On Daily Kos, Snoopydog’s post about his life as a page brought back some weird flashbacks of how early the class struggle begins - and how chibi-elitism can be fetishized by all the adults around.

I’m not sure when I first heard of congressional pages. I lived in a dismally backward rural area, so it was probably later than most. What I do remember is that in early high school, I associated pages with debutantes. It was something that classy people did, and therefore I wanted to do it, too. For some sad reason I didn’t make the jump from “rich people get to do this” to “patronage position”: I thought I would apply, and that my grades, test scores, and perhaps an essay question would be reviewed by some committee.

My hopes were raised when the daughter of the posh family in town actually became a summer page. Before the likelihood of becoming a page was about as likely as a prince on a white horse trotting up to the porch of my house. Suddenly being a page was something real people actually did.

If I respected the laws of reality, I would have applied to be a page, all my hopes and dreams would have been crushed, and I would have accepted my fate as a Dollar Store check-out girl. However, I found a way to beat the system. Through a weird, twisty, outright outre series of events I got a save-the-po’-folk scholarship to a D.C. prep school for a year, and they placed their students as congressional interns (yep - like Monica Lewinski was a White House intern). So while my hometown’s prissy prom queen was a page for a summer, I was an intern actually doing staff work for a year. It was a “world turned upside down” moment, and it’s an experience I’ve treasured for many years.  

There’s a few things I’d like to underscore here. First, pages aren’t the only kiddies running around Capitol hill.  They’ve achieved a symbolic status, probably precisely because they are beneficiaries of patronage. They’re not just working in the center of political power, they are scions of wealth and/or privilege. Before Monica, did anyone  ever speculate on the sex life of scantily dressed congressional interns? Youth and beauty isn’t enough - pages represent flirtation (pun absolutely intended) with power.  It’s naughty, it’s dangerous, and it possibly has a skull-and-bones-esque sort of elite cultishness.

And who wants to bet the slobbering voyeuristic public is solely interested in the seduction and/or sexploits of pages? Go into the XXX section of any shady video store two months from now, and I’ll be there will be titles like “Pages Gone Wild”.

While I was an intern, I didn’t see anything untoward going on (though it’s possible I just wasn’t anyone’s type). It might be worth casting the net a little wider to all the Congress-kiddies. I have a feeling, though, that the public is just interested in the pages - for the exact same reason  our wayward elected officials are. There’s a romance about being a page, and they’re easy to fetishize.

Disciplinarian parents who ignore the viewpoint of their children may be contributing to the obesity epidemic. The tentative explanation is that children overeat to cope with stress. Parents who set out rules, but listened to their children and provided them with a sense of security, had children with the fewest weight problems.

There’s a lesson for society as a whole here. Subjecting the most vulnerable members of society to constant insecurity isn’t an incentive to try harder, it’s an incentive to find ways to alleviate the stress. No matter what obesity-pundits say, food is an effective and cheap way of reducing stress. Business and government are currently being obliged to adjust to the reality of inceasing rates of obesity. The efforts seem to be focused on setting more controls: deprive people of food, berate the character of people who have “let themselves go”, and bemoan “addiction” on all the afternoon talk shows. Perhaps instead of spending all this time and money on damage control, which seems to be rife with humiliations that will only make the problem worse, people should consider providing more checks on rankism. Allowing open season to abuse the most vulnerable members of society has resulted in a tremendous cost, and the bills are now coming due.

In the U.S., nothing brings out the policy wonks like the subject of health care. The profits of the health care industry have been soaring, while the legions of uninsured has reached a staggering 48 million.

One under-explored angle on this problem is the culture of rankism that infects the medical community and plagues the major health care organizations in the U.S. While Britain has engaged the medical community in a public discussion of physician-on-physician bullying, similar concerns in the U.S. have been downplayed. However, the U.S. public is slowly coming to realize that dysfunctional administration profoundly influences the delivery of health care and leads to many unnecessary deaths every year.

