Last year, when I ran in the Republican primary for the Ohio House of Representatives, I had a telephone conversation with a member of the local party's central committee.
"I gotta be honest with you," he said. "When you started writing your column for the Press--when was that?"
"95," I said.
"95? Okay, when you started writing it back in 95, I read it every time it appeared. But after awhile, I just stopped. Then, one day, I was talking with a friend and he told me the same thing..."
He paused, probably fearful that he could offend me.
"What?" I asked him.
"Well, we both agreed that we just sort of got bored with it."
Writers, of course, don't aim at boring their readers. So, I probed to determine why my columns bored this man and his friend.
It turned out that there just wasn't enough red meat, no earth-scorching, sin-damning, strawman-bashing rhetoric to suit his tastes.
Surf the blogging world or turn on your TV these days and you'll find a lot of nastiness, from reality shows to so-called "debates" on the cable channels, from movies that extol sadism and talk shows that celebrate violent language and violent actions to resolve interpersonal problems.
It seems that we're yelling at each other all the time and that anger is our modus operandi.
Don't get me wrong, I get angry, too. Often, my anger is born of selfishness, ignited by the world or the events of my day not going the ways I want them to go.
But my anger can also be legitimate, I think.
Self-righteousness makes me angry.
And I hate it when people are treated unjustly, be they children subjected to endless put-downs, innocent commuters riding subway trains, or minorities thwarted by discrimination.
I also get angry at political talk show hosts and pundits who seem bent on turning every political or religious conversation into Armageddon.
They allow anger or the never-ending search for hot buttons that will bring them attention and advertising revenues and book deals, to incite them into saying the most malevolent, dim-witted things.
All this anger--affected or real--doesn't help us make decisions as a society or help us work together, in the phrasing of the Constitution, "to form a more perfect union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity..."
Sometimes today, it appears to me that those aims are being torpedoed either by an attenuated Freudianism that encourages all of us to vent our spleens and look for new things to be outraged about or by the desperate desire for "success" born of attention-grabbing anger, all with the absurd idea that this is what healthy people do, that this is what citizens of a democracy do.
By the way, anger in itself isn't a bad thing, from a Biblical perspective. It's morally neutral. Anger only becomes bad when it's used in bad ways. So, don't write off what I'm saying as the candy-coated rhetoric of a Christian naif.
"Be angry, but do not sin," Paul says in the New Testament. "Don't let the sun go down on your anger."
In other words, the Bible's counsel is that we should own our anger in constructive ways. "Speak the truth in love," we're told.
Of course, on rare occasions, our anger might lead to volcanic outbursts. Christ, Who was sinless, had what I sometimes call His temple tantrum, when He saw extortionists make a killing off the credulous faith of earnest believers. In the temple in Jerusalem, He overturned their tables, threw down their coins, and "liberated" the animals they were selling at exorbitant prices for temple sacrifices.
What makes Jesus' action in the temple so alarming and impressive is that it's one of the few times when He displayed anger. But anger is the stock in trade of much of our public discourse and private conversation.
I realize that in rejecting anger as the language of normal debate and discussion, I am really out of step with my world. I hope that in itself doesn't sound self-righteous. I don't intend for it to be. It's just that all this anger makes me angry.
Do you ever feel this way, too?
UPDATE: Ann Althouse seems to have a slightly different perspective, at least in the case of one angry pundit, Christopher Hitchens.
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