MY LIFE IN HORROR: I’M A TEACHER OF LITTLE CHILDREN.

My Life In Horror
 
Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.
 
This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.
 
This is my life in horror.
 
I’m A Teacher Of Little Children.
 
It’s entirely possible I was eleven.  Ten feels more likely, but not certain.
 
I am still at junior school, and still blissfully unaware of how the benign neglect of my regular teachers is soon to convert to an order-of-magnitude more damaging form of the indifferent, impersonal violence of active and willful neglect, as I transition to secondary school.
 
I know I was that age because I can still visualise the ten-or-eleven-year-old bullies who I was at that time facing on a daily basis, as I read the fictional six-year-old bullies of the opening scenes of this book. Which isn’t a surprise. One of the brilliant qualities of Orson Scott Card’s writing that is often unfairly overlooked, I think, is his deep understanding of how little physical descriptions of people matter, in prose; he has a perfect grasp of just how little you need to say (and what that little should be) in order to allow the reader to fill in their own life experiences. He’s a master of getting out of the way of the reader's imaginations, inviting you to project and build your own version of the characters he’s telling you about.
 
That’s far from the only brilliant thing about Ender’s Game. Indeed, with the admittedly rather large exception of the politics in general (and especially and specifically the gender and racial politics, which are so backwards that Card’s writing IQ plummets at times, with a shocking suddenness, to Lovecraft-writing-German-U-Boat-Commander levels of terrible), most of this book is either quietly or loudly brilliant.
 
What I mean by the quiet part is that, as Card discusses in the gloriously defensive and passive aggressive intro to the revised edition of the book - I mean, seriously, dude, you won the Hugo and Nebula for this puppy and you’re still this absurdly angry about the criticisms? - he shares Stephen King’s disdain for much of the ‘gimmicks that make “fine” writing so impenetrable to the general audience’. And yes, that’s an actual Card quote, and yes, we could indeed spend a considerable chunk of time unpacking the layers it reveals, but that’s not the essay I’m writing today, so I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.
 
Astonishingly chippy phrasing (and questionable reverse snobbery w/r/t literary fiction) aside, the core truth behind the claim, one borne out beyond doubt by the text, is that Card writes lethally readable prose. The pages and chapters fly by, and they do so not because the story and themes are not weighty or impressive or difficult, but because on a sentence level, Card is an incredibly highly skilled craftsman who understands how to write prose that is pleasurable and easy to read.  It’s a talent that goes massively undervalued in general criticism, and I think many critics dismiss it as something that anyone can do, despite the evidence of, like, the vast majority of books written in the entire history of, well, history.
 
Additionally, as Daniel Harper noted when we recorded a podcast on the subject of this novel recently, this book is, amongst other things, a stunning and pretty devastating portrait of a child suffering sustained psychological, emotional, and physical abuse. It’s interesting how as a child reading it I mainly focussed on Ender’s suffering at the hands of the other children, but missed entirely the brutalities his training is inflicting upon him. I think it’s very telling (and not especially to my credit) that I took General Graff very much at face value, as a conflicted father figure morally agonizing about the suffering he was causing his surrogate son, and I think I ended up concurring with his assessment that what was going on was ultimately necessary.
 
As I reflect upon that now, and the relationship between Graff and the ghost who haunts this blog series, I am struck with great force by the dangers inherent in the near universal myth of the older, wise man and his child apprentice.
 
Anyway.
 
It’s worth digging a little deeper here into why I bought into this for-your-own-good bullshit so uncritically, at ten/eleven years old - an ideology now I consider to be howlingly immoral, and actively cancerous to the human experience.
 
And the answer is, in part, that Card is a really fucking good writer, and also because he’s especially good at writing about bullying.
 
The opening chapter of the book sets up the morality in microcosm. Ender has been protected for three years by the ‘monitor’, a device the government attaches to promising children to assess their potential to join Battle School. The longer a monitor is left in place, the closer you are to being selected. The device ‘sees what you see and hears what you hear’, and as those outputs are being monitored by the military (who are also the government) the opportunity for bullies to make life difficult are severely limited - even though Ender’s birth circumstances as a third child make him a prime target for such treatment, as overpopulation has meant there’s a general prohibition on having more than two kids.
(And I know I keep going on about it, but seriously, the way all the above is crammed into 3 or 4 pages of the opening chapter, walking you through it all without ever once feeling clumsy or like an info dump, as Ender moves through the process of having the monitor removed and returning to his class is an object lesson in How To Write Genre Fiction Amazingly Well Without Showing Off Even A Little Bit).
 
So, Ender no longer has Big Brother directly looking out for him, and sure enough, on his way out of class, three mean kids block his way, making it clear that there will be violence. We’re inside Ender’s mind for this sequence, sharing his thought processes. And, yes, for  six year old, they’re definitely a bit too sophisticated, but ten-or-eleven year old me had absolutely no trouble tracking the contours of his argument, or agreeing with the basic thrust of it.
 
