An Impervious Rage
Speaking, as we were, of people for whom anger is a credential, a kind of emotional jewellery, this seems apposite:
My fury has been bottomless. I drink my morning coffee from a cup that says, “I hate to wake up when Donald Trump is President.” The constancy of my outrage has been exhausting, yet I have not yet found a way to quell it — nearly each day has brought a new reason to stoke the fire. But a day with my daughter, communing with the angry and the aggrieved, seemed a good way to try.
Ruth Mayer, a woman seemingly oblivious to the implication of her own words, recounts her pilgrimage to the ‘Women’s March’ in Washington DC. It’s a tale of cultivated umbrage, car trouble, and a moment of reflection, narrowly missed.
Via Darleen.
Wow. Some people need professional help.
Some people need professional help.
It doesn’t exactly suggest someone gifted with self-knowledge. Though I suppose if you’ve spent years politicising almost every aspect of life – so there’s no respite or escape – and if political affiliation is the go-to social signal, the measure of belonging in almost any sphere, then dramas like the one above are likely to arise. I don’t think it bodes well.
“Some people need professional help.”
Well she is a self styled ‘Development and Communications consultant’ she could just talk to herself in the mirror.
emotional jewellery
🙂
Pursuant to our discussion of Jordan Peterson
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/31188-Why-do-they-hate-Jordan-Peterson.html
🙂
Well, I think that’s what it is. It’s definitely for display. Sort of, “Look at my relentless, hyperbolical indignation. See how it catches the light.”
But if anger is currency, a measure of woke status, then the more angry and unreasonable a person is, the more statusful they may imagine themselves to be. Which may explain the competitive screeching fits seen on any number of campuses. And when people are angry, they often behave selfishly and with a preposterous sense of entitlement. Conceivably, for some, that’s the part of the appeal.
[ Edited. ]
Imagine one day you wake, and look in the mirror at the bitter harridan in the glass, and you suddenly think, ‘Oh my God. I’m the one who’s loony.’
Imagine one day you wake, and look in the mirror at the bitter harridan in the glass, and you suddenly think, ‘Oh my God. I’m the one who’s loony.’
I’m not holding my breath.
The overwhelming impression I get from that article is of someone who is both rather pathetic and terribly dim.
I have been angry at my country for electing this man, angry at my neighbors who support him, angry at the wealthy who sacrificed our country and its goodness for tax breaks, angry at the coal miners who believed his promises.
So this Drumpf-voting Nazi Redneck didn’t immediately ship her and her daughter off to Auschwitz like she imagined they would? It’s almost as if Trump supporters are… dare we say it… human beings.
Short version: I’m a walking cliche and I don’t know it.
Short version: I’m a walking cliche and I don’t know it.
I’m still processing the idea that an obvious way to “quell” one’s “bottomless fury” is to spend a day surrounded by – sorry, communing with – a crowd of other absurdly angry and hysterical people, all reinforcing the same assumptions.
He did all of this so quickly that I didn’t have time to grab the prominent RESIST sticker on the side of my car, which suddenly felt needlessly alienating.
Or put another way; she has spent so much time in the echo chamber, reinforcing her perceived stereotype of Trump and Trump voters, that she found herself embarrassed by the Resist sticker on the side of her Prius when exposed to the real world.
No, he’s not. It’s all yours. Own it.
Socrates held that virtue is the harmony of the soul, and that this leads to true happiness. Indulging negative emotions like hatred and anger creates disharmony in the soul (the hatred and anger can become semi-autonomous parts of a personality, almost demonic in some cases), and so it hurts you more than it does the object of your hatred and anger – a point that could be dawning slowly in Ruth Mayer’s consciousness.
“He did all of this so quickly that I didn’t have time to grab the prominent RESIST sticker on the side of my car, which suddenly felt needlessly alienating.”
Never occurred to her to wonder why he might have voted that way, did it?
“As I drove home, I felt the full extent to which Trump has actually diminished my own desire to be kind.”
Oh, now I see. Your good character is conditional upon someone else’s behavior. The logic of a kid picking on her little sister. “She made me do it!”
Still, a good example of employing tactical silence, long enough for one of the lower orders to lash her air dam down so she can get home.
I like the way she mentions that she drives a Prius, and so signals her eco-virtue.
I wonder whether the anger which these self-proclaiming, “righteous” Lefties are now experiencing has more to do with the fact that all of the things they feared–concentration camps, elimination of all manner of rights, multitudes of great flyover unwashed storming their Manhattan salons–are not happening. Writing an angry, “blame Trump” op-ed is easier than admitting you’re wrong.
So this Drumpf-voting Nazi Redneck didn’t immediately ship her and her daughter off to Auschwitz like she imagined they would
But I would not be surprised if she would happily vote for those who promise to do so to the Trump supporters.
Imagine the article if the situation were reversed. That is, she confronts Trump-voting Redneck in distress. I can’t help but think she’d be reveling in another’s misfortune while joyfully pointing a finger and talking about karma being a bitch for us deplorables.
In a decade or so there will be a wave of folks with health issues (mental and physical) that will be tracked down to eight years of rage (real and faux).
