Bullies, Hypocrites, and Your Place in Hell

A week or so ago, I woke up to the news that Chester Bennington had hanged himself. If the name doesn't exactly ring a bell with you, I freely admit it didn't ring any with me, either -- or wouldn't have, had his name not been smeared all over the news for about a month previously. Bennington had been the lead singer for Linkin Park, a rap-metal band which had blown up the airwaves in the 2000s with a string of mega-hits but faded from relevance in more recent years, though commercially they remained quite successful. Interestingly, Bennington committed suicide just two months after the suicide of his close friend and fellow singer Chris Cornell, who'd fronted for Soundgarden, Audioslave and Temple of the Dog.

In the weeks preceding Bennington's death, he had appeared on the pop-culture radar once more, but this time for all the wrong reasons. Linkin Park had released an album called "One More Light" which was violently attacked by critics and fans of the band alike. The oldest and tiredest, but also the hardest-hitting, charge which can be rendered against musicians is that they have "sold out," and "One More Light" was viewed by many as a sell-out album, an attempt by fading rockers to go mainstream in order to recapture their cultural relevance and, presumably, replenish their bank accounts. These attacks deeply angered Bennington, who lashed out in interviews with comments like, "if you’re gonna be the person who says, ‘They made a marketing decision to make this kind of record to make money,’ you can fucking meet me outside and I will punch you in your fucking mouth, because that is the wrong fucking answer.”

It was the fan backlash to these and other comments which brought Bennington back into my personal awareness. My various social media news feeds were a torrent of abuse heaped on Bennington for everything from his physical appearance to the sound of his voice to the type of music he made to the supposed decline in its quality; but they were most especially reserved for the fact had struck back at his critics. Evidently he had been growing increasingly angry and frustrated that fans and critics could not let go of their memories of Linkin Park's first two albums, "Hybrid Theory" and "Meteora," the former of which was released 17 years ago. It is hardly unique for a band to get lost in the shadow of its own early work -- it happens to authors, too, not to mention artists, actors and directors -- but in Bennington's case the burden of his early mega-success seemed to grow heavier over the course of time. This was due largely to the fact that each subsequent album was criticized for not being an exact copy of the originals. In ordinary human lives, the past is supposed to fade with time and not grow more vivid, but with artists the exact opposite often obtains; futures become bleak, presents irrelevant, and only the past seems to matter.

All public figures are subject to criticism and ridicule by that same public, especially in the age of the internet, and Bennington was no exception. What was exceptional in his case was the intensity and the viciousness of the attacks. It was not merely that he had become a prisoner of his own early success, condemned for failing to repeat his formula exactly; he was also attacked even more violently when he tried to reinvent himself into something completely new. As my grandmother would have said, "they got him coming and going," for whichever direction he turned, the critics were waiting. He was like a boy beset by multiple bullies, at once pushing and shoving. And in the last weeks of his life, the bullying increased to a savage intensity. I couldn't lift my phone or turn on my PC without seeing threads and articles devoted not merely to bashing Bennington's new sound or defiant attitude, but to people specifying how much they hated him personally, how much they wanted to beat up "that skinny little shit." What surprised me was not the ferocity of the trolling -- the internet is an ugly place -- but the fact that so much of it came from people who admitted they were, or had been, devoted fans of his band. Some people evidently found no contradiction in boasting that they considered two or thee of Linkin Park's albums masterpieces they had "played to death and still listened to," yet, in the same sentence, wishing they could take Bennington up on his challenge to "meet them outside." He was laughed at, ridiculed, insulted, threatened, dismissed, negated as a musician and a human being, and all because he had expressed crude but understandable frustration with being subjected to same.

I don't profess to know precisely what drove Bennington, a father of six children, to hang himself. He was depressed by the suicide of his close friend Cornell (he died on what would have been Cornell's birthday), and obviously upset by the firestorm of abuse he'd endured following the release of "One More Light," but I imagine the cause lay deeper within himself. Artists are often very troubled souls, thin-skinned and beset by demons and doubts, prone to overthinking everything and often prone to gloomy outlooks on life. They come into the world both blessed and burdened, and the burden often outweighs the blessing, at least within their own minds. It's seldom a shock to me when such a person chooses to take their own life, or commits default suicide by drinking or drugging themselves into oblivion. Many struggle on the edge of that cliff for years or decades or their entire adult lives, and no one knows the struggle is even taking place until it ends, tragically, with a shotgun blast or a length of rope. What I do know is that the difference between life and death is often found at the central point of their spiritual corrosion -- that is, the point where they are most damaged, most weakened, most susceptible to attack. And that area, like as not, was either created or expanded by bullying. For once a person has been bullied -- I don't mean once or twice, but over a long period of time, and usually at a vulnerable age -- they never completely recover from the experience. They will never be able to endure taunts and mean-spirited ridicule with the same equanimity as a self-assured person who was not bullied during their formative years. Like Achilles, their vulnerability is both built-in and permanent, and no amount of success, fame or material wealth will make it go away.

When Bennington killed himself, the reaction on the Net was as effusive and passionate as it had been in the month leading up to his death, with the exception that all the sentiment was turned on its head. Many of the very same people (I recognized their profile pictures and internet handles) who had called Bennington a "skinny, talentless little faggot" and pleaded for a chance to "beat the shit out of him" just weeks before, now painted cyberspace with weeping emojis and long, heartfelt paens to his greatness. They expressed dismay and horror at his death and said things like, "RIP brother," "thoughts and prayers for your family" or the classic, "I didn't like the guy buy I never wanted this!" (This begs the question of what, precisely, they did want when they wrote things like, "Fuck you and your shitty music. Die!").

I found the hypocrisy of all this affected grief to be quite disgusting, and for more than the obvious reason that it is just exactly that. The truth is I understand Chester Bennington uncomfortably well. I too am the creative, "artistic" type, and I also know what it's like to be bullied -- thoroughly, mercilessly and inventively, over a period of years. I know the deep and abiding scars such bullying leaves, as well as the brimming reservoir of anger which can run over either as depression or violence or both. And, perhaps worst of all, I know what it is like to see the bullies of yesteryear turn around in the present day with friendly smiles, pretending or perhaps even believing that they did you no wrong. It was fascinating, though by no means encouraging, to run into people at my high school reunions who were among the most sadistic and enthusiastic bullies I've ever encountered, and discover how completely they had forgotten their behavior -- if, indeed, they had ever acknowledged it in the first place. In one instance I was asked by a former classmate how "X" was doing. This classmate had viciously bullied "X" all through junior high school and into ninth and perhaps tenth grade, sometimes physically attacking him, and doing so despite knowing "X" had tragically lost his father in an accident; yet as a grown man he seemed to regard "X" with genuine affection, as if they had been buddies who'd shared many a sophomoric hi-jink. The truly awful thing about the conversation was that his solicitous questions as to "X's" status and well-being carried no trace or irony or malice; they actually seemed sincere. Another former classmate, now mother of a large family, held forth at some length about her liberal principles and how much she hated Donald Trump because of his long record of bullying behavior: yet she herself was one of the queen bee bitches of my formative years, a Cordelia Chase-type ringleader who made cruel sport of the awkward, the unattractive, the unathletic and the poor.

Don't mistake me. I am not an advocate of holding grudges, I believe in second chances and I have seen people change remarkably over the course of not terribly long lifetimes. I don't believe that someone who was a jerkoff at sixteen must necessarily be one at twenty-eight or forty-five, but I do insist that he or she at least take some responsibility, and accept some accountability, for the wrongs they have done. I have far more respect for an unregenerate scumbag who freely admits all of his crimes and outrages and openly plots to commit more, than I have for someone who spent their youth tormenting others and now pretends that none of it ever happened. This latter type reminds me of the line in Shakespeare about "remembering with advantages." Doubtless a lot of former bullies need to re-write history within their own minds so as not to despise themselves in later life, and I'm sure bullies that have procreated feel an even more urgent need to "remember with advantages" their own school days, lest they wake up in the middle of the night trembling at the thought that someone like their younger selves might take an unhealthy interest in their own children. When Chester Bennington was alive, many took distinct pleasure in harassing him online, and when he committed suicide, many of those same people affected (virtual) tears of sympathy. In some cases, the tears were probably not even affected. One thing is for certain: in all the hundreds of comments and posts I scrolled through, not one expressed any remorse or discomfort for past posts raining abuse on the now-dead singer. Not one person said, "Gee, I kinda feel bad I trashed him so hard -- maybe he read some of that and it got to him." To even acknowledge the possibility, you see, would be to acknowledge the responsibility that accompanies free speech. Technically speaking, and legally, there is nothing to prevent one person from verbally bullying another; it is a question of morals, of right conduct, or more simply put, of not being an asshole. But again, to accept responsibility for something means acknowledging that you did it in the first place, and judging by some of the ex-bullies I mentioned above, that is precisely what these people train themselves to avoid. They want, simultaneously, to act like shitheels and think of themselves as good people, to vent their sadism and to deny ever having been sadistic. Like participants in a riot, they wake up the next morning and go about their business as if nothing happened. And I suppose, from their point of view, nothing did. But it is worth remembering that in Dante's Inferno, hell is composed of nine concentric circles, with the least odious sinners in the first circle and the worst in the ninth.

The eighth is for hypocrites.