Ender decides he has to win not just this fight, but all the fights. He has to not just beat the other kid, but beat him badly - so badly, so decisively, that the other kids will simply be too scared of him from then on to ever mess with him again. His assessment of the bullies is that only a display of overwhelming force will keep them away from him for good.
 
And as a bullied kid - hell, as a man in his 40’s who is a former bullied kid - it feels like a seductive argument.
 
So much of it is true, that’s part of it. Bullies do thrive on fear as much as anything else; most bullies are not interested in a fight, but exerting dominance - by which I mean, simply, bullies want to beat you, not get in a fight with you; a conflict where they could also be hurt, or even lose, doesn’t generally appeal. That’s not universal, of course - for a relatively small subset, sadism is the overriding motivation, and for a similarly small group, there may be an indifference to personal pain (though again that can often be performative, to a degree). Still and all, the notion that one should ‘stand up to bullies’ (should one be fortunate enough to have both the physical and psychological tools to do so, of course, which is far from all of us and not something to feel a second’s shame about if you don’t possess them for whatever reason - it is never your fault if you are bullied) has, at least situationally and subject to the above caveats, some merit.
 
There’s an element of wish fulfilment too, let’s just own that. As a child, especially once I started attending a secondary school where the bullying was more widespread, systemic, and to some degree even institutionally sanctioned, through a laughably ineptly implemented Prefect system, I would often indulge in savage, bloody fantasies involving my inflicting severe violence against my tormentors, in a suspiciously similar style to Ender. I don’t suppose there’s anything unusual about me in that regard, psychologically speaking - apart from being prepared to admit it in writing, perhaps - and I am sure a lot of bullied kids will have had a similar reaction to the book: essentially, give him one from us, Ender.
 
And I believe absolutely in the right to self defence, and the right to employ violence to defend your person from violent attack. Your rights end at the precise moment your fist meets my nose - or, more accurately, at the precise moment I see the fist coming and can reasonably assume it’s intended destination is my nose. And this revenge power fantasy builds on that entirely reasonable notion, adds in the rocket fuel of aggrieved injustice, and then whispers in your ear turnabout is fair play and retires to a safe distance.
 
This is dark and bloody stuff, right here; the intersection of justice and violence, the notion of the righteous infliction of pain and humiliation, beating a bully to a bloody pulp to send a message. Because he started it. This is the fantasy we tell ourselves, over and over, especially in cinema - Death Wish, Dirty Harry, Pale Rider, The Brave One, Taken, on and on and on, the bullies finally messing with The Wrong Guy, and hell itself - the righteous fury of the victimised - being visited upon them.
 
And again, as a man who was once a bullied child, I’m basically fine with that. I think power fantasies for people who’ve been victimised are probably healthy forms of entertainment - a way to indulge the darker parts of our emotional imagination without actually doing something crazy and unforgivable in the real world. The problem with this scene in Ender’s Game is not that Ender beats the kid, nor even that, as we later discover, he beat the kid to death; the problem is that the book wants us to believe that Ender was right to do it.
 
Well, okay - that’s where the problems begin.
 
And again, I give Card credit for his psychological honesty here; Ender isn’t happy about it. Throughout the book, Ender suffers many of the symptoms of PTSD as he relives the beating he gave his bully (and the others that inevitably follow, given the highly militarised environment he is thrust into and the meteoric nature of his success there). It’s is one of the primary sources of psychological torment that both plagues and drives Ender through the entire narrative. And on this score, Card does not censor or cheapen; as a psychological portrait of a bullied and victimised child, Ender’s Game is unflinching and devastating. In this regard, I would even argue the portrayal is moral; far more so than the many revenge fantasy movies I talked about above. One of the biggest lies action movies tell us (sure, in the name of entertainment, and I love the genre, but still) is that violence - righteous, good guy violence, anyway - is, in psychological terms, consequence free. If such storytellers were remotely interested in a realistic portrayal of violence (and again, I know they are not, and am not suggesting they should be) the sequel business would consist almost entirely of watching the heroes of the prior film disintegrate under various PTSD symptoms, and the addictions and erratic behaviour such symptoms often cause.
 
And yes, this is *exactly* why First Blood is one of my favourite movies of all time.
 
So, Card does way, way better than Hollywood on this one, and way way better than a lot of genre fiction, especially military SF, of which this book is, I would argue, both a foundational text and a pinnacle of what that genre has so far achieved. He does it by displaying incredible empathy for Ender, and also by digging deep into human psychology - asking himself what would really happen? - and then reporting back as honestly as he could what he saw.
 
