In Praise of Bullies
Hilary Taylor
Issue date: 4/12/09 Section: Features
One day earlier this year, my son came home from school quite dismayed, and not for the usual reasons (that I'm his dad and we live in a clapboard shack). This time, there was a different, wilier, less-based-on-the-smell-of-whiskey-and-failure culprit: books.
Sure, we adults know that books never did no good for nobody no-how and that book-learnin' is for uppity college folk who love putting on airs and fancy store-bought belts that you can't plug into a wall, but children are innocent and foolhardy, and still place their hopes and dreams in written words, particularly when they desperately need dreams of Somewhere Else because they come home to a dad who sometimes uses "Dude" as punctuation, and thus, is perpetually unemployable. And so, on this particular afternoon, my son expressed to me his dismay that all the other kids in his class were forming a club centered around reading the Harry Potter books, which was something he didn't want to do.
I told him that was good, because books about magic are for losers. And then I offered to take him to a magic store to prove my point, so he could gaze upon the creepy single men in their 50s who work there and will never know love, save for the love of momentarily tricking small children with a stacked deck of cards, which isn't so much "love" as it is "ineffably sad."
And then I realized: what has happened to kids today, where a child can be ostracized for NOT reading a book about a magical wizard?
When I was growing up, my peers had determined that only two things were cool: skateboarding and new wave. If you were into books about magic and science fiction, unless they were set on the planet Thrashotron, involved laborious descriptions of tubular goofy foot ollies/totally massive 720s on the gnarliest vert ramps ever, and somehow mentioned Devo, then you were a nerd, and you were probably reading sci-fi because you were busy dreaming of what Vonnegut called "impossibly hospitable worlds" where losers like you wouldn't get beaten up all the time.
Sure, we adults know that books never did no good for nobody no-how and that book-learnin' is for uppity college folk who love putting on airs and fancy store-bought belts that you can't plug into a wall, but children are innocent and foolhardy, and still place their hopes and dreams in written words, particularly when they desperately need dreams of Somewhere Else because they come home to a dad who sometimes uses "Dude" as punctuation, and thus, is perpetually unemployable. And so, on this particular afternoon, my son expressed to me his dismay that all the other kids in his class were forming a club centered around reading the Harry Potter books, which was something he didn't want to do.
I told him that was good, because books about magic are for losers. And then I offered to take him to a magic store to prove my point, so he could gaze upon the creepy single men in their 50s who work there and will never know love, save for the love of momentarily tricking small children with a stacked deck of cards, which isn't so much "love" as it is "ineffably sad."
And then I realized: what has happened to kids today, where a child can be ostracized for NOT reading a book about a magical wizard?
When I was growing up, my peers had determined that only two things were cool: skateboarding and new wave. If you were into books about magic and science fiction, unless they were set on the planet Thrashotron, involved laborious descriptions of tubular goofy foot ollies/totally massive 720s on the gnarliest vert ramps ever, and somehow mentioned Devo, then you were a nerd, and you were probably reading sci-fi because you were busy dreaming of what Vonnegut called "impossibly hospitable worlds" where losers like you wouldn't get beaten up all the time.
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