Rage Is All the Rage

Don’t get angry if this is wrong, but doesn’t it seem as if this spring has brought fewer flowers and more anger? A number of people in public life and neighborhoods seem to get angrier more easily these days, then blame others for their outrage. Anything out of the ordinary gets people up in arms. An awkward place to get, climbing into your arms.

Yes, 2004 is an election year, which always shows spikes of high dudgeon. People profess puzzlement -- yes, ladies and gentlemen, even outrage -- in intentional misinterpretations they’ve made about opponents’ stands, non-stands or matching misunderstandings. Howard Dean (remember him, the sure-fire Democratic nominee?) didn’t invent public anger when he lost Iowa and his temper. But his late-night fist-waving punched the campaign fast-forward button. American candidates prefer divisive stances to steel their core supporters. So today, fully six months before we must decide which political gang next rules the White House, we have the two parties’ candidates and squadrons of surrogate speakers deeply angry about this, profoundly troubled by that and both angered and troubled by this and that, none of which has changed in recent months.

Just the other day in Woodlawn, Md., two people were arrested and 11 students suspended when an anger management assembly managed to provoke so much anger that 750 students erupted into a fist-throwing, sneaker-swinging melee focused on a mother angered by girls taunting her daughter daily. You’d never guess the taunting group got angry about the mother’s anger. An angered principal pondered expelling angry students. In Kosovo, members of a multinational U.N. peace mission assigned to defuse ethnic tensions between angry Serbs and angry Albanians had their own armed dispute, apparently over Iraq. Three ended up dead. Jihads and assassinations erupt regularly these days. The Pentagon is angered by published photos of American coffins. The families that aren’t angry the photos were kept secret are angered by publication, or because their loss became political, while the press is angry about the need to challenge publication restrictions in the first place.

The corporate announcement right before Valentine’s Day that Barbie and Ken had split up after a 43-year relationship angered thousands of customers sufficiently to stop them from buying the legendary dolls, sending profits plummeting. Perhaps coincidentally, Mattel Inc. anticipates a romantic encounter soon between Barbie and Blaine, a boogie-boarding Australian dude. Now Americans can be outraged by offshoring Barbie beaus too.

One Berlin apartment dweller angrily sued his neighbor for prolonged loud laughter one evening. A wise judge tossed the case, saying, “Laughter is a general sound of life.” May the German ruling quickly spread here.