Interestingly, the controversy over investment in a national EMR, has opened a wedge between traditional physician interest groups and the advancement of technology, which has allowed a few mavericks to break ranks and debunk the myths that have granted the MDeities fate-making powers over those in need of medical care.

Mounting evidence of medical student abuse (particularly in regard to women), suggest that subjection to hazing in medical school shapes physician attitudes about rank and entitlement later in their career. As long as rankist practices and traditions remained hidden behind the cloak of “professional matters”, there could be no public comment on the gross social and organizational distortions created by physician culture. Now, as the death toll mounts, it has become evident that medical student abuse and endemic rankism in health care organizations are problems that demand public attention and legislative oversight.

I just read a terrific article on mobbing. I learned that the term mobbing comes from ornithology:

Every so often birds in a flock will turn, as one, on a perceived threat (either outside, or inside their group) and harass some luckless victim into flight or exile. It often seems less a response to genuine danger, than a reflexive action making for collective cohesion (”we’re all in this together - except that bastard over there. Let’s get him”).

In an academic context: “mobbing is a way in which academic groupings - departmental or sub-departmental - create reassuring solidarity and togetherness for themselves.”

The most interesting observation touched on the irreversibility of the acts that feed the moment of mobbing: “But a spotlight is now constantly directed on the mobbee. In its glare, very few people can maintain impeccability. Any lapse is seized on as confirmation. The dossier swells. It never shrinks.”

Recently, I’ve seen attempts to make the ex-president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers, the posterboy of mobbing. I just can’t buy that because Summers used (abused?) his position as the leader of an elite institution to push out others, and degrade women as a group. Sometimes it’s hard to tell mobbing from democracy, but I would say that when someone has long benefited from leading the mob, and he’s finally on the receiving end of a sorting out - that’s probably democracy.

Also, I wouldn’t want to see mobbing used as a shield by the corrupt leadership of the University of California.

The people who are really vulnerable to mobbing are those at the bottom, those who people don’t give a second thought about after they’ve been “disappeared”. I wish there was more high profile media coverage focusing on them. I want to hear about the file clerk who was mobbed - perhaps to preserve group solidarity based on sex, race, or religion.

Online, I’ve seen many cases in forums where the group leader (a “moderator” or an “admin”) signaled open season on a target, and hordes of people who were just passing by will jump in on the pile-on with obscene glee.

Mobbing is also a form of rankism. Instead of a high-ranking person abusing their power, mobbing is about abusing group authority. Members of the group are granted rank to enforce the “general will”. The result is the opportunity to release frustrations that have been suppressed in other areas. This sort of bloodletting reveals all that is horrifying about human nature. Hopefully the problem can be mitigated by education and social consensus.

This is a case of the criminals running the prison if I’ve ever seen one. It’s utter rankism for guards to assume they are allowed to engage in the behavior that the inmates without their rank are being punished for.

One of the tricky things about the U.S. legal system is that people have to arrange their grievances to fit the existing law. The woman who won a $500,000 judgment against the company that spanked employees deserves every penny. However, it should give us all pause for thought that the lawsuit had to be constructed around sexual harassment. Are we really missing the legal foundations to defend workers against deliberate humiliation by superiors? Why wasn’t this a class action suit?

If even half of this is true, I hope the plaintiff wins a definitive, precedent-setting verdict.

Unfortunately, this case will probably add to the widespread perception that women exercise their power in petty, bullying ways.

If the results from a University of Maine study can be construed as representative of university life in the U.S., more than one in five students have witnessed hazing. A quick glance at the news reveals a surprising number of hazing incidents (including the hazing murder of an Iraq veteran), and efforts to protect the victims through enlightened policies and legislation. Here is a good general resouce on hazing.

Apart from protecting the victim, I think the high numbers of witnesses who apparently do little or nothing call for a renewed public discussion about the bystander effect. This is a difficult topic to bring up, especially if you’re trying to point out and prevent the Bystander Effect in progress. In my experience, anyone who is part of the Bystander group will have a knee-jerk defensive reaction to the implied accusation rather than using the information to redirect their attention and help the victim. Perhaps what we also need is a social pact that makes it safe for people to bring up a Bystander issue: i.e., no hostility, retaliation, ostracization, or attempts to turn the group against the person who dares to point out Bystander behavior. The Bystander Effect is real, and a quick glance at all the news stories about hazing shows that people are getting hurt and even killed because of the social obstacles to intervention.

