, and is generally not expected to perform manual or even professional labor. Professionals wore a derby, which didn’t fall off as easily as top hats. Louts wore brimmed caps, which actually allowed them to bend over if they had to tote that bale or drag a saw through some planks. Some of the public school upper-classmen abused the younger boys in ways better not imagined, let alone described, which is where the word “fag” obtained its current meaning. But even kindly parents put up with a bad system because it allowed their sons to make the sort of social connections that fended off the dread possibility of having to perform useful labor for their sustenance. An evil tradition was endorsed by the society that rich Americans frantically wanted to emulate. American-style bullying was somewhat more biological. The pre-adolescent boys clustered together -- often in a place they did not especially want to be -- and generally tried to establish who was “top dog” by seeing who might be the best pugilist. Emulating the British, Americans dropped the use of edged weapons. As a result, bullies could beat up smaller kids without the risk of getting knifed afterward. There were also religious restraints up to a point. Some Englishmen and the Irishmen, in particular, took the code of the gentleman to heart to such an extent that they generally would not launch a “sucker punch” on a weaker target. Those who wanted to establish their primacy among male peers would literally walk around with a wooden chip on one shoulder and dare anybody who felt up to a punch-out to knock the chip off their shoulder. In the South, would-be pugilists swaggered around looking for trouble and anyone who thought better of a fist-out would “knuckle under” – cup their hands with the fingers inter- The best antidote for school bullying Help is on the way Glen Rock residents Danny Palombo, P.J. Martin, Nolan O’Shea, Sam Calello, and Carolyn Patterson joined other members of the Confirmation Class at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Ridgewood to collect food be to cooked or donated to the needy through the Father English Food Pantry in Paterson.