House of Eratosthenes

If this is what Title IX is all about, we have to do something about it. Kill the beast. Or starve it. Or simply clip its nails. But for God’s sakes, let us do something.

Bullies called this kid gay. I doubt like hell they said “hey, you are a gay person.” The bullies probably called him a pansy, or a pole-smoker, or a fag.

The family of Dylan Theno, 18, filed the lawsuit in May 2004 against the Tonganoxie School District. The suit claimed Theno had suffered years of brutal bullying, and that school officials didn’t attempt to stop the harassment.

He got a quarter mil. From the school. For the treatment he received at the hands of bullies who, so far as the article mentions, did not work for the school. So now I have a crystal ball showing me a place that is Our Future, where people confront any & all problems with a lawsuit. We have no hope.

When I was a kid, I got picked on by bullies a lot…although I haven’t completely forgotten, that stuff mostly took place between fifth and seventh grades, not during my junior year of high school. I haven’t been sued by anyone under Title IX lately. So based on my personal experience, I have a lot of incentive to say bullies represent a big problem, and kids like Dylan Theno, and his lawyers, do not. But I’m not going to say that. Theno is a much bigger problem for our society than his tormentors.

Why do I say so? Because bullies are part of life. Life is bullies. Life is pretty much one solid, non-stop parade of figurative “bullies,” like reverse-fairy-godmothers, waving their magic wands over you. You wake up, get dressed, run downstairs and some days you’ll find yourself blessed by the fairy-godmother-bully of dead car batteries. Or maybe the fairy-godmother-bully of being-out-of-coffee will brighten your day. Or maybe you’ll get some pixie dust sprinkled on your head by the fairy-godmother-bully of “I’m the boss and I just had a fight with my wife and I’m going to take it out on you.”

I think by now every grown man who has any character at all, can see where I’m going with this. Life is a series of challenges. And looking back on it with the wisdom and lack-of-sympathy of a 39-year-old, reviewing the days I lived a full quarter century ago, I see that besides a few cold mornings on the paper route, and some lukewarm grades I earned myself by not doing the homework I was supposed to be doing, I really didn’t have any problems in life besides bullies. Life did get rough soon after that, but the point is that Dylan Theno took the one real exigency in life we can expect during those years…the only one…and played ostrich with it.

Manhood has given me many blessings over the years, things I wouldn’t trade for the three brand new Dodge Vipers Mr. Theno can now buy any time he chooses. Not just “I have a penis” manhood, but being a real man who knows how to take a lemon and use that internal resourcefulness to turn it into lemonade. Manhood hasn’t made me any money…not that I’m aware of. People who lack my manliness don’t look at me wistfully and say “Gosh, I wish I could be a real man like that Freeberg guy,” and because I’m a real man, it wouldn’t mean a whole lot to me if they did. But my manhood is priceless.

It has solved, by itself, every single problem that it ever made for me and a whole fistful of problems that it didn’t.

Nearly everything I have that’s good, I owe to my manhood, and conversely, I only owe my manhood to a tiny handful of various things. I owe it to other manly men I had the common sense to sit back & watch & observe, at an age where I didn’t have the common sense to do too much else. And I owe it to Boy Scouts. And a good chunk of what’s left over — I owe to bullies.

Bullies are therefore, to me and a whole bunch of other real men, emblematic of what it takes for our society to survive, insofar as our society needs real men to survive. Which it undoubtedly does. You see, you’re reading this blog entry on a computer invented by a real man, running software written by a real man, downloading my remarks through transmission protocols written, tested, refined and documented by real men.

The gavel that the judge brought down when Dylan Theno was handed his 250 large was invented by a real man.

“That’s five years of my life that I had to live — just depressed, angry, scared. I can never get that back,” Theno told KMBC-TV. “I was just miserable, you know. You wake up every morning, begging my parents not to make me go to school. It was just, I didn’t want to be there; I didn’t want to walk down those halls anymore.”

I know the feeling, kiddo. It’s part of life. And the grown-ups are pretty much unsympathetic, apparently, because they don’t have to go through it everyday like you do. And that’s true — kind of like your dad only had so much sympathy for you when you got circumcised, because it wasn’t being done to him.

And that’s kind of “wrong,” so what, now all circumcised men can go back and sue over that too?

This is crap. And you know what else is crap? Take a look at this…

Mr. Theno says he was “just miserable, you know…didn’t want to be there; I didn’t want to walk down those halls anymore.” Because the bullies were offering their opinion that he was a homosexual.

Not that I’m advocating you should let bullies determine your fashion sense.

But a man’s earrings are, so far as I understand them, a known “calling card.” If you put any weight behind my personal opinion, anyway, they definitely are. Earrings are for women and mature little girls — the message they send out from masculine earlobes ranges somewhere between “confused,” “androgenous,” “weird” and — well, let’s face it — “gay.” Having it all to do over again Mr. Theno, would it not have been a tad less drastic to simply remove that metal from your earlobes, as opposed to dropping out, getting your G.E.D., and turning our tort system upside-down?

I know it would be awfully tough for me to hear a question like that while I was cashing a check for 250 grand. But the rest of us may want to take note, there’s a sensible way & a nonsensical way to address just about anything.

Update: No new news, I was just doing some more thinking about this.

The reporter-in-the-field, on the video, makes reference to vulgar slang and I believe he used the word “epithets”. Although the exact epithets used, must be in the public record somewhere, my capability of finding them falls short of what is needed.

Why would they be relevant? Well you run through the list of them in your mind, which is what I’ve been doing, and you come to realize something. Pussy. A vagina, a feline, a homosexual male, a male exhibiting traits of a homosexual, or a male lacking masculine qualities. Sissy. A homosexual male, or a male who is not manly. Fag. A small piece of wood to be used for fuel, a matchstick, a homosexual male, or a male who is thought to not be very cool. Homo. A homosexual, or a guy that other guys just wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time with. Pansy or Pansie. A homosexual male, or a male who, if you go out to do some fun stuff with this guy, will put the kibosh on it — either by not being tough enough to do it, or by threatening to snitch.

My point is — and this is based on what I know, which is not comprehensive — it’s not only within the realm of consideration, but likely, that the bullies had the intent of calling Theno something besides a homosexual. I say likely because based on what I now know about Mr. Theno, the subordinate definitions of these words apply to him, either in fact or in appearance.

In fact, I honestly can’t think of a single word you can apply to a homosexual, besides “homosexual,” that would not also be used to describe an adolescent male showing desultory development of the desirable adult male attributes.

I have an abundance of reasons to believe that this applies to Dylan Theno, or did apply to him during high school. I have no reason to doubt this. As a matter of law, I would expect this would become relevant if Theno’s standing to sue is founded on the Title IX anti-discrimination legislation. I’m not a lawyer, but if I was inclined to bet on the school’s appeal, this would have an effect on the amount I was wagering.

None of which will probably arouse much interest from anybody at all. Except for Dylan Theno himself, the school district, and Dodge Viper dealers. All you Viper dealers, if you see Mr. Theno on your lots, maybe you should make an appointment for him to come back in a few months after the appeals have been exhausted. You might be glad later.

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A Nation Of PussiesSaturday, August 13th, 2005

A Nation Of Pussies
Saturday, August 13th, 2005