An interesting Wisconsin State Journal article argues that the Left and the Right are uniting in opposition to the Bully video game. It would be interesting to see if there’s a line between supporters and opponents that can be drawn elsewhere. For instance, would the positions reflect a generational divide? Or perhaps the battle over Bully is defined by economic as opposed to political positions: is this a free market vs. planned economy showdown?

I’m personally still in favor of parents choosing not to buy the game instead of banning it. I think it’s providing a terrific focus for conversation about bullying.

Also, I learned today that 160,000 students have reported skipping out on school because they fear being bullied. I wonder how this number would look if other strategies to avoid bullying were factored in. For instance, my father drove me every day to a school in another town for my senior year in high school to dissuade me from dropping out of my hometown school. I was bullied extensively as a classic chess nerd - though it was probably more of a problem that the social status of my family and my dollar store clothes didn’t match my upper class-ish abilities and interests. Nothing drives people crazier than a person that’s difficult to categorize.

I often wonder if the mass unsettling of categories isn’t the root of a lot of reactionary politics today. A lot of people have attempted to assert equality without any financial ground to stand on since the 60s: this probably looks like chaos from the perspective of the traditionally privileged. No wonder our government and the media are looking for any rationale - scientific or religious or judicial - to put people “in their place”. A banner example is Tom Delay’s shifty agenda for moral fitness. For the reader’s benefit, here’s a defition of “moral fitness” from a philosophy web site:

Moral fitness theory is a rationalist theory that includes the notion that the human mind is able to grasp the various moral relations that result from the essential natures of things in the universe; e.g., the nature of humans and God creates a relation that necessitates the allegiance of humans to their superior (this view was made most famous by Samuel Clarke).

The idea of “moral fitness” probably sounds comforting to the people dismayed by the confusion and contradictions of the modern world. However, I imagine it’s a lot more comforting for those who deem themselves to be the “superiors” than those who are shoved into the class obliged to proffer a natural “allegiance.”

In Britain there’s currently a debate about whether a tough-talking celebrity should be leading the effort to stop bullying. The case of Jodie Marsh brings into focus a number of questions that usually get sidestepped in public conversation about bullying. First, is the person who fights back also a bully? My sense is that there is considerably social pressure not to fight back. Most of the conceptualizations are patently negative: “two wrongs don’t make a right”, “you can’t fight rankism with more rankism”, “revenge”, and even “terrorism”. It seems to me that this predictable social response supports bullying.

What happens when bullying occurs, and the public fails to support the target when the target fights back? This sends the message that it’s better to take the initiative in a conflict because the public will help pin the victim down. This invigorates bullies with the confidence that they will get away with aggressive action. Also, when other victims see that they will be punished with social disapproval and ostracism if they try to fight back, they will be less inclined to try: their only choice will be to comply. This is exactly the situation that bullies want.

Another question is whether a person who fights back is a good role model for children. It seems to me that there are different kinds of role model. Jodie Marsh is not a role model for turning the other cheek and passively accepting bullying. She is a role model for assertive responses to bullying, and at this point she can provide the victims of bullies with some insight to the bully’s point of view. It all comes down to how society views role models: are they there to reinforce hierarchy or are they there to help children think for themselves and stand up for themselves? Jodie Marsh is obviously a flawed human being. But we are all flawed human beings. Maybe children would be better off talking about the decisions Jodie made than feeling obliged to live up to the example of someone who is presented to them as perfect.

The ideal situation would be to explore at least three scenarios: the person who triumphs by repaying bullying with generosity, the person who repays bullying with more bullying, and the person who ended up in the hospital because they internalized the social pressure not to fight back. Without incorporating at least those three points of view, the anti-bullying movement will soon be mired in platitudes, without a sliver of hope for effective policy or social change.