Someone needs to do an “Are We the Baddies? sketch featuring SJWs. “Are We the Loonies?”.
Comedy gold!
I concur with all the analysis posted in this thread, but really it can all be boiled down to one statement:
She is a silly moo.
Imagine the article if the situation were reversed.
You don’t have to imagine, just look at the typical reaction to the recent “GOP train” wreck.
You don’t have to imagine,
See also Stephen King:
Following a public backlash, Mr King offered a similarly questionable apology.
More senseless anger from the most privileged people in history:
https://harpers.org/archive/2018/02/the-other-whisper-network/
They’re like children “acting out”—“Do you care enough about me to set some limits for me?” Unfortunately the answer, in general, appears to be No.
Looks like Uncle Stevie’s cracked up. I guess I’ll cancel my order of his book coming out in April. A pity. He was a great talent. I have believed for years that “The Shining” will be a classic of American literature.
No, he’s not. It’s all yours. Own it.
This.
And, in fact, she does seem quite proud of her obsessive, all-consuming rage. She just added it to her professional resume.
OT, other than it relates to more social justice nonsense – The new Woke™ US Census.
How, you ask, will this help ?
Yeah, OK, the heavy burden of being a writer for Mr. Bezos’ blog. I’d suggest that the author of this stop her focus on color, but as we have learned, that too is racist.
Yeah, OK, the heavy burden of being a writer for Mr. Bezos’ blog.
Ah, but when everyone deemed problematically pale is hung-up on race too, paradise will unfold and puppies will smell of candy floss.
Trump’s cruelty and mendacity demand outrage and the most vigorous resistance a nation can muster…
Oh deary me… What did President Trump do that was so cruel and mendacious? He defeated Hillary!
It was supposed to be her time, dammit.
IT WAS HER TURN!!!
I find it very amusing that Trump’s theme song appears to be ‘You can’t always get what you want’. I wonder if there’s a connection to the TanTrumpOcalypse we’ve been seeing of the past year or so.
“Most notable is that those under its umbrella are rarely asked to shoulder the burdens of being an outsider in America”
Forgive me, for I suspect I’ve posted this before; twenty years ago I was Grease-Ball ‘Max’ the spaghetti-bender, and now I’m Mr. White Privilege.
Isn’t progress grand!
For the first several decades of the Census, white and black were the only categories; “black” was broken out into other definitions, but all were explicitly not-white.
Clicking on the link, one notices that the “other definitions” the author alludes to are “free colored” and “slave”. Any student of American history would know damn well why these distinctions are important, doubly so given how freely the Left likes to throw around the mendacious “fact” that the the Founders believed blacks were only worth 3/5th of whites.
Natives and Chinese first show up as Census categories in the decades following the Gold Rush (big surprise!). Various flavors of “Hispanic” don’t show up until the 1970 Census. So if the author wanted to be honest, she’d admit that she’s obsessing over a “problem” that only showed up on the heels of LBJ’s social engineering disaster.
Of course there is no such admission, so we naturally infer that honesty is not on the menu.
I must admit I have been puzzled by the reaction to Trump (and Brexit) ever since the election (and referendum). It all seems so out of proportion. I remember Ted Kennedy driving into Chappaquiddick and leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to drown or Bill Clinton taking advantage of young girls in his office and lying about it. These were despicable characters who deserved condemnation but they get a free pass whereas Trump attracts a level of hysterical outrage which I just find baffling.
It’s almost as if Trump supporters are… dare we say it… human beings.
Not just human beings, but decent people who will stop to help neighbors and strangers alike, without first interrogating them on controversial political topics for a half-hour to determine their worth, like some gender-studies major on a first date.
What I find so infuriating is that the author could run headlong into this encounter, and rather than having an epiphany, she still comes out of it blaming Trump and his supporters. She admits that she withdrew from her diverse (!) neighbors and their porch parties, because she is so filled with rage that she cannot muster a bit of quotidian decency. And yet, she cannot allow the possibility that she has personal issues to work through, because she’s a Good Person with a Prius and a craftsman bungalow.
Much like John Irving, I find it wearisome to be condescended to by my inferiors. Simultaneously, they find it unbearable that knuckle-draggers like me don’t take them seriously, and so we go ’round and ’round in our vicious circle. It’s exhausting, I tell you.
“Print, for example, German, Irish, English, Italian, Lebanese, Egyptian, etc.”
I’ve been puzzling about this for a couple of hours. I’m not obsessive about genealogy, but I know the earliest U.S. ancestors came from Alsace–Allemanic, not Frank, thank you– , England, Ulster (Wear orange on St. Patrick’s Day), Dublin (Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, kneecap other relatives), Rotterdam and Louisiana via Arcadia.
WTF am I supposed to write down?
And heaven help my kids. Their mother is a real life Bavarian. (DO NOT call her “German.”) Is “Bavarii” a category?
Somebody hand me another Bud Light.
She admits that she withdrew from her diverse (!) neighbors and their porch parties, because she is so filled with rage that she cannot muster a bit of quotidian decency. And yet, she cannot allow the possibility that she has personal issues to work through, because she’s a Good Person with a Prius and a craftsman bungalow.
