White Bully Lady
Here are some of the things I said:
Do you daydream about your own funeral sometimes, and bring yourself to tears thinking of the eulogies about how funny you were, how brave, how you “weren’t afraid to speak the truth”?
You long to be invited to get norovirus at the Mar-a-Lago buffet. You’ve planned what you’re going to wear; you’ve practiced walking in the stilettos; after an hour you’ll be asked to leave and make room for the next round of guests.
How are the book sales going? Saw you made Amazon’s top ten list of slight self-published content by mediocre white bully boys.
I’ve wondered about it since. “Am I a bully?” I asked AI.
“Thinking …” it said. Then:
“The fact that you are asking this question and reflecting on your behavior suggests it is unlikely you fit the profile of a typical bully, as those who bully are often unaware of their actions or lack empathy. However, you can assess your own behavior by considering key characteristics of bullying, which generally involves repeated, intentional, and hurtful actions where there is an imbalance of power.”
I was being intentionally hurtful; check. There is also an imbalance of power.
“Does Trump have power over me?” I asked AI.
“Yes, as the sitting President of the United States, Donald Trump has significant official and legal power over you as a citizen, as well as over all other individuals in the country, but that power is subject to strict constitutional limits.”
AI is hallucinating.
We need a better word for it than “bully.” Bully is a chubby buck-tooth boy in a striped ringer shirt, taking aim with a slingshot or holding a ball just out of reach. It sounds inconsequential. It falls into a pile of antique blocks faintly painted with nostalgic words: Bully. Wooly. Snuggly. Buddy. Lolly. Bingo. It could be a little nickname: Gee willikers, bully! You didn’t have to hit her that hard! A bit of 1950s street-gang slang: Let’s bully up to the window and watch her take off her clothes. A bygone superlative: You should have seen her choking on her own snot and tears, trying to spit out the dirt! It was totally bully, man!
We need a word with an edge, something that would make even the worst parent (or employer) feel a flash of terror or fury when an official voice slapped the label on. Something diagnostic, with decades of studies and research behind it, a word so official that it stings like an antiseptic, something that almost kills hope that the [bully] would ever recover to a normal state.
“White bully lady.” Has there ever been a creature less intimidating? Except when she’s got a cell phone in her hand, and she’s poised to hit 911. Then, White Bully Lady can be deadly. But only to some people.
Would you like to tell me, would you like to debate me, why won’t you debate me, on the topic that a cell phone in the hand of White Bully Lady could get a white man killed? Not in my experience. Cops show up and try to get people being threatened and attacked by white men to be nicer to the white men. That’s their job. It’s illegal to be mean to white men, even to shake your finger and say no!
Bullying is a man’s prerogative. The more he bullies, the more masculine he becomes. White Bully Lady is transgressive.
The First Lady, stranger to irony, had an anti-bullying project that folded like a false storefront in a ghost town. Its name, “Be Best,” had the punchy brevity and off-kilter grammar of a tattoo scrolled across a Russian mobster’s man boobs; its figurehead was the meanest of the mean girls, ready to claw her way to the top of the heap on a spin-off reality show. I don’t care, do you?
Today, they urge, we must bridge the gap by being curious instead of confrontational. My curiosity about authoritarians and their supporters is endless. White Bully Lady probably put more thought and care into their circumstances, their life stories, their speech, their disorders than any of their sycophants have.
We are told we must find “common ground,” and as White Bully Lady, I did so. We met on the field of cruelty. Some of them want to die there; they think it’ll be noble. Me, I never even got put in Twitter jail. My escape is attributable to my invisibility; my aspiration was only to leave a mark like that of a mosquito, a micro-slender needle stick whose trace may be gone in moments, or in weeks, after days of plaguing scratching and blood, or in years, if there’s a secondary infection, a few layers of skin dug away, and a scar.
Sally Wilde was just laid off from a major media organization in Washington, D.C., and needs a job.