Mercy for “Shrieking Girl”

The poor kid.

This may seem like a strange way to describe the Yale student telling a university administrator, “You should resign,” among many other less printable things, in a tone most civilized people would blush to use on a telemarketer. But since her performance has been captured on video and viewed by millions, she is going to get her just deserts and probably much, much more. She’s already been tagged “the Shrieking Girl,” which nickname, observes Kate Maltby, is “belittling,” “gendered” – and right on the money.

Maybe the student, whose real name I won’t share, though it’s already made the rounds, will find some way to profit from the exposure. Or maybe she’ll find a way to convert her new label into a badge of defiance. She might, for example, start an annual Shrieking Girl Walk. But the latest evidence suggests otherwise. The Daily Caller notes she has declined to return calls and is “frantically moving to delete her online presence.” That’s the modern-day equivalent of fleeing to South America under an assumed name via a Vatican ratline.

What’s driven this young woman into hiding is, in a word, shame. We’ve gotten so used to using shame as a verb, a synonym for “humiliate,” that we run the risk of forgetting it’s a profound and powerful feeling that people can experience even without outside help. Shame, like its cousin embarrassment, serves to remind people that they’ve violated a rule or fallen short of some standard. Shame can be a valuable pedagogical tool, but with a mind of its own, it resists moderation to fit the gravity of the offense, and can outlive its own usefulness by a good stretch. Unfortunately for any member of a generation so concerned with triggers, it remains subject to re-activation years after the events that caused it.

This woman’s action injured several parties. It threatened the reputations both of Yale University, and her mother’s company, on whose webpage she kept a profile. Mom and Old Eli will have to form their own judgments and hand down their own sentences. But if I were Nicholas Christakis, the administrator and professor who was the target of her address, I would be satisfied with an apology along the lines of, “I don’t know what came over me. I must have been having the worst day of my life. Please don’t hate me.”

If I were feeling especially Christian, I might even urge her not to hate herself. After being observed by a large share of the English-speaking world looking arrogant on one hand and ridiculous on the other, she can expect to face that temptation at every turn, at least for the foreseeable future.

My assumption that the student’s rudeness was uncharacteristic is a big one, and possibly over-generous. But I’m basing it on common sense. Anyone who acted as a general rule the way she did in that video would be at best friendless and at worst long dead from justifiable homicide. The Daily Caller reports she’d been a master’s aide – “a kind of student administrative assistant” – which suggests she was capable either of winning a popularity contest or impressing people in charge as competent and reliable. Some people, it’s true, do get their way by throwing their weight around, but what I saw in that video wasn’t an experienced bully. It was someone so unused to handling authority that she couldn’t recognize deference when it was being shown her.

In this, she could be typical of a generation. In The Spectator, Julie Burchill coined the term “cry-bully,” which she defined as “a hideous blend of victim and victor, weeper and walloper,” noting that the type had begun to proliferate among young left-wing activists. The formula for creating such a creature isn’t hard to figure out. Once you’re convinced that 1) you’re powerless and 2) both society and the cosmic balance will only profit as you empower yourself, no internal check will stop you from grabbing as much power as you can and wielding it as recklessly as you can. Skipping over details like politicking and leadership, Cry-Bullies plunge right into tyrannizing.

In the video the student thrusts her finger in Christakis’ face. No, not her middle finger – her index finger. It’s a gesture a parent might make to a child if the parent were at her wits’ end but which no adult would dare make to another. As Christakis is master of Silliman College, he stands, at least formally, in loco parentis to the student and her classmates. With that wagging finger, she looks as though she’s trying – consciously – to turn the tables 180 degrees.

This morbid attraction to the theatrical aspects of power at its most despotic – the haughty tone, the calculated slight – is apparent even among older and presumably more mature people, provided they’re shilling for a cause. As I noted last week, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern recently proclaimed his own right to impose “discipline” on Christians who publicly disapproved of homosexual relations. For such people, it seems, being obnoxious is a natural perk of moral authority. In an unguarded moment, they might even call it the fun part.

It’s often been observed that rudeness and mindless aggression are most effective when delivered in bulk, on the Internet. (“Social Justice Warriors,” the nickname bestowed on those who practice this kind of thing, is meant as an irony. It suggests none of them would be much use in a foxhole.) What we’re seeing in this video is Internet-style rules of engagement applied to a face-to-face encounter between individuals, and the result is grotesque. My most earnest hope is that it will hold up a mirror to those who indulge in moral dog-piles or imperial posturing, and – for the love of mercy – get them to ease up.

It is in the name of mercy, then, that I am staying out of the dog-pile now forming on top of the student in the video. Taking her disappearing act as the sign of a awakening conscience, I’ll trust it to do its job and hope it permits her one luxury she would deny Christakis – that of sleeping at night