The problem - and really, that’s too weak a word for it - is that the book then extrapolates from this personal conflict to justify genocide.
 
No, really.
 
See, there’s aliens (called, and I wish I was making this up, The Buggers) - insect type humanoid creatures (controlled, of course, by a queen hive mind) who attacked earth’s colonies some time before our story began. They were beaten back, barely, and now there’s a world government lead by a global military holding an uneasy truce based entirely on the fear that the aliens will be back - indeed, it's precisely to find the leaders of tomorrow that the monitors and the Battle School system exist in the first place.
 
Those of you familiar with Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers will likely already be seeing the startling parallels, but what’s scary here is that Card is clearly batting for the Federation, and he doesn’t seem to realise that’s the wrong side to be on.
 
Because what Card does, over and over, is have the adults in Ender’s life put him in situations where there is no help coming, and he has to fight as hard as he can - to kill - to survive. And he does. And eventually, he uses that same training to commit xenocide, using a chain reaction weapon to destroy the alien homeworld. And yes, he’s tricked into doing it, told that he’s fighting a simulation program created as the ultimate training tool; but the fact remains that he’s morally extrapolated from those earlier fights, and applied that same logic - I have to win not just this fight, but all future fights - to its logical conclusion.
 
And when you strip away the they started it justification - a line we’re taught as children to treat with disdain, as some of our most rudimentary moral upbringing - what we’re really talking about here is the raw brutality of might making right.
 
Because it’s not okay for me to murder you and your family and enslave your children just because you threw a rock at me - even if you threw it first. Lurking barely beneath the surface of this exciting tale of How A Bullied Child Became The Saviour Of Mankind is a pretty straight no-chaser moral justification for colonization and genocide. That last is made utterly explicit, by the way, when we learn that Earth is going to send out colony ships to the fertile planets that used to home the aliens and are now conveniently mapped out and empty. It’s one thing for a bullied kid to stand up for himself, use violence against the violent, even take it too far out of fear or misguided logic. It’s quite another to treat an entire group of intelligent beings as existential threats just because you can’t communicate with them.
 
That’s what’s so insidious, so morally troubling about the narrative of this book, above and beyond the awful gender and racial stereotyping. It mercilessly plays on our strongest moral instincts to manipulate us into accepting acts of evil as morally justified.
 
I suspect the author would deny it - or at least, hedge. Sure, it’s evil, but the lesser of two - kill them before they eat you. Leaving aside how in the real world, for most of the history of colonisation, the fight is between gunpowder and spears, and the ones with gunpowder were also the ones aggressively seeking out people to murder and enslave, even on the terms of the book’s own narrative this justification fails.
 
Because the aliens can communicate. Turns out, via a computer program, they’ve been doing it all along, sending messages to Ender through a game he’s been obsessed with in his downtime. Now, the book uses this to absolve Ender, both by letting him off the hook for the genocide by leading him to a queen egg, and also, in a passage that makes me want to vomit with rage, by having the queen, via telepathic link, forgive Ender for murdering her species on the basis that she understands that they just didn’t understand and it was all a simple communication issue.
 
But here’s the thing - the humans knew the aliens were intelligent. Indeed, we learn towards the end they’d even cracked the queen/hive mind thing, and won the first war by killing the queen. And, as the book tells us, the aliens were trying to communicate with us, and had even found a way to obliquely do so.
 
So what if, instead of turning the entire planet into a resource gathering machine for a world army, they’d spent anything like the same effort just trying to figure out the coms? What if they’d taken a child as gifted and troubled as Ender and developed his empathy rather than his brutality?
 
When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
 
Ender’s Game is a story about evil. It’s a story about an evil society, driven by evil men, who do evil things to children in order to manipulate them to commit evil acts. That the evil men who do these evil deeds agonise and argue and weep over their decisions does not change the fact of their culpability, or the harm of their actions. It’s a story of how the human instinct for self protection and survival is manipulated to create child soldiers who are capable of committing acts of genocide. It is also - grossly, unforgivably - a story that has the victims of colonisation and genocide forgive those who have brutalised and oppressed them - words put into the mouths of the murdered by a man who, for all of his considerable skills of empathy for those who share his gender and skin colour, is utterly incapable of seeing the other as of equal worth.
 
And that really is what it comes down to. The notion that we and our lives are worth infinitely more than theirs. One of the most unoriginal ideas in all of human history, and one of the most bloodsoaked. Ender’s Game is an agonising, sentimental, but ultimately powerful endorsement of and justification for that position.
 
As such, it’s an incredibly powerful study of the anatomy of evil, and how that evil ingratiates itself into the minds of men. It’s brilliant. It’s superb. It’s utterly, utterly vile.
 
And it’s a story that I will always carry with me.
 
KP
5/10/18