Oh, I’d bet that the shrink that she is likely seeing is very supportive in this.
twenty years ago I was Grease-Ball ‘Max’ the spaghetti-bender, and now I’m Mr. White Privilege.
Heh…My adopted sister just did the 23-and-me thing. Mostly because her new husband bought it for her. From what little I knew, I was long under the impression she was (mostly) ethnically Italian. The few times that her adoption would come up in conversation after we were adults, she never expressed much interest in her birth family. I was quite young at the time and when I did encounter the papers from the adoption agency after our parents passed, I passed them on to her with only a casual glance necessary to determine what the document was, which mostly confirmed what I knew (or thought I knew). On rare occasion, as adults, when we differed over something I would teasingly attribute it to her dago heritage…with the even more occasional implication (and never when we were talking about her specifically, always in regards to Italians) that Italians ain’t really white folk…not that there’s anything wrong with that ;). Now she gets the results back and, according to the DNA report anyway, she’s almost as German/English/Irish as I am. Though it does appear she had an Italian great-grandfather. So she gots White Privilege either way. But still. It’s like I now gotta go back and apologize or something.
WTF am I supposed to write down?
I lean heavily towards GFY, but that’s me.
On the last census, I only answered the question re: the number of adults in the household, so maybe my grumpy suggestions in this matter should be taken with a grain of salt.
WTF am I supposed to write down?
Purebred American Mongrel, your kids can be Teutono-American Mongrels. Seeing as there was apparently an affinity for various generational Muldoons to include Muldoon père, to mix with polacks, bohunks, and some North Africans (say it loud, I’m Carthaginian and proud !) I am just going to put Mutt.
I have been angry at my country for electing this man, angry at my neighbors who support him, angry at the wealthy who sacrificed our country and its goodness for tax breaks, angry at the coal miners who believed his promises.
And no mention of the millions of progressive liberals who didn’t vote and let this happen when they could easily have stopped it.
Their mother is a real life Bavarian.
Sorry, but we British just have to mention the war.
WTF am I supposed to write down?
Me? I’m mutt, too …. French, German (maternal grandfather’s family came in the huge German migration of 1850’s…where a clerk at Ellis Island butchered the family name Rüppel into Rippel), Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Norwegian, English (Click family sold out of debtor’s prison in England and brought to America in 1697, then sold to work on a plantation in Virginia).
I enjoy family history merely AS history, not some weird identity politics. Which is why I’ve never understood the ‘offense’ taken at the question “Where are you from?” as it is a colloquial phrase in regards to the family history.
Click family sold out of debtor’s prison in England and brought to America in 1697, then sold to work on a plantation in Virginia
I was hoping for a readership of aristocracy and jet-setters. People with yachts, basically.
People with yachts, basically.
I’m a good swimmer. That help ya any?
A redneck replies.
http://joelsgulch.com/your-outrage-is-not-about-trump-lady-its-about-you/
The dirt from which my forebears scraped out a living was in Prussia or Poland, depending on what century you’re talking about. Rather than sort out such definitions, I’m thinking I’ll just put “I Have A Dream” on the appropriate line.
Though now that I think on it, perhaps being judged on the quality of my character isn’t really a winning play, either.
People with yachts, basically.
I built a dinghy from a sheet of plywood once. That’s related to a yacht.
When I was a kid I had a bathtub baking-soda submarine, that’s pretty close to a yacht.
I’m not holding my breath.
I think anyone who has personally witnessed a long-running, toxic and manipulative relationship would advise this course. I was going to make a crack about the author “looking for hate in all the wrong places”, but that’s just a side effect of where she’s been looking for love, social acceptance, secure status, etc.
When those who are poisonous down to their very bones promise you all these things, they can be very convincing. And anyone who threatens to contradict their narrative must be driven away.
Nothing is more faithfully denied than undeniable evidence of faithlessness and deceit.
R. Sherman
I’ve been puzzling about this for a couple of hours. I’m not obsessive about genealogy…
Well, my grandmother
was (in part from having to prove descent from an American Revolutionary War veteran to join the DAR), and I’ve been informed that my mother’s side is mostly English (both Norman and Saxon), with some French and (German-speaking) Belgian. My father’s side is Scottish (being Clan Gunn, almost certainly Norse-descended) and Frisian. As Billy Connolly once quipped “We’re so white, we’re blue”.
Not that it really matters, but dear Ruth was so enthusiastic about it, we won’t likely ever forget. In her later years, it was about the only thing that made her happy – that and old-school English murder mysteries (“cozies”, I think they’re called).
People with yachts, basically.
I was given a used inflatable dinghy from a yacht and after I repaired all the air leaks it actually floated.
I was hoping for a readership of aristocracy and jet-setters. People with yachts, basically.
Instead…
Oh my. I’m afraid I shall be a huge disappointment.
As a 100% Englishman, I find myself in rather vulgar company. Is it time for tiffin?
“I lean heavily towards GFY, but that’s me.”
Seems reasonable to me. Nobