Rage and its discontents
Nov. 22nd, 2004 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sisyphusshruggedor discontent and its rages. One of those.
What we are is we're angry. All of us.
The people of the red states, pounding nails into their foot with gleeful abandon - angry. Enraged. They look around them and what they see makes them feel bad and powerless and it isn't fair and someone has to be punished for it. Someone who isn't trying as hard as they are. Someone who isn't as good as they are. Someone who doesn't understand how hard they're trying. Someone who's trying to make them feel bad when they're the victims. Someone not virtuous.
Unfortunately, as a group they're suffering from Harlan Ellison syndrome.
I don't know if you've read The Glass Teat. It's a book of columns of television criticism he wrote in the sixties (humorous note: in one column he raves about having seen the future of the dramatic art in its depth and truth and uncompromising realness in the work of a promising young actor who went on to become the producer of Red Shoe Diaries) but it's also a chronicle of the life and times of Harlan Ellison, angry man. He's met this woman, see. She's the sun and she's the moon and she's the stars and she's above this mere earth and she has his fealty forever because it's the only fit tribute to her magnificence. His friends don't understand. Fuck his friends. His friends are venal and they don't know about us and they've never heard of love.
A few weeks later, though, she's a skank whore bitch who blinded him by her evil machinations and the depths of the pit are looking down in awe at the abyssal dimensions of her perfidy.
But that's OK, because he's met this girl.
It's very hard, reading this, not to draw the conclusion that the reason his eyes lit up and his blood turned to champagne and he set her up upon a pedestal as the quintessence of womanhood is that, well, deep within his heart where he keeps his pictures of the world, there's a portrait of a woman who's a skank whore bitch and he really digs chicks who look like her.
In parenthetical fairness, by all accounts his wife is a very nice woman and they get along fine, which is a fine hopeful thing.
If you don't break the cycle, though, every time the inevitable happens it tells you how right you were, and how true your perceptions are and how anyone who tries to tell you different, or tries to tell you that you may be contributing to your own unhappiness through your own choices, just doesn't get it and is probably deliberately misunderstanding the situation and thinks you're dumb or something and they're trying to tell you that you deserve what's happened to you, which is of course grossly unfair and really, they're colluding in your betrayal and that really pisses you off.
Like those liberals. Taking my hard-earned money that I worked hard for and handing it over to some professional victim who gets to take it easy while I work some more to pay for it. You wouldn't believe the shit I take to put food on my family, but I do it, because that's what a good person does, and Those People don't do it, so they're not good people. My hard-earned money is going to bad people. Sometimes you just have to fight fire with fire. I gotta appreciate someone who's gonna go into the jaws of the liberals who ruthlessly oppress us and cut a few corners to keep my money away from the bad people.
Now imagine who the politicians who make their eyes shine are, and what their politicians tell them to get their votes. Or just could just pick up a paper and look. They have a mandate, on dit.
Then in what we are pleased to call these days the middle, there are the hard-headed realists. Life is hard. You have to make the hard choices. You're just being sensible. You do the best you can for yourself, make your life as good as you can and you mean well, by your own lights, and you wouldn't hurt anyone unless there was something very important in it for you. What pisses you off is all those wildeyed good government fanatics who have no sense of balance. It's a cold cruel world out there, and you can't pretend it isn't, and you have to be sensible and rise above things and it's really the only way, you have to take the long view and the poor are always with us, right? No shame in not wanting to be one of them but all those goody goody wild-eyed unrealistic throwbacks out there who don't understand are just picking on you.
Not so hard to be picked on by the wackos on the right, because let's face it, you're better educated than they are and we only have Walmart because they shop there and you have more money and your friends wouldn't even talk to them if they weren't buying a Big Mac, so who gives a shit what they think? They're sheep. They don't matter. Yeah, disapprove of me, guys, go ahead, fill your house trailer with rage and I'll crack another Sierra Nevada while you vote for my tax cut. No-one's gonna break down my door no matter what I do with my dick, and I still have a retirement account.
Hell, Glenn Reynolds understands. David Broder understands. Tucker Carlson understands. It's just theater. Lighten up.
Those assholes on the left, though. Think they're so fucking smart. Think they're so fucking righteous. Think they're so fucking cool. Live to make you look bad. Anybody could make anybody look bad if they were fucking out to get them. No balance. No proportion. Everybody goes along to get along, and if you've got a problem with that, it's not because I'm doing something wrong, it's because I know how to work the system and they don't. They're just jealous. Think they're hot shit. Fuckheads.
And speaking of those assholes on the left, it's a shame they can't get together with those assholes on the right, because they're pounding nails through the opposite foot and they'd all be well on their way to a marvellous auto-crucifixion if they'd just team up.
I have the power of my vote and my voice. I also have a laundry list. I feel very strongly about my laundry list. I refuse to compromise one single issue on my laundry list. I don't care if it means that my laundry is going to be thrown in a mud puddle. I certainly don't care if means that your laundry is going to get thrown in a mud puddle. How dare you point to your muddy laundry as if it should be a concern of mine. I have more important concerns than your damn laundry. I am overwhelmed with concern. I'm so concerned I'm practically paralyzed.
