"The Deadly Gaze of American Love"
By Mark Sashine
"The cat then hugged the mouse and purred, 'I love you to death.'"
- Old Turkish saying.
"The Deadly Gaze in the U.S.: Several years ago I wrote that the U.S. behaved toward Iraq like a rapist who, after raping a woman, tells her to clean herself because of her disgusting appearance. I was expecting a barrage of comments, but, instead, I got silence. In the U.S., however, silence doesn't mean assent; it means a deliberate ignoring. Somehow they are okay with an act of killing performed by a man with a gun.
In my research to understand that pattern of brain passivity, I several times stated my perceptions directly into the faces of my fellow Americans. Whenever I did that, the reaction was the same. The person would look sideways and say nothing. I tried to catch that frozen gaze on the person's face, and, when I managed to do that, I recognized it as a gaze I hadn't seen for a very long time. It was the gaze of a bully from my childhood. You can sometimes notice such a gaze in dogs. It is the deadly gaze.
The Boy With the Deadly Gaze: He was transferred to our school when we were in the 5th grade, so most of us were about twelve at the time. That was the age when a teenager "grows out of his uniform," as one teacher said. Of course, in Russia at the time, we didn't have cell phones or the Internet; we didn't even have good clothes. Most of us wore uniforms: greenish-gray pants and jackets for boys, white blouses and brown skirts for girls. We were the "young pioneers," and each of us had a triangular red tie, symbolizing equality, fraternity and liberty, as well as the sacrificial blood of the martyrs of the Revolution. The strict collective code of honor included studying hard, helping other people to learn, helping the weak, and respecting society by behaving properly.
At the same time, every teenager of our time lived most of his or her life on the beat, and we learned the unwritten "street rules' by experience. As an overweight kid, I had a tough time. No matter what happened between us kids, the worst possible thing you could do was to rat on your peers to adults. We had our rules, though: It was a shame for a boy to hit a girl and for a girl to instigate a fight. It was a shame to hurt someone weaker than yourself, unless that someone had asked for it. And it was a shame to tease old people and to torture animals. Not that we were perfect: We smoked, drank (sometimes with tough health consequences), stole things, fought ferociously and cruelly, cheated on homework and exams, lied repeatedly, and disturbed the peace. But I could say we were honorable. The bully wasn't, however. We saw this from the start.
He was a tall, lanky, blondish boy with a strange, sticky voice. When he talked, it seemed the words came out of him in slow-motion. We noticed his voice first, because it was full of sh*t. He used profanity as a primary way of communication. It was kind of like the way movie characters talk these days. We all used bad words, but coming from him they sounded exceptionally dirty. He had two followers who looked very much like him, though not as repulsive, and this unholy triad roamed the school hallways and nearby streets night and day. Nobody knew where he lived; it seemed as if he could appear and disappear at will. You could go out for groceries and bump into him. He would then perform his ritual of pretending to be your friend, pawing you, especially if you were a girl, then complaining that you didn't appreciate him, so he had to hurt you for your own good.
All that would usually end with some really dirty thing, like throwing your groceries on the pavement and stomping on them, throwing stones at your pet, or lighting a match near a girl's skirt so that it created a huge hole in the only uniform she had - etc, etc. While his goons laughed their ears off, he never laughed. Instead, his frozen smirk seemed to become more like a mask and his expressionless gaze would get uglier than ever. Sometimes he would force a kid to do something dirty to others; he called it a coalition. That wouldn't last for long, however, because you could never satisfy his perverse appetites. Eventually, he would discard his temporary allies and hurt them even more. At that time, I didn't know about moronic evil, or such terms as "sadism." If had known about them, I would have recognized the pattern in the bully. But I was a bookish boy, and I recognized him instead in references I encountered to the Hitlerjugend and the SS. The bully was like them. In books about the Nazi culture, the training of young children that deprived them of a social conscience was described in gory detail. One of the main goals was to develop in them a sense of total indifference to, and contempt for, "others"- the inferior beings, whether animals or humans. The children were also pushed to have fun hurting people. In that context, our own bully was a "natural."
People noticed his behavior and tried to change it. Teachers warned him repeatedly, and the pioneer organization threatened to take away his tie (a very tough public punishment). One day, when he had been caught in some bad action, he put on quite a spectacle, promising to change and become a better person. To the kids who were his victims, though, this was a disgusting sight. We all knew he didn't mean it. The smirk was there all the time.
That's when those of us who had been hurt by him decided to take the matter into our own hands. On that rainy evening, we took off our red ties after school as usual, but we didn't go home. Instead, I went to intercept the bully, leaving the others ready to back me up. He was at his usual place and called me to approach, but I told him to f&ck himself, and when he started toward me in his deliberately menacing posture, I ran. Then the bully, accompanied by his two allies, followed me down the street and into the dark stone passage, through the cast-iron gates. Those gates were usually closed, but this time they were open. Right after they passed the gates, I reached the end of the passage, where the exit gates were closed. And at that moment a screeching sound told us that the entry gates were also closed. I stopped and looked at them. Then the shadows along the passage walls came alive and the enemy triad found itself surrounded, with nowhere to run.
