This morning’s New York Times had a story that reminded me of some of the more nauseating passages from Victorian novels, and of the way my pet mice behaved when a runt was born into a litter. It was Dan Barry’s report from Fayetteville, Arkansas, about a 16 year-old boy named Billy Wolfe.

The photo shows a blond kid with wary brown eyes and a crooked mouth. Billy Wolfe is described by Barry as “all lank and bone”, a handsome set of words that brings to mind something awkward and unformed and beautiful.

His schoolmates in Fayetteville, Arkansas, don’t think he’s beautiful. Since he was twelve years old they have been beating him up, as often and as hard as they can. Last year they recorded a beating on a cell-phone camera. His smile is perhaps crooked because the inside of his mouth has been lacerated several times in these beatings, once by his braces. When Billy was in 9th grade, his lovely classmates started a Facebook page about Billy, with this caption : “There is no reason anyone should like Billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”

Fayetteville, Arkansas is also the place where ten years ago, another boy, William Wagner, was beaten so hard by his schoolmates that his parents feared for his life and pulled him out of school. So what does all this tell us? That kids in Fayetteville Arkansas hate lanky boys who might just be gay? Billy Wolfe is extremely tall, wears glasses, and does poorly in school; The New York Times puts it politely: “A learning disability that affects his reading comprehension”.

In those Victorian novels, the bad children always threw stones and beat a hapless soul whom the 19th century writers called “the village idiot”. In the cage where my mice lived, when a runt was born, the other mice ate it. The choice of victim is never random: the disabled, disadvantaged, slower, smaller, weaker, sicker. They are first turned into scapegoats — the epithet "bitch”, or “Gay” being the equivalent in Fayetteville Arkansas, of “Jew” in Nazi Germany, or “Witch” in medieval Europe. Then the scapegoats are beaten, humiliated and weakened, so that they will be recognizable by their limps, their scars and their stigmata the next time you need to find them. And if they should make friends, that makes the bully’s job of rounding up the undesirables that much easier. When a crazy kid goes around a school shooting, that is a psychotic act. A bully doesn’t act alone; a bully always acts with the rest of the litter. Bullying is fascism.

This story breaks my heart. What do you think?