Little Big Man

by Dennis Green

I had read a story in the Chronicle by Meridith May about “Relaxation Yoga,” and wrote the author an email about a class in yoga I’d taken in the early ‘80s from a guy named Donovan, who also taught yoga at Mills College. She wrote back that she’d taken his class there in ’87, when yoga was still a little exotic.

So that got me thinking about yoga and all the things I learned from Donovan, the visualization techniques, including the reading of auras. And recounting this, I realized I’d used the technique recently, interviewing a leading citizen of Alameda, a man who serves on an important board, and is instrumental in deciding critical policy matters that impact the whole town.

And I discovered, in the fact-checking and process of corrections, that the man is a bit of a bully. When we’d met, I’d read his aura without even thinking about it, automatically, as I always do, and it had appeared muddled, even molten, filled with a spirit of impatience and a need to be in control. So…in our exchange of emails following the interview, an interesting thing occurred.

He kept trying to make me make his case for him, instead of remaining, as the reporter I am in this relationship, neutral. And when I resisted using great stretches of language he wanted inserted in the story, he wrote, “If your story isn’t accurate, it will be easily dismissed.” This came when I insisted that I would correct inaccurate facts, but not my own independent conclusions.

So I wrote him back, “Considering the many populations of Alameda, anything we say can be easily dismissed, no matter how accurate it is. Politics is like that.” But he wanted to change my thinking. He wanted me to see the world exactly as he sees it. I once had a father-in-law like that. At least one.

And when I spoke with other people who know this particular Alameda prominent citizen, they told me, “You should see him in action in a board meeting! Yes, he intimidates as many people as he can.” So my reading of his aura was true to form: another bully-boy.

There was another “tell” about the man. Just as some pretty women have “Pretty Woman Syndrome,” and assume that they can get by on their looks, so do some men, a very few men of larger stature, have “Little Big Man Syndrome,” so used to pushing others around, and getting their way that they expect it to be always thus. Being over six feet tall, and even slightly athletic, can do that.

When I was a kid, we moved around a lot, and I was often the new kid in school. And the class bully always had to prove his dominance early on. I remember the last time I let this happen, in the third grade, in Springfield, Oregon, when the bully shoved my face into a big mud puddle after a rain, in front of a gaggle of girls.

I never tolerated such treatment again. I found that if I jumped the bully first, got on top, pounded his head on the pavement, he would never mess with me again. Worked like a charm. And once you’ve put the class bully in his place, nobody else messes with you either. There’s a new Big Damn Dawg in town.

If anything, once I learned about pack order, Alpha Males and Top Dawgs, I had to restrain myself. It’s tempting, and it’s easy, to become a bully yourself. But bullies are also cowards at heart, or they wouldn’t be so insistent about being in control. Nor so easily put in their place.

And nowadays, the bullying is more often intellectual, the effort put into imposing one’s notions of reality on other people, rather than simple classroom dominance. But the motivation, and the results, are all the same. You won’t let me act for myself, be myself, or think for myself, because you have the better way, your own way, the better way of thinking, of seeing the world.

I’d rather be a little guy with a big heart and a great fluttering uncertainty about just how this world goes, than a Little Big Man. Nobody likes a bully. And when you look in your mirror, what do you see?

©2010 Dennis Green