… to explain a puzzling thing to me.
The playwright said:
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)
Addiction to Shared Outrage
Eight years of George Bush has changed us in many ways. Perhaps the most insidious and dangerous has been the rather pervasive addiction to shared outrage. In the early days, we learned to scan the news for the latest abomination from the Bushies and then send it to our friends or post it on some leftie website where we could all be horrified together. Over time, this became almost an addictive behavior, with the periods of lull in the news leaving us restless and hungry for more fodder. Needless to say, George Bush and his crew have provided a mountain of damage and abuse with which to feed our habit over the last several years – Iraq, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Attorney-gate, to name but the most notorious – and our fury has known no bounds.
But then a funny thing happened. The primaries took off, and we remembered what it was like to have leaders speak for us and talk in coherent and inspiring sentences. George Bush started to fade into the mists of Lame Duckhood (even though, in reality, he still remains an uncontrollable danger until he is out of office). Unfortunately, old habits die hard, and our addiction to outrage did not disappear, it merely mutated. Like a road that suddenly forks, our need to focus anger and blame split in two, with one half enraged at Hillary Clinton and the other at Barack Obama, each half with its websites on which to share a righteous outrage at every little word or event that might fit into our angry, indignant narrative.
I think it is time for us to take a good, hard look at this pattern. If our party is to come together, it will not be while we scan the headlines for another proof of how awful and incorrigible our chosen scapegoat remains. This is the mind of the irrational mob, searching for reasons to hate and scorn. It was appropriate during the height of the Dark Days of Bush in order to keep us energized and fighting the lethal encroachment of so many lies and misdeeds. But now we must embrace our candidates despite their flaws, and let go of this tendency to scorn and be consumed with righteous disdain. Both candidates have worked hard to serve our country, and only a focus on this rather than the consuming, obsessive acrimony will move us toward a repair of the party and a victory in November.
Emphasis is mine.
This is the best summation I have ever seen for the scorched-earth infighting that drove me and many others completely away from Daily Kos. I have given up believing in the political system as savior — my observations over the past eight years have completely crushed any hopes I had that elections would change anything. I couldn’t understand why there was so much rage and energy being spent on this candidate versus that one, and why the outrage was always directed against one of “ours” as opposed to one of “theirs.”
I have no solutions, and I have no real hope that the infighting will cease now that there is a presumptive nominee. I only know that I like it here in our quiet little backwater, and I’m glad to understand the Orange People a bit better.
Today I am going to can some chicken stock and make bread. After a while, I’ll write a summary of my efforts this week at Independence Days, and I’ll let the fighting at that other place go on without me.
And to end with a quote from another poet:
“Let the dead past bury its dead! Act, – act in the living Present!” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life
11 Comments
“All is well that ends well,” to quote my favorite words in literature, because it can mean so many things on so many different levels….(you know I love ambiguity).
I still post at the Big Orange because there are still some wits about, and it attracts traffic to this haven.
AAF, my friend, I would never presume to suggest that you shouldn’t post at Big Orange. Reading that little article was such an “Aha!” moment for me that I thought I would share it.
Now at last I understand a little better. I still don’t want to be part of it, but fortunately I don’t make decisions for the whole world!
I tend to keep away from all the candidate threads, and the IP ones too, and just about all the flame wars, doesn’t interest me, waste of time & energy. The frontpagers still turn out stellar material, and the odd wit makes me laugh.
I think you nailed it. I know it fits where I was at when I first found dKos. I honestly believe I went insane when we invaded Iraq – I can’t even express the anger I felt.
But that faded over time because I have to survive, after all.
And dKos now just seems kind of boring and silly. Worse, it reminds me of Political Feast Fest and the rest of them. Of all of them, I’ve found myself still enjoying reading Armando over at TalkLeft, even though I’m not really a Hillary supporter (although her esteem certainly rose for me thanks to the attacks on her at dKos, and I now rather like her) and even though so much of the commentary simply mirrors dKos.
It’s all just too much. We shoot ourselves in the foot, and we do it in exactly the same wasteful, overindulgent ways we live our lives. Americans suffer profound spoiled brattery and way too much I WANT IT GOT TO HAVE IT! and way too little ability to reflect on our own behavior. It’ll be the doom of us, not only in the physical Peak Oil Climate Crisis sense, but in the ideological and political sense. We’ve screwed ourselves before and I fear we’ve just screwed ourselves again.
Yep, there was once a great President, Carter, who came out with an equally great energy plan….and most people just laughed at him. I thought at the time that the US will regret this passed opportunity….and I’m not wrong now. Personally, I don’t think for a second that Obama will change much, if elected: his pandering to Israel bodes disaster, and he won’t be able to stand up to big pharma, the military machine, the multinationals, the energy czars and so on. I don’t air these views on DKos, I’d be ostracized, and that in itself is not exactly democratic.
This is precisely the reason for this sentence I wrote above:
Soooo nailed it.
Americans are beyond spoiled, and all this primary season has proven to me is that we’re more spoiled and self-indulgent and self-absorbed than even I believed. It will be the death of us.
Great post, Kate, and the blog you link to makes a really important point. I realized some time ago that I was getting addicted to the outrage, and that it was making me sick.
Yet, addiction being what it is–you know, addiction–I kept going to the Big Orange. It wasn’t till I realized that there was no rhetorical difference between what I was reading there and what I’d seen of insane places like Little Green Footballs, that I was able to quit.
I still look in from time to time, but I have to tell you–everyone here–that this place, the Little Purple, is to DKos as homemade chicken soup with homemade noodles is to McNuggets.
LOL! Lil’ Purple will grow up one day….
As long as we don’t turn toxic in the meantime!
Thank you, Anne. Very nice words.
There’s not much of a chance for toxicity on this site. A quick delete and any wandering troll gets zapped back into cyberspace!
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