As we presumed, the two butt kissers betrayed the bully in a second. We pushed them away, threw a blanket over him and started hitting. At that moment, we forgot that he was always bragging about carrying a knife. But, in this circumstance, he was lucky not to have one; if he had been carrying a knife, the enraged kids would likely have killed him with bricks. We knew this was our day. The deal between us was that we would stop punishing the bully when he began to cry. But he didn't cry. For some time we could only hear ourselves, our own animalistic rage. Suddenly, however, we heard a howl. He howled like a wounded beast in a paroxysm of helplessness and desperation. Then we stopped. We opened the gates on both sides and left in silence. None of us felt any satisfaction. We were just tired and empty. The one girl among us saved our souls that evening. When we all stopped to go our separate ways, she took out our red ties, which we had given her for safekeeping, and neatly put a tie on each of us. Then she smiled at us all and vanished into the darkness. The burden was lifted. We knew we had done the right thing.
The bully didn't come to school in the morning. The two others came, but they knew nothing of him. Eventually, we heard that his parents had transferred him to a special school for kids with psychological problems. We never saw him again and, for some reason, the bullying among ourselves also stopped entirely. None of us wanted to be like him, ever. We had all grown up.
When as a parent you introduce shame to your child, you do that by appealing to the child's sense of empathy and of self-preservation. Those are connected in a thoughtful human. Empathy tells you that you inflicted something on another person that you would not like to be subjected to yourself. And the sense of self-preservation tells you that the same kind of hurtful action could be directed toward you. Those realizations make you feel ashamed of your actions: you see them as not only mean, but also stupid. A person with no concept of shame, who sees the world only as an object for self-indulgence, is the bad seed. Such a person belongs in an asylum. From Reagan to Cheney and Obama, we have such people at the highest levels of power in the U.S. It is bad enough if one person is shameless. But what if this disease were to spread through the entire nation?
Our Gaze at the World: I have been living in this country for 28 years now, and through all those years we have been at war, either directly or indirectly. Here are the places I remember since Y1989: Iraq, Kuwait, Somalia, Panama, Sudan, Kosovo, Lebanon, Haiti, Iraq again, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. In all these cases, we had our fun. We killed a lot of people after leaning on them, pretending to be their friends, and proclaiming our love. In all these cases, we denied any atrocities and vehemently called ourselves the best people in the world. In these cases, too, as well as in numerous cases before, we forced other people into a "coalition" with us.
Yet, NONE of these cases produced any positive outcome. In fact, we considerably worsened the world economy and devastated political structures, creating chaos and misery whenever we went. Those are the facts, and they are indisputable. If it wasn't for that insane gaze of ours, all of us here in the U.S. would be on our knees begging God's forgiveness. Instead, we celebrate after we've destroyed anything that even remotely resembles honest work for honest pay. We are truly unbelievable, and my little psycho-bully would fit in here very nicely. He would be in charge of some important department, and the media would be calling him "Slow, but Smarty, Mike," or whatever his ugly name was. The presence of the bully here has become so obvious that every morning I am afraid to see his face on TV. Sometimes the bullies come back, courtesy of Stephen King. They eat their breakfast, send their kids to school, and then proceed to spread their deadly love over other people, leaving dead bodies behind.
Americans are sick, and that sickness overtook them in the 20th Century when they benefited immensely from other people's miseries in two World Wars. Since that time, they have felt superior to other people and that feeling culminated in the BOMB. Not only do we have the BOMB; we actually used it and got away with it. Nobody threw a blanket over us and kicked us bad. Our hubris rules supreme. Our religion tells us that we are the freest, the smartest, the most righteous people on earth, and thus all our actions toward others are GOOD. We claim the right to dominate others, because we indulge ourselves and believe we are by default the ones who deserve it. Do you recognize the logic? It is the logic of a shameless, bratty toddler. There is no real love there, just self-adoration. We behave like a child who is "asking for it," and anyone who is at least a half-wit should become very worried indeed. Humankind is not very different from a middle school, and eventually the shadows will separate from the walls. Do we really want to risk being exposed?
I Am Not Fair: I concede that I am not entirely fair in comparing the whole American nation to a psycho kid from my childhood. There are plenty of good people in this country, and I have no right. No, I have every right! This is my home. Diversity: the real display of it is not in food, drinks and flowers. It is in the historical, generational experience, in the memory of the heart. I have an obligation before my people here to report a dangerous, maybe even fatal, psychic disease - a disease that once consumed the whole German nation and is now in full swing in America. I don't want to run again, panting and sweating into that dark passage. It is the light I seek, and in the light we fight. I am not fair. I am in love and I want to protect this beloved country of mine. In this battle I take no prisoners. It is easy to get cured. Just put the damned psychos into an asylum, where they belong!"
