Personal essays
Is skill and will enough to challenge might
Tom foolery
Tom Lehrer died this week. We had his album “That was the year that was” when I was growing up and I played it over and over.
I’m sure I didn’t get all the jokes, but I got a lot of them and learned to understand the rest.
I loved the song “New Math” where he takes the audience through the problem of subtracting 173 from 342 while explaining the new math where it’s “more important to understand what you’re doing than to get the right answer.”
After performing the substraction he then points out that actually this was to be done in base eight. He advises, “Don’t panic. Base eight is just like base ten, really. If you’re missing two fingers.”
His first album was released in 1953 and opened with the song “Fight Fiercely Harvard.” The song was a joke about Harvard’s football team - not exactly a powerhouse.
I relistened to the song in the context of Harvard’s current fight with the Trump administration as he urges Harvard to, “Demonstrate to them our skill. Albeit they possess the might, Nonetheless we have the will.”
The lyrics seem to capture the fight between the left and the right.
Audience
On Fridays I record a podcast of the newsletter essay from roughly three years ago.
In the most recent episode I said in passing that it’s not important to a bully that they win.
It’s more important to them that you lose.
Of course they want to win. When young the want to take your lunch money and dominate you. But more importantly, they want to see you cower and they want the people around them to see them as being strong.
It’s likely that they picked on you because they figured you weren’t strong - but that isn’t the point.
They are winning.
The nerd with all of the skill and the will is giving in to the might.
And there is a crowd around them who individually might know better but in this group watching a bull being gored is enjoying themselves.
Why?
I have no f’ing idea.
Why, in that minute, do they see themselves as the bully dominating and winning and not empathetically as the person being bullied.
They are much more like the person being bullied. In another moment they could easily be picked out of the pack to be the next victim.
But somehow they feel that as they stand cheering the winning side, they are winners.
They don’t stop to think of how they’re helping to make the world a much worse place. They’re too busy winning.
Monsters
In a recent standup routine Josh Johnson says that, “as long as we see someone as a monster, whether they are or not, we don’t really care what happens to them.”
Whether they are or not.
And that’s how a bully gets people to not care about their victims.
The bully picks on the kid who the other kids are making fun of. They bully the kid who is weak or different.
And the ones cheering the bully on may forget that we’re all different and one day the bully will point out your differences.
Johnson uses the example of people in prison who don’t have clean water, showers, or non-contaminated food. Some of us think it’s ok to treat the prisoners that way because we’ve taken time to “strip the humanity of a person whether they’ve made a mistake or not.”
Our bullies - not the kids stealing lunch money from the weak and different kids - the bullies who are destroying our democracy - they’ve gotten really good at stripping the humanity of people one group at a time.
Johnson reminds us of when we moved from being warned about criminals who were invading this country to trying to stir us about with lies about immigrants eating our cats and dogs. Then it moved to people with possible misdemeanors in other countries, or those who wrote an op ed we don’t like, or … and the next thing you know, it’s anyone the bullies don’t like.
People we’ve counted on to stand up to bullies - aren’t.
Elected officials. The media. The rich and powerful.
Us with the skill and the will are losing to the bullies. Albeit, they possess the might.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 279. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe