A two-year presidential campaign is under way, and we can expect some aspiring leaders to stand out by appealing to a party’s base, ideologically passionate folk noted for scathing and seemingly ever-increasing anger at the opposition.
It is hard to imagine a better time for the arrival of “A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now,” a detailed examination of the expressions of anger in America from Peter Wood, provost and professor of anthropology at King’s College.
In summer 2004, Wood heard a workman tell an angry, swearing colleague, “a bee in the mouth is always bad.” Despite extensive research, Wood was unable to find the origin of this saying, raising the possibility it is merely one man’s motto.
But the distinctive metaphor for anger, and the advice that seemed like a bygone era, spurred the author to look at why so many modern Americans seem to more eagerly embrace their anger compared with past generations.
Wood diagnoses that more Americans believe that anger is empowering and allows them to overcome the perceived indignities of modern life and is also an expression of their authenticity. To many, control of one’s temper is repression, surrendering to conformity, and at its heart, dishonest.
Wood ends with something of a lament, and closes with a metaphoric reference to an invasion of angry killer bees in the state of Florida. Looking at the experience of another state, Wood closes, “The best advice that Arizona officials have come up with after several years of dealing with these bees is: “RUN! RUN! RUN!”
But we cannot “RUN RUN RUN” from an angry culture. We have to live amid it and its effects, from road rage, to athletes storming into the stands to confront jeering fans, to rap music that celebrates violent or even deadly responses to any perceived slights, to those who turn a political disagreement into an opportunity to loudly denounce our views as evidence of our moral and intellectual decadence.
And throughout the book, Wood hints, but does not quite explicitly argue, that all of this anger may actually amount to sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The great accomplishments of the past decades — the technical innovations, medical breakthroughs, economic growth and explosion of choices in everything from books on Amazon to user-created media on YouTube to the repository of knowledge that Google and Wikipedia and millions of Web users are creating — are driven by entrepreneurship, ingenuity, creativity and bold dreams — not anger.
In the political world, anger has not yet propelled many candidates into the offices they desire. Dean imploded. Ned Lamont, the candidate and campaign most tuned-in to the anger of liberal bloggers, lost by 10 points. Some of the angriest opponents of illegal immigration, J.D. Hayworth and Randy Graf, went down to defeat in Arizona House races last year.
Jim Webb, who ran on the campaign slogan that he was “born fightin,’ ” is in the Senate having bested George Allen (doomed by the anger, or at least ugliness, in his “macaca” belittling of an opponent’s staffer) and expressed to friends his desire to physically strike President Bush after a brusque face-to-face meeting in the White House. Yet Webb also achieved the rare feat of having a higher negative rating than positive rating in the first poll of his job as senator.
The political flavor of the month is Sen. Barack Obama’s pleasant, affable graciousness to all, particularly to those who disagree with him.
There will always be those who “get off” on expressing their anger. But anger is like hot spices or detergent: A little goes a long way. Read the comments thread on an angry political blog and you’ll hear posters lament that they can’t get along with family members over politics, and remark, sometimes with pride, that they have ended friendships over political differences.
They lash out at apostate lawmakers of their own party at least as harshly as those on the other side of the aisle and view compromise as a synonym for weakness or lack of principles. These angry web citizens find the virtual community of folk marching in ideological lockstep much more palatable than the real world, full of dissenting views, disagreement, competing interests and apathy.
While they may find this self-segregation and constant reinforcement emotionally satisfying, it ensures their distance from the non-angry and an inability to connect with those who aren’t in that same Republic of New Anger. The satisfaction of the angry comes at the high cost of their chance at persuasion.
Jim Geraghty is a member of The Examiner Blog Board of Contributors and writes the Hillary Spot blog for National Review Online.
