Sources of Childhood Cruelty
Don't tell me you don't remember
Ingenuity
I was listening to the audiobook of Original Sin, the untold story of how every Democrat secretly knew Biden was senile all along and were shocked—shocked, I tell you—but not shocked enough to speak up about the mental degeneration of the 46th President of the United States of America. The book claims that one reason why Biden stayed in the 2024 race for so long was that he had overcome so many other apparently unsalvageable situations, including the 2020 primary and, early in life, a stutter.
The kids of Biden’s generation were hard. They had no understanding (to the extent we understand stuttering even now), no modern pieties, and no mercy. They called him Joe Impedimento and Dash, after the dash in Morse Code. Brilliance sometimes achieves a polish that only cruelty can give.
Children are unafraid creatively, free with their associations, secure in their play and seemingly immune to the fear of failure. When you combine that flexibility of mind with a cruel streak, the results are as Joe Biden experienced them, stumbling over his words in a schoolyard of mocking Catholic schoolkids.
Whoever came up with Dash had a real future in advertising, and I hope they were punished by taking it.
Squishiness
After finishing my reading about poor Joe and having my sophisticated adult thoughts, I was at the mirror of my bathroom cabinet, plucking a few stray eyebrow hairs. My eyebrows have either mislaid or ignored their genetic instructions and grow to crazy lengths in all directions. I have what you might call a semi-monobrow, but only on the left side, which I tolerate until the hairs start growing a little too close to the sun. I remembered that one girl in school described me as having two and a half eyebrows, a barb that is now about thirty years old.
That set me to remembering the time in my childhood that a kid called me fat at my local park, which triggered a total and age-inappropriate meltdown despite the fact I was skinnier than a pine sapling. Somehow this insult, literally childish, hit me like the judgment in Kafka’s “The Judgment” and will be the closest I ever come to viscerally understanding that story.
The primary victims of kids’ cruelty are kids. Kids very selves are squishy, they retain impressions. As emotions whirl and a sense of self slowly hardens, this cruelty hits deep, in the places where adult vulnerabilities are formed and nurtured far from sight.
Incident
Teenagers are notoriously cruel human beings, but teenage cruelty is personal. Memories of cruelty centre around a character: the bully or the nemesis, whose name is uttered with relish and disgust, decades later, with half a laugh, a portal to a private hell.
Teenage cruelty comes with characters attached. Childhood cruelty arrives in incidents, the nastiness packaged into a memory that bubbles up alone. If a name is attached to it, you say that name with a hollow sound, disbelieving such a person once loomed so large over your life.
There’s something weirdly ambient about childhood cruelty: it wouldn’t really occur to me to be mad at the people who said the things I was remembering earlier. I suppose this is because whatever hurts I’ve retained, from all that way back in time, are richer and more vivid than my sense of the people who said them. Childhood cruelty comes almost out of memory itself.
Observation
Children see and they say. What they experience comes from beyond gauzy social graces and what they voice can be almost objective, a dispatch from the world as it is. If a child tells you your breath stinks, it stinks. Children trying to be cruel to adults are funny. Not trying, they can wound like no one else.
Equality
Teenage cruelty is embedded in status hierarchies that are comprehensible to us as adults. We no longer venerate the cool kids in the same way, and many of us have acquired new sources of status since our teenage years.1 We may even take a quiet delight in the upending of the hierarchies that governed our lives back then, the revenge that time can take.
But the basic structure of the teenage world—a world which reveals disparities in talent, charisma, and social graces, and heaps unequal rewards upon the blessed—well, that’s our world.
Among children, status isn’t quite real in the same way. Children don’t have better jobs, hotter partners, or fancier cars. They don’t have fixed places in the spheres of cool. Kids can have money through their families, but even that guarantees little. You can have a swimming pool, or a video game everyone wants to play, but material power alone is contemptible in a kid. Deep down, no one respects a kid with stuff and no other merits, not even their so-called friends.
Childhood is a semi-egalitarian kingdom. That’s not to say everyone is equal in a playground. The fact that they’re not is the very fact that must be accounted for. What makes the strong and the weak the way they are? What is the difference, deep down, between you and the kid who ignored you, who invented a nickname for you, who said you smelled, who made you cry? Physical strength aside, there are no nice, neat explanations for why one child should have power over another, and even strength is not sufficient.
The true leveller is emotion. Kids grow strong because cruelty washes off them, because they’re inured to it like cold or pain, or because they’re unassailably positioned as the one dishing it out. In differing relationships to cruelty, roles form. Childhood shows us the persistence of inequality without hierarchy, full of roles are arbitrary and yet full of destiny.
And that’s what childhood shows us that is so uncomfortable to understand. When there’s no true explanation for why you were treated the way you were, you have to reach inwards. Even on the receiving end, childhood cruelty reveals something about you. Whatever happened, happened only to you.
The weird persistence of advice about standing up to bullies—even in situations where that is clearly and grotesquely inappropriate—happens because everyone knows this: kids know it, adults know it, and they know the only sure way to address the root cause is to cease to be the kind of kid that is picked on. Whether we mean to or not, this lesson gets passed on.
But we never do stop being that, do we? As Biden’s brain exits the scene, the memories I’d bet any money will be last out the door will come from the primordial past, from the schoolyards of Pennsylvania and Delaware, and as the heads of state and advisors and celebrities and rivals of a political lifetime retreat into the haze of age, as a fuming young Dash struggles to form his words among the roaring Catholic schoolkids, as he stops, starts, stops, starts, he swears to himself the bloodiest of oaths that he will show them all, he will show them just how wrong they were, he will be great, and he will stay great.
And for this we are very grateful.