Outrage Is Just Fine for Voters

I’ve been thinking a lot about outrage this year--especially as the June 5 election approaches. I’ve always tended to regard outrage (“passionate violence of expression,” according to Webster) as the antithesis of reason and therefore a condition to be avoided if at all possible. Decisions made or positions taken in the heat of outrage, it seemed to me, seldom turned out to be in the best interests of anyone.

Now, I’m not so sure.

Two awarenesses--one recent, the other long running--have helped bring me to this place. The recent event is the explosion of columnist Jimmy Breslin against a young Korean-American journalist in the offices of Newsday, as chronicled so graphically in The Times a few weeks ago.

The long-running awareness is the continuous--and often effective--outrage of the groups that oppose abortion, what they see as pornography, homosexuality, and many educational practices inimical to their sense of morality.

In the Breslin episode--in case you missed it in the news--the columnist was criticized by one of his associates, a young woman reporter named Ji-Yeon Yuh, for a column Yuh considered sexist. Breslin went berserk, storming about the newsroom spewing racial and sexual slurs that appalled even his old buddies there. The Times headline--”Rage and Outrage”--struck home with me. What Breslin was expressing was pure rage (which Webster defines as “fit of fury; insanity”).

By contrast, the Christian fundamentalists and political ultra-conservatives--many of them headquartered in Orange County--who are trying, with considerable effectiveness in many instances, to impose their constricted views of right and wrong on the rest of us, are moved primarily by a sense of outrage. Like Breslin, they use hatred--in their case, hatred of groups and lifestyles that frighten and threaten them--as a weapon. But their seemingly tireless energy comes from moral outrage.

That motivation gives them a decided advantage in our society today over people who are moved almost entirely by either reason or rage. The latter is blind and totally ineffective in a fight. And the former can be almost as insidious because it starts from a basic wrong assumption: that people approached solely with reason will respond in kind and thus make reasonable choices. And it just isn’t so.

That, in turn, raises the question of why outrage should be reserved solely for fundamentalist thinking. Those of us who see our First Amendment rights being eroded by fundamentalist pressure should be equally outraged. Reason in this country today--and especially in Orange County--simply isn’t enough. It needs at least a small sense of outrage, and that isn’t happening.

I got a letter the other day from Madeline Keeney of Huntington Beach, responding to a column I had written objecting to prior censorship of government-subsidized art. Keeney wrote: “I agree that ‘Americans have the right’ etc. What you and others of your ilk can’t seem to figure out is that (Rep. Dana) Rohrabacher (R-Lomita) and I and many others think that if pornography masquerading as art is so great, it should be self-supporting. We resent having our tax dollars used to support such ‘art.’ Let those who approve of it buy it. I don’t care. But leave me and my money out of it.”

I could reasonably point out to Ms. Keeney that the United States is one of the few industrial nations in the world--and maybe the only one--that doesn’t support its own artists generously with public money; that only the totalitarian nations put rigid prior restraints on the art produced; that the definition of pornography is in the eye of the beholder; that given the nature of our economy, most artistic resources in this country would dry up without public support, and that stifling the arts has historically been a prelude to the decline of a society.

Or I could get outraged, instead, and say there are a multitude of government expenditures I would have preferred to “leave me and my taxes out of.” Take, for example, the billions poured down the rapacious rat hole of “Star Wars” or the bailout of venal savings and loan officials, both of which I consider much more obscene than anything photographer Robert Mapplethorpe has ever done. But this is a plural society, and our taxes aren’t all spent in precisely the way we want them to be. We win some and lose some.

I suppose recognizing this is why I can’t work up to the same degree of outrage as the people who would either censor our artists or withdraw public support from them, or the people who would take away the fundamental rights of homosexuals or corrupt school texts to conform to their sometimes-peculiar views of the world, on what they see as moral grounds. And that, I have come to believe, is not good.

We should, for example, be outraged at the burgeoning number of police killings of unarmed citizens in Orange County. At Republican Party officials who first initiated, then condoned the use of private uniformed guards at polling places to interfere with the rights of minority voters. At a Democrat who is running for the State Board of Equalization while under indictment for seeking illegal campaign contributions. At three Orange County assemblymen who violated every standard of ethical behavior by forging the name of the President of the United States to campaign documents. At a U.S. senator so consumed by greed in collecting campaign funds that he puts the savings of his own constituents in jeopardy. And that’s just for starters.

Recently when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher pushed through a new tax law that benefited the wealthy at the expense of the poor, the English people took to the streets in massive demonstrations. They have since defeated Thatcher’s candidates in several by-elections.

In the United States, we have passively accepted an income tax rate that decreases for the very wealthy, so they pay a much lower rate than people who make less money than they do. I find very little satisfaction in knowing that I pay a higher income tax rate than Donald Bren or Donald Trump. I suspect the same is true of a lot of other Americans in the same boat.

Yet, we aren’t out on the streets demonstrating, and I suspect few of us have even raised hell about this inequity with our representatives in Washington.

But if taking to the streets is not our style, we can still express our feelings on Election Day by voting against those people whose words and actions have outraged us. Only in this way can we let them know they are accountable to us, however safe they may consider themselves to be.

And maybe we can carry over at least a smattering of outrage to mix with reason in taking on the moral absolutists from whom we will continue to hear much in the years ahead.