Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 12 September 2016 issue)

Dear Kam,
I just heard the terrible news. Hiddleswift is over! What is wrong with the world?
Splitsville

In these troubled times, I was hoping that the combined forces of Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddlestone would save the world but sadly, Hiddleswift is over. For a brief moment, theirs was a power combination that could only have been equalled by, say, Queen Victoria dating former US president Teddy Roosevelt. But the uber-celebrity Hiddleswift has split up, perhaps setting back the dream of world peace for a generation. I don’t think I have ever listened to a single Taylor Swift song but I am told that she is like totally “amazeballs”. I like Tom Hiddlestone as an actor and I think he would make a great James Bond, although I don’t know what a post-Brexit Bond will be. Britain is now a complete irrelevance on the world stage and I think the only job available to Bond would be to hunt down Polish construction workers and send them back to Krakow. Perhaps the Hiddleswift combination was always like totally “cray cray” but I am sorry to see it end and I greet the news the only way I know how: emoticon sad-face.

Dear Kam,
My child is being bullied at school and I don’t know what to do.
Helpless

Without Hiddleswift, there is now nothing standing in the way of Donald Trump’s plan for world domination. I am fascinated by the rise of Trump and the very real possibility that Americans will vote for him to be their next president. It is clearly a ridiculous notion because Trump is so obviously an ignorant and self-serving sociopath. And yet millions love him.

I think the main reason I am fascinated by Trump is because I want to work out one thing: How do you defeat a bully? I was the victim of bullying when I was growing up and so I spent many, many hours trying to work out how to get out of the situation and how to destroy the bully. I dreamt about killing him, about doing to him what he was doing to me. But I knew this would have made me just as bad as him, and I am a physical weakling anyway. This was all a long time ago and I had forgotten about it until the rise of Trump, but I think my adult personality and responses have been shaped by my deep-rooted desire to avoid being bullied, and even becoming a bully. How do you defeat a bully? I do not know, and I am not even sure if it can be done.

Trump has always been a bully but he used to be that ridiculous reality TV personality with the orange head, and so could be easily dismissed. But when he started running for president, my bully-radar woke up. During the Republican debates, he gave his opponents cruel nicknames. He called Marco Rubio “little Marco”, and Jeb Bush was “low energy”. The cruel but brilliant thing about these nicknames was that they were true. Rubio is short and young, and Bush was docile, but that was probably because he was trying to portray himself as a caring and compassionate conservative. The bully’s genius is to repeatedly attack the thing you can do nothing about, or turn your source of strength into a weakness and force you into making only one possible response, which is to deny, therefore giving the bully control of the agenda. Rubio could not deny his short stature and youth, nor could he think of a way to turn it into a source of strength when Republicans have been complaining about Obama’s youth for the last eight years. The most frightening thing is that people loved it and applauded the bully, which is all the bully really wants.

When Trump visited Mexico recently, it was obvious that he is a bully. He stood next to the Mexican president and was quiet and well-behaved, despite having called Mexicans “rapists” and threatening to build a wall that, he says, Mexico must pay for. When he was away from his fans and actually in Mexico standing next to the country’s president, the bully was suddenly quiet. A few hours later, and back in the US in front of his adoring fans, he delivered a deeply offensive racist speech about, you guessed it, Mexicans. Mexico’s president is deeply unpopular and has been excoriated by Mexicans for having allowed himself to be manipulated by the bully.

Bullies can do their evil work privately against one person but they invariably like to have the validation of an audience. Presumably, they are trying to compensate for something they fear in themselves but who knows or cares what that might be. But their world can come crashing down when they are exposed as weaklings in the eyes of their fans. How is that achieved? I don’t know. The only place where Trump’s bullying can be countered will be during the debates with Hillary Clinton and I really want to see what she does. I suspect that Trump will be quiet and well-behaved and will draw Clinton into becoming the angry screechy one.

I was bullied and the worst thing was that I reacted by becoming a bully myself. I was not very good at it (I got beaten up by the person I was trying to bully) but it is the moment in my life about which I am most ashamed and I fear that it still exists within me. The boy who was bullying me was not a bad person. We had been friends and I knew why he was doing it (he did not like being called a soft crybaby anymore) but I wanted to kill him. In the end, we just got older and moved on but I never did work out how to defeat him. The only clue I have found in the face of the Trump bullying has been in watching the comedy of TV satirists like Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers. Joining in with their audience’s laughter as they demolish Trump’s absurdity is rewardingly cathartic. Perhaps that is the only answer — being reminded that you are not insane and that you are not alone.

Reprinted with the kind permission of