THE BELL CURVE:Unflinchingly loyal, with total support

I missed one of those rare opportunities last week that columnists covet: a chance for a free ride on a topical and noncontroversial subject — in this instance, Pearl Harbor Day. And I’ve decided it isn’t too late to catch up.

For almost 60 years on every Dec. 7, I’ve pulled down my Slipstream from a sacrosanct place on a shelf in my bookcase and wallowed for a few hours in what it was like then. The Slipstream is a kind of yearbook, like the one we got when we graduated from high school except the Slipstream catches the faces of a nation at war. Mine pictures all the men who won Navy wings in 1943 and the planes we flew. I’m there with the graduates of May 29, 1943, two weeks ahead of an 18-year-old named George H. Bush.

In my annual Pearl Harbor Day genuflecting to history, two things have always impressed me most deeply. First, how incredibly young most of us were.

And, second, the enormous contrast between the environment of public support and enthusiasm in which we served and the lack of those qualities in every war since.

When I was assigned to instructor duty after winning my wings, I was 21 years old, teaching kids a year or two younger than me how to do their job and come back alive — qualities I had scarcely learned myself. When an entire squadron of us later awaiting shipment to the Pacific fleet as dive-bomber pilots were suddenly and inexplicably shifted to four-engine transports, we pooled our money and sent two members to Washington to try to get our orders changed back. That was foolhardy, of course, and we went overseas as transport pilots, which quite possibly — maybe even probably — saved our lives. But we were far too young and too sure of our own immortality to recognize that.

That’s what I see in my Slipstream today. Boys sent out to do a man’s job — and doing it superbly well with the force of a nation behind us rather than a passel of politicians and double-dome theorists who never saw a war eyeball-to-eyeball themselves.

As the director of outreach and advocacy programs for the Newport-Mesa Unified School District, Jane Garland told us in a Forum piece last week about two new programs called Project ASK in our local schools directed at drug resistance and bullying. I can get foursquare behind the drug program, but the bullying — which she referred to as a national epidemic, which hit me as overkill — left me divided.

I’ll put my eight decades of bullies up against the current crop and give points. That also goes for the way we dealt with them. Today, they are a social problem. In my youth, they were individual problems to be dealt with by those directly affected. That solution obviously needed a lot of rethinking over the years, especially with the growth of gangs, but it shouldn’t be obliterated entirely by the sociologists.

This may surprise you, coming from a self-styled liberal, but I always depended on my father’s advice that most bullies are cowards, picking on what seem to be easy victims, and the best way to deal with them is a fist in the belly. That mostly worked for me, even though I wasn’t very big. I grew up in the Great Depression, and my father moved us about the country seeking employment. As the new kid in school every year, I got beat up a lot, but practically never by the same bully twice.

I suppose it’s because of that early experience — and four years in the military in my early 20s — that when I saw such phrases as “increasing children’s social-emotional competence” in Garland’s column, large red flags ran up. My generation took care of our bullies, either individually or en masse, and seldom turned to authority on the grounds that we would all end up — bully and victim — looking to it as the ultimate enemy.

This was well illustrated for me when, many years ago, in military uniform, I got on a bus full of junior high kids who were tormenting a slight, bespectacled boy in obvious duress. I intervened, sitting down beside the victim and forcing his attackers into a surly retreat. By coincidence we all got off at the same stop, and when I waited to see if the bullying would resume, the kids threw gravel and clumps of dirt at me and ran. And right in the forefront of the throwers was the kid I had protected.

There were many similar examples during my 21 years of teaching at UC Irvine. Frequently I heard late papers excused because loud music in the dorm made thought impossible. When I asked if other students were affected and was told they were, I asked why they didn’t go as a group and request that the noise be turned down — and, if it wasn’t, to go back and tell him to do it or it would be done for him. That always got a puzzled look and the response that an authority figure had been notified, but when nothing came of it, the problem was clearly insoluble.

I can handle being accused of fomenting violence by these antediluvian thoughts if my accusers would allow that total dependence on sociological strokes and higher authority leaves the individual out of the loop. Anger at a bully and a powerful sense of wanting to render justice are perfectly normal reactions and need to be controlled, not stuffed down. So is a primitive sense — in a man, at least — that he has allowed himself to be humiliated without a justified response. This clearly has its limits. We don’t throw gasoline on a road-rage assault or challenge someone holding a lethal weapon. But self-respect suggests that we also don’t look to Sociology 101 or call the cops every time the volume gets too high. We need to know the difference. Hopefully, Project ASK in our public schools will point that out.