Maybe I can't save the whales, but I can make my voice heard and stand up for my principles, so when the children of the fortunes made in the wake of the Nuke the Whales Act of 2005 go to the museum their parents will edge around the whale memorial exhibit and act shuffly knowing that there were some who stood by the whales until they get to the dodo exhibit and put the whole thing back in perspective. I will not cut a deal on the saving of whales and I will not compromise and I will not back down and after all, I didn't kill the whales. I poured my heart and soul into the resurgence of the Save the Whales party, and we got enough votes to defeat that quisling who was soft on saving whales.
His opponent voted for the Nuke the Whales Act in his first term, which just goes to show that the system is gamed against the virtuous.
Then of course there's the ball of rage which none of these people quite realizes is directly in the center of all this and which it all revolves around, to whit me.
People are dying. We're going after the sick and the lame and the halt and the different and the dusky because they're low-hanging fruit and not enough people know what's going on or care enough about it to make it stop and people are treating all of this like it's a game of Calvinball - hur hur, worked the ref, moved the goalposts, it's my ball anyway, clever me, I win, you have to buy the first round and come to think of it the rest of them too. Sack dance.
Which is what I'm angry about. And anything that reminds me about it just taps the wellspring of that rage. Which there's a lot of. And if maybe a story about Bush saying something stupid or or another example of some social-climbing twit at the Times/Post/CNN/the Washington Monthly fluttering their eyelashes at the status quo because it dines with a better set of people comes to my attention it's a frail container to have to hold all that rage. Perhaps it's enough to point out that the image doesn't reflect the reality. Perhaps it's corrective to say that if you feel embattled by the Hobbesian direction society is heading in, you should take a good hard look at who is taking it there. Perhaps pouring withering scorn on ANYONE WHO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS SYMPTOMATIC OF EVERYTHING THAT'S WRONG WITH AMERICA TODAY AND DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT AND DOESN'T FUCKING DO SOMETHING, DAMMIT is a hair, let's say, disproportionate*
You know, maybe. To some extent.
Anger can be great fuel. It's counterproductive to flood the engine.
*This should not be taken in any way to imply that I am backing away from my firmly-held conviction that the lowest circle of hell is filled with the howling souls of marketing people clawing at their flesh in eternal torment but unable to tear away the sansabelt slacks and pantsuits from the back pages of Parade
What we are is we're angry. All of us.
The people of the red states, pounding nails into their foot with gleeful abandon - angry. Enraged. They look around them and what they see makes them feel bad and powerless and it isn't fair and someone has to be punished for it. Someone who isn't trying as hard as they are. Someone who isn't as good as they are. Someone who doesn't understand how hard they're trying. Someone who's trying to make them feel bad when they're the victims. Someone not virtuous.
Unfortunately, as a group they're suffering from Harlan Ellison syndrome.
I don't know if you've read The Glass Teat. It's a book of columns of television criticism he wrote in the sixties (humorous note: in one column he raves about having seen the future of the dramatic art in its depth and truth and uncompromising realness in the work of a promising young actor who went on to become the producer of Red Shoe Diaries) but it's also a chronicle of the life and times of Harlan Ellison, angry man. He's met this woman, see. She's the sun and she's the moon and she's the stars and she's above this mere earth and she has his fealty forever because it's the only fit tribute to her magnificence. His friends don't understand. Fuck his friends. His friends are venal and they don't know about us and they've never heard of love.
A few weeks later, though, she's a skank whore bitch who blinded him by her evil machinations and the depths of the pit are looking down in awe at the abyssal dimensions of her perfidy.
But that's OK, because he's met this girl.
It's very hard, reading this, not to draw the conclusion that the reason his eyes lit up and his blood turned to champagne and he set her up upon a pedestal as the quintessence of womanhood is that, well, deep within his heart where he keeps his pictures of the world, there's a portrait of a woman who's a skank whore bitch and he really digs chicks who look like her.
In parenthetical fairness, by all accounts his wife is a very nice woman and they get along fine, which is a fine hopeful thing.
If you don't break the cycle, though, every time the inevitable happens it tells you how right you were, and how true your perceptions are and how anyone who tries to tell you different, or tries to tell you that you may be contributing to your own unhappiness through your own choices, just doesn't get it and is probably deliberately misunderstanding the situation and thinks you're dumb or something and they're trying to tell you that you deserve what's happened to you, which is of course grossly unfair and really, they're colluding in your betrayal and that really pisses you off.
Like those liberals. Taking my hard-earned money that I worked hard for and handing it over to some professional victim who gets to take it easy while I work some more to pay for it. You wouldn't believe the shit I take to put food on my family, but I do it, because that's what a good person does, and Those People don't do it, so they're not good people. My hard-earned money is going to bad people. Sometimes you just have to fight fire with fire. I gotta appreciate someone who's gonna go into the jaws of the liberals who ruthlessly oppress us and cut a few corners to keep my money away from the bad people.
