I used to blog a lot, fed by anger. Anger at how things were, how things have been, what things were becoming. Anger at other Americans, at politicians, at corporations, at bad music elevated above good, at nothing at all. It got to the point where I couldn’t write anything without anger to feed it. Anger at American exceptionalism and warmongering and empire building and the American penchant for righteous ignorance.
Like a lot of people, I made the leap into the idea that putting my anger down and out into the world made a difference.
Looking back, that too was an expression of how American I am. I used to comfort myself with the fairy tale that Americans were fundamentally good and liberal and loved puppies and apple pie. Naively believing that argument expressed forcefully could balance the scales and rescue a country that has always barely held itself together. How stupidly American, that things could be so because I and others WISHED them so.
What crap.
Looking at the Beck Traveling Road Show today in DC, the mosque silliness and the continual elevation of pathetic morons like Sarah Palin, and it’s painfully clear that Americans hate each other, fear each other, and will continually side with the Owners of this nation, like peasants and serfs have done throughout history, in the hopes of protection and maybe a little filthy lucre too.
It’s not just the right in this, but the supposed liberals too. Gore and his album-banning wife, his fake activism and his eager surrender in 2001, Kerry and his concession through perfumed hankie, Bubba Clinton and his attacks on the poor, his elevation of banksters by shredding regulation, and most recently Barry Obama and his empty promises and his feckless cowardly buddies in the Senate.
So much and so many to be angry at … all to no effect.
Sadly, trying not to be angry makes it impossible to write. They’re so tied up together, conditioned. Politics and daily outrage as Pavlov’s bell.
There really isn’t any point to this, I guess, other than as a minor self-exorcism. We’ll see how things go.
Breakfast in the Ruins 
Very similar for me. I might go so far to say it was ‘anger management’ in my case. I found it therapeutic to direct my utter disillusionment with the world into words…
Now, I find it hard to get angry anymore & to be honest, it’s healthier not to be. My time is better spent writing music than raising my blood pressure to rant on the internet…
By: lucid on August 30, 2010
at 12:29 pm
it just gets too corrosive after a while.
By: Madman in the Marketplace on September 2, 2010
at 12:15 am
Americans are really no better, or no worse, than people in any other rich, privilaged nation.
A lot of the Islamophobia around the Tribecca Islamic Center is mainline Eurofacism imported by American wingnuts.
The real division isn’t America vs. the outside world. It’s north versus south, rich versus poor.
Americans and western Europeans are being subjected to a neoliberal assault that will reduce them, in a few decades, to the same economic and political status as people in China or India.
That’s where the anger comes from. They know it and, deep down inside, they know that they can’t continue to consume at the right they are now. But they’re in denial.
The arc of despair is long, and, in the end, nobody will care.
By: Theodor Parker on September 5, 2010
at 3:08 pm