(Thanks to my daughter Kate, aka the Popcorn Press graphics department.)

“Wait. Gimme a sec. I can probably think of a use for it.”
—Those wags at Woot.com

Now if there were only some way to deal with the tangle of electrical cords from all my countertop appliances!

In my early childhood, I was under the impression that “people are people.” I assumed one template for everyone, thinking that some individuals merely tried harder than others. (That made bullies, in particular, difficult to understand.)

Later, as a young married person, I stumbled across the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator test, based on Carl Jung’s psychological theories. Amazed at how well it explained the way things looked through my eyes, I asked my wife to take the test. The results indicated that she and I were polar opposites, her ISTJ to my ENFP, she the practical-minded safe harbor to my adventurous soul. (Happily, it also gave advice for how an ENFP might best communicate with an ISTJ, and vice versa.) So, clearly, there was more than one template for a human being, each an equally valid way of perceiving.

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Bullying is a fairly common topic in education nowadays. Frightened by the events at Columbine and such, many schools have set a zero-tolerance policy. The US Department of Health and Human Services has a Web site devoted to prevention of bullying. Experts from law enforcement and social work offer advice on how to deal with the problem.

That’s all great. I support it enthusiastically.

My purpose here, however, is to focus on “social bullying,” the threat of exclusion from a group, and ask, “What is it about human beings that leads them, within a social setting, to pick on the weak?”

You know what I mean. It’s personified in Stephen King’s breakout novel, Carrie. It’s been treated in countless other novels and movies. It is, in effect, a trope, and that says something about its universality.

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Recently I met a young man who worked his way through college by cranking out research papers for an online term-paper store. The company sells “model” research papers, many made to order, so my young acquaintance might find himself writing about quantum mechanics one week and Stalin’s concentration camps the next. The job gave him lots of practice writing on short deadlines. He also picked up quite a bit of knowledge in many different fields. And of course, he got paid for helping someone else with more money than skill or discipline pass a course at some college.

He contributed to plagiarism, right?

Okay, how about this: Over the past thirty years, I’ve met several other people who make a living ghost-writing novels. Publishers use house names like Kenneth Robeson and Franklin W. Dixon to provide a sense of continuity for a line of books, but those two authors don’t really exist. Instead, a stable of writers is used to do the writing as work for hire. These writers get paid for helping a publisher that has more money and clout than time to continue a profitable line of stories. The same thing happens when a celebrity with more name recognition than writing skill lands a lucrative book contract and hires an uncredited person to write it. Or, frankly, when the long-dead Walt Disney affixes his name to yet another animated feature written and drawn by a seraglio of work-for-hire creatives.

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