Now imagine who the politicians who make their eyes shine are, and what their politicians tell them to get their votes. Or just could just pick up a paper and look. They have a mandate, on dit.
Then in what we are pleased to call these days the middle, there are the hard-headed realists. Life is hard. You have to make the hard choices. You're just being sensible. You do the best you can for yourself, make your life as good as you can and you mean well, by your own lights, and you wouldn't hurt anyone unless there was something very important in it for you. What pisses you off is all those wildeyed good government fanatics who have no sense of balance. It's a cold cruel world out there, and you can't pretend it isn't, and you have to be sensible and rise above things and it's really the only way, you have to take the long view and the poor are always with us, right? No shame in not wanting to be one of them but all those goody goody wild-eyed unrealistic throwbacks out there who don't understand are just picking on you.
Not so hard to be picked on by the wackos on the right, because let's face it, you're better educated than they are and we only have Walmart because they shop there and you have more money and your friends wouldn't even talk to them if they weren't buying a Big Mac, so who gives a shit what they think? They're sheep. They don't matter. Yeah, disapprove of me, guys, go ahead, fill your house trailer with rage and I'll crack another Sierra Nevada while you vote for my tax cut. No-one's gonna break down my door no matter what I do with my dick, and I still have a retirement account.
Hell, Glenn Reynolds understands. David Broder understands. Tucker Carlson understands. It's just theater. Lighten up.
Those assholes on the left, though. Think they're so fucking smart. Think they're so fucking righteous. Think they're so fucking cool. Live to make you look bad. Anybody could make anybody look bad if they were fucking out to get them. No balance. No proportion. Everybody goes along to get along, and if you've got a problem with that, it's not because I'm doing something wrong, it's because I know how to work the system and they don't. They're just jealous. Think they're hot shit. Fuckheads.
And speaking of those assholes on the left, it's a shame they can't get together with those assholes on the right, because they're pounding nails through the opposite foot and they'd all be well on their way to a marvellous auto-crucifixion if they'd just team up.
I have the power of my vote and my voice. I also have a laundry list. I feel very strongly about my laundry list. I refuse to compromise one single issue on my laundry list. I don't care if it means that my laundry is going to be thrown in a mud puddle. I certainly don't care if means that your laundry is going to get thrown in a mud puddle. How dare you point to your muddy laundry as if it should be a concern of mine. I have more important concerns than your damn laundry. I am overwhelmed with concern. I'm so concerned I'm practically paralyzed.
Maybe I can't save the whales, but I can make my voice heard and stand up for my principles, so when the children of the fortunes made in the wake of the Nuke the Whales Act of 2005 go to the museum their parents will edge around the whale memorial exhibit and act shuffly knowing that there were some who stood by the whales until they get to the dodo exhibit and put the whole thing back in perspective. I will not cut a deal on the saving of whales and I will not compromise and I will not back down and after all, I didn't kill the whales. I poured my heart and soul into the resurgence of the Save the Whales party, and we got enough votes to defeat that quisling who was soft on saving whales.
His opponent voted for the Nuke the Whales Act in his first term, which just goes to show that the system is gamed against the virtuous.
Then of course there's the ball of rage which none of these people quite realizes is directly in the center of all this and which it all revolves around, to whit me.
People are dying. We're going after the sick and the lame and the halt and the different and the dusky because they're low-hanging fruit and not enough people know what's going on or care enough about it to make it stop and people are treating all of this like it's a game of Calvinball - hur hur, worked the ref, moved the goalposts, it's my ball anyway, clever me, I win, you have to buy the first round and come to think of it the rest of them too. Sack dance.
Which is what I'm angry about. And anything that reminds me about it just taps the wellspring of that rage. Which there's a lot of. And if maybe a story about Bush saying something stupid or or another example of some social-climbing twit at the Times/Post/CNN/the Washington Monthly fluttering their eyelashes at the status quo because it dines with a better set of people comes to my attention it's a frail container to have to hold all that rage. Perhaps it's enough to point out that the image doesn't reflect the reality. Perhaps it's corrective to say that if you feel embattled by the Hobbesian direction society is heading in, you should take a good hard look at who is taking it there. Perhaps pouring withering scorn on ANYONE WHO DOESN'T UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS SYMPTOMATIC OF EVERYTHING THAT'S WRONG WITH AMERICA TODAY AND DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT AND DOESN'T FUCKING DO SOMETHING, DAMMIT is a hair, let's say, disproportionate*
You know, maybe. To some extent.
Anger can be great fuel. It's counterproductive to flood the engine.
*This should not be taken in any way to imply that I am backing away from my firmly-held conviction that the lowest circle of hell is filled with the howling souls of marketing people clawing at their flesh in eternal torment but unable to tear away the sansabelt slacks and pantsuits from the back pages of Parade
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-21 12:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-22 03:18 am (UTC)Has the beast been starved enough yet to be drowned in bathtub?