Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
Dear Matt,
I thought when the election was over, I’d stop being angry all the time. But I find that I still am. Constantly. I’m angry at Donald Trump for tweeting like a 4Chan troll. I’m angry at the liberal media for not treating Donald Trump fairly and for running unsubstantiated rumors that he’s a Russian double agent who hires prostitutes to pee on each other. I’m angry at Barack Obama, for making as many blockhead decisions on the way out the door as he can. (Giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Joe Biden. What was that about?) In short, I’m angry. Is this wrong, and how do I stop? Or should I stop? Is being angry a byproduct of good citizenship? Looking forward to your answer, but am hoping that it doesn’t make me angry.
Seeing Red,
Moline, Illinois
The first step in solving a problem is admitting that you have one. I heard someone say that once on a television show about Alcoholics Anonymous. Or maybe I just imagined it while drinking heavily to make the pain stop, which is something I’m forced to do with increasing frequency these days. Not so much to ease the inner pain of feeling alone in the cosmos, but the outer pain of having to deal with serially angry people who are harshing my mellow, as idealistic boomers used to say before they grew up and drove the country into a ditch from which it may never be towed. Thus making me furious. (Thanks, Least Greatest Generation.)
But good on you for quasi-acknowledging that you’re logging pointless miles on a manufactured-outrage treadmill. In all likelihood, what you perceive as your righteous anger is actually unrighteous anger. And unrighteous anger inevitably curdles, turning us peevish, or into the village crank, or causing us to resemble Hong Kong Hannity, who has now taken up mixed martial arts and is shy about mentioning it unless he’s on television and a lot of people are watching. But while I pick on Hannity sometimes in this space because it’s easy and fun, he is hardly alone in his perpetual State of Rage. Raging is all the rage. Everybody’s doing it.
Look no further than the last 10 or 15 embarrassing celebrity videos protesting—and this is so brave of them in a Republican stronghold like Hollywood—the election of Donald J. Trump. If you haven’t bothered to sit through the latest one (don’t worry, they’ll make more), here’s the gist of what they’re communicating: “I am a celebrity. I speak lines other people write for me in an insular world of make-believe. And because of this, you should suffer through my babblings, because I too read the Internet, which enrages me, and causes me to have emotions and political opinions which need to be publicly expressed as though I’m saying something unique.” Personally, I derive more edification from watching a fat kid fall off a bike. At least when I Google “fat kid falling off a bike,” this found treasure causes me to laugh, to feel some pangs of human sympathy for my fellow man suffering an indignity, and it’s over quickly. Plus, there’s no chance that Mark Ruffalo will star in it.
Our perpetual State of Rage has been germinating for years, so that some time along the way—let’s call it “2010”—everyone seemed to collectively decide, “It’s okay to behave like an out-of-control jackass.” I don’t typically opt for adult language in print. I try to set a good example for the kids, knowing full well that “Ask Matt” is a staple of so many high-school curricula. But I respect the English language enough to use the word that best gets the job done. And so that’s what we’ve let ourselves become, plain and simple: jackasses. If politics used to best resemble the Cowboys vs. the Redskins (a storied, mostly good-natured rivalry in which you rooted for the other team’s defeat, not their death), it’s come more to resemble the Israelis vs. the Palestinians (an existential hate-fest in which the other team’s ceasing to live would be considered a desirable outcome). This is not a development we should be proud of.
I regularly say this to both my conservative and liberal friends, the latter of whom now likely frequent this site in lesser numbers than they did even five years ago, as everyone is now consigned to their digital masturbatoriums to have their prejudices confirmed and partisan passions inflamed. This is a pity. We all benefit from cross-pollination. From having to confront ideas that don’t naturally reside in our own brainpans. As that great fictional liberal Atticus Finch put it, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Skin-suits aside, liberals and conservatives need each other more than either side is willing to let on. Without conservatives, liberals would likely have no country music, U.S. Marine Corps, or Chick-fil-A. Without liberals, conservatives would have no entertainment industry, farm-to-table restaurants, or porn. A man can only listen to Toby Keith or eat spicy chicken sandwiches so much before he longs for the snappy repartee of Girls or to gawk at strangers fornicating. We are more interdependent than we choose to believe.
Sure, the system is rigged these days, to help us endlessly gloat and glory over each other’s crimes and misdemeanors. Just take last week’s action, for example. Maybe Barack Obama shouldn’t have given a Presidential Medal of Freedom to his vice president just for being a likeable Joe. Why not give it to someone more accomplished, like Sasha or Malia or the White House pastry chef? (He’s good.) And maybe Buzzfeed shouldn’t have notebook-dumped a dossier of mysterious provenance suggesting famous germaphobe Donald Trump enjoys Russian-hooker waterworks, without a trickle of corroborating evidence. And maybe liberals shouldn’t ride their moral high horse, decrying “fake news” when they lose an election, but embracing it when it casts a post-election shadow over a president they regard as illegitimate, the Constitution notwithstanding.
And maybe conservatives, too, should quit whining about liberal-generated fake news when their president-elect spent the better part of five years as a birther, about as fake-newsy as it gets. And maybe, while they’re at it, they should quit whining like screechy tweens about liberal media bias, which has become a bit like whining that the sky is blue. The reality that most mainstream journalists are liberal is settled law, to be sure. But this factoid doesn’t become more interesting the more times you incessantly repeat it. Habitually citing it has become both a crutch and a moral dodge. Just because a journalist leans liberal doesn’t disqualify them from noting, quite accurately, that the president-elect often acts like a mercurial man-baby who risks lower-back injury from carrying so much of Vladimir Putin’s water. We may not like the facts, or who is delivering them. But that doesn’t necessarily make them not so.
So where does that leave us and our State of Rage? Maybe the best way to let go of partisan-based anger is to think of it as the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius did. You remember Stoicism, right? That ancient philosophical code that espoused equanimity and steadiness and cooled passions, while subjecting oneself to duty and truth and reason? Of course you don’t remember. Or barely do. They don’t talk about it on Facebook or Snapchat. Its tenets are not very “shareable.” And these notions that were once considered marks of high character (itself an endangered concept) are now words that carry the same mustiness as “forsooth,” or “gadzooks,” or “meseems.” You can still turn them up in a dictionary, but they no longer find purchase in everyday life.
Still, with nearly two millennia gone by, some truths, like those in Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, carry the scent of the eternal. The next time you’re readying yourself to man your Twitter battle station in order to lay a hammershot on your ideological foe, remember this: “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Or this: “The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.” Or this: “Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.” Or this: “Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”
Marcus Aurelius and I could go on. So we will. There’s this: “If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.” And this: “If it is not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it.” And this: “How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”
But there’s one Aurelius maxim that I particularly like, though it causes extreme discomfort, damning us all, as most true things do. It could effortlessly solve anyone’s anger problem, while simultaneously requiring all the effort in the world:
“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
Have a question for Matt Labash? Ask him at [email protected] or click here.
