American Anger, Part
One
Preface: This is Part One of what I hope will be an
ongoing, potentially year-long exploration of this subject. The topic seems
well-suited to the “blog” format, serving more as a catalyst for conversation
rather than a definitive treatise on the topic. I look forward to continuing
the conversation in hopes of reaching some constructive insights, conclusions,
and potential remedies.
As you’ll no doubt
quickly note, my take on American anger is a rather personal approach; your
choices for taking on the topic may no doubt differ. Despite that, I’ll be
using terms like “Americans “ and the first-person-plural pronoun “we” rather
liberally throughout the entries. I do this merely as shorthand, fully aware
that it’s literary sleight of hand, both a contrivance and a conceit. I don’t
intend to suggest that there are absolute universal truths here, especially
since the insistence on universal absolutes in society tends to generate the
very anger I’ll be analyzing.
As always, thanks for
reading, and even more thanks to those who respond to provoke or inspire
further insight.
1. Use Your Words
American anger fascinates me.
Here we are, billing ourselves as the “best, greatest,
richest, most powerful” nation in the world, and yet people all over the
country claim to be angry. Watching the growth of the Tea Party movement in
2010 was like watching the now-famous scene in Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film
“Network” in which mentally ill talk-show host Howard Beale inspires his
viewers to lift up window sashes across the country and shout out into the
night: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” Everyone was
mad as hell for different reasons, but there was a feeling that bringing all
that rage together into one unifying cry might make it either coherent or
effective. (Spoiler alert: it didn’t.) In many ways, it echoed a couple of the
poet Walt Whitman’s famous lines from “Song of Myself”:
I,
too, am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I
sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.
It was not a specific word or words that Whitman called out
into the night; it was not an intelligible phrase or clause. It was a sound, an
utterance, savage and undomesticated, more animal than human. In a way, Whitman
was suggesting, people had been making those sounds for years and would
continue for many more, well beyond his own eventual death. We might never come
to know who he was or what he meant, but discussion about it “shall be good
health to you nonetheless.”
In this election year, 2012, we are hearing quite a few
YAWPS across the political landscape, some less tamed and translatable than
others.
In addition to all the contemporary social and political
dissent, there is a perhaps an even more powerful undercurrent of dissonance—the
lack of a rational link between one’s beliefs and one’s reality, however either
one is perceived. It’s the feeling we get when we pay top-dollar for something
only to find that it’s cheaply made or ineffectual. We vote for a candidate
based on his or her promises only to find those promises later ignored. (To
provide some continuity between this blog and an earlier entry on football’s
“Tebow Time” phenomenon, dissonance was that sickening feeling the
hyper-religious quarterback’s more fanatic fans experienced when the Denver
Broncos were humiliated by the New England Patriots in a recent playoff game.
For the sake of divisional fairness, it was also the sickening feeling the
Green Bay Cheeseheads felt when Aaron Rodgers and the nearly-perfect Packers
succumbed to the New York Giants the very next day.)
I’ll be talking much more about dissonance and its relation
to anger later on, but it’s worth mentioning here just to keep the idea in mind
as the discussion of anger progresses.
As Americans, we see anger glorified throughout our culture,
from movies to music, sports to politics. Despite our supposed Judeo-Christian
foundation, we have movements in the country that promote violence and greed
over diplomacy and charity. As our young people’s generation comes to define
itself (or, to put it in the passive voice, lets itself be defined by others)
as “ironic,” it also grows indifferent to irony’s cousin, hypocrisy. Sarcasm
provides an easy segue from skepticism to cynicism, providing many a political
pundit on both ends of the political spectrum with the equivalent of sniper’s
bullets.
When anger wears us down into a numbed state of depression,
anger’s inward-turned doppelganger, we shrug our shoulders and try to focus our
attention elsewhere. For some, this may translate into another glass of wine,
another dose of Xanax, another marathon session watching the Real Housewives of
Whatever County spit their venomous barbs at one another. Other folks may start
in on the next level of “Angry Birds,” one of the highest-grossing games in our
country. Or perhaps you want to take a virtual trip around the world—killing
people and blowing things up along the way—in America’s top game of the
Christmas season, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. What a wonderful gift to commemorate
the birth of the Prince of Peace. (See how easily the sarcasm comes?)
Many players of these games claim that such pastimes are
cathartic—that they help “release tension” and “blow off steam” at the end of a
stressful day. If that were truly the case, violent movies and first-person
shooter games would leave the players in a state of blissful repose at the end
of a session. Instead, they ramp up the emotions and boost the adrenalin. (Full
disclosure: I play an occasional hour or two of “World of Warcraft” myself at
the end of a busy day, so I know that to be successful as a warrior, you need
to “generate rage.” It’s right there in the game manual.)
So maybe the term cathartic
is a canard when we choose violence-based entertainment as a relief or release
of our internal anger and frustration. I’d argue that the proper word is indulgent. Pressing further, I’d express
concern that a more appropriate adjective might be catalytic. America seems to like things super-sized, so it’s no
surprise that when it comes to anger, amplification isn’t just acceptable; it’s
preferable.
An admission: cathartic,
indulgent, and catalytic are big
words. I’m a writer, so I sometimes use big words. That’s because language,
like anger, fascinates me. They’re both acts of expression that have rich,
sometimes hidden, roots and origins. Example: I wrote a poem about one such
instance, the word decimate. Many
people think it means “to destroy completely and indiscriminately.” In fact,
the word is based on the Latin root for the number ten and originally meant a
methodical act of slaughter in which exactly one victim in ten was killed.
(Ironic, eh?) The meanings of words may evolve over time, but the origins of
their species are there for all to comprehend and appreciate.
But I digress. Let’s return to the notion of anger as a
cathartic force and set forth a little thought experiment. Imagine that you’re
a parent dealing with a red-faced child whose inexplicable rage has sent
cereal, milk, and orange juice flying across the kitchen. To calm the child,
would you—
a. put
on some soothing, New Age music and send the child into the corner for a
five-minute “time out” period of self-reflection?
b. tell
the kid to march off to his/her room and go the f*ck to sleep?
c. tell
the child to imagine having an automatic weapon in his/her hands during a
stressful, high-stakes combat mission whose outcome will determine the fate of
all mankind?
d. ask
the child, “Why are you so angry?”
Now imagine America as a red-faced child.
Modern child-rearing gurus recommend option d. Many advise
parents to respond to their children’s extreme behaviors with the expression
“Use your words.” This doubles as both an encouragement of self-expression and
a redirection of energy. It’s a graceful dance step that moves the child away
from visceral reaction toward more cerebral creation. Emotions, meet intellect.
Intellect, say hello to emotions.
To some, however, “use your words” is just so much
poppycock. To quote the blogger MetroDad, a rather literate and opinionated New
Yorker: “I think it's a bullshit mantra that only helps raise the next
generation of pussies.” Like it or not, that’s using your words.
In some ways, “use your words” promotes a form of therapy.
It seeks to replace the outburst with what we might call the “inburst,” a
breaking-and-entering of the psyche in order to see what secrets are hidden in
the closets or nailed beneath the floorboards. We ask a child “what’s really
bothering you?” with an expectation of stolen snacks or missing pets, but
sometimes the answer shocks and surprises. I’d argue that this is true even
when we as adults ask the question of ourselves.
It’s no surprise that many people view creative expression
as a form of therapy. Just read the inexhaustible output of writers writing
about writing, a quite profitable if overindulgent niche market. We’ve even
“verbed” the word “journal.” Did you know that people who journal frequently
are able to reduce their stress and manage their anger more efficiently? I
could say the same thing about blogging, but then there’s that quote up above
from MetroDad. (I kid MetroDad. His blog entries are actually quite amusing,
entertaining, and even insightful.)
Too often these days, when it comes to using our words,
people settle for quick fixes rather than deep introspection. It’s the
140-character Tweet of the daily pet peeve versus Plato’s lifetime of
examination. I’m not suggesting that everyone sign up for therapy sessions, but
I do ask friends and colleagues to strive for clarity and honesty in their
communications. That often requires work. True expression isn’t effortless.
Even as I write this, I am surrounded by reference
materials. As a writer, it often isn’t enough simply to “use your words.” As
you’ve noticed, I often rely on the words of others, be they expressed in song
or psalm, poetry or prose, book or blog. I would be lost without the
dictionary, the thesaurus, the atlas, the encyclopedia, and the patient
guidance of my editor/husband—even though all of those things can tempt me
along time-consuming tangents with their fascinating insights. Likewise, I am
inspired and guided by the works of scholars like Geoffrey Nunberg, whose books
and NPR spots on language have both educated and entertained me. Honestly, how
many of you get excited when you see an essay entitled “The Politics of
Polysyndeton” Hands? Hands? Hello?...
My own fascination with language started in second grade,
and it has grown deeper ever since. Even so, one catalytic instant stands out.
(Please, if you still don’t know what catalytic
means, either look it up on your iPad’s dictionary or ask your car mechanic.
After all, these elite, ten-dollar words aren’t reserved for professors holed
up in their ivory towers. If you truly love your country, learn the English
language. Have I made my appeal clear in both liberalese and conservatese?)
Elie Wiesel, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 and the
holder of a Congressional Medal of Honor, is another humanitarian hero of mine.
Wiesel spent most of his life coming to terms with the violence, anger, and
despair he witnessed as a concentration camp prisoner during the Holocaust. I
heard him speak about his experiences shortly after he received the Nobel
Prize. One of his responses during a question-and-answer session has haunted me
ever since.
“Americans,” he stated matter-of-factly, “have one of the
most violent languages in the world.”
The truth of that comment struck me. No…it hit me in the
face. No…it blindsided me. No…it knocked me out. No…it fell on me like a ton of
bricks. No…it blew my mind. No…it bowled me over.
Everywhere I went and everyone I talked to—suddenly, I was
keenly aware of the insidious presence of anger and violence in everyday
American language. On one occasion, I felt compelled to alert a pacifist
minister to her repeated use of violent idioms and imagery in a sermon on
compassion. She stood there dumbstruck (as we say), amazed by the horrible
truthfulness of the comment.
For a while after hearing Elie Wiesel speak, I too felt dumbstruck, “made silent by
astonishment” (to quote Webster). As a writer, I also felt aware in a way I had never felt or experienced before. The Buddhist
in me smiled silently. Mindfulness, after all, is one of the key concepts of
the practice, summed up simply in the popular mantra “Be here now.”
And so here I am, now, in an American culture defined (in
part) by its reactionary anger toward so many things—including each other. I’m
struggling to understand that anger, both in myself and in others, and to use
my words to describe it. But what do we talk about when we talk about anger?
Defining anger, as I hope to demonstrate in the forthcoming
part two, is no easy task, but it’s well worth the effort. Our fate as a
nation, if I can ramp up the election year rhetoric, may actually depend on it.
• • •
Playlist for
“American Anger”
“Music is food,” says
my artist-friend James “Mayhem” Mahan, and so this post comes with a playlist
for the full multi-media experience. These are songs that fed my mind as I
considered this post and its upcoming parts. It’s also collaborative, so if
you’re on Spotify, I encourage you to contribute as well as to listen. Mostly
it’s for fun…testing once again how all of this interactive interconnected
technology works. Enjoy.
1. Green
Day, “American Idiot”
2. Public
Image, “Rise”
3. Nine
Inch Nails, “Terrible Lie”
4. Kanye
West, “Monster”
5. Florence
and the Machine, “Kiss with a Fist”
(You can listen to and help build this playlist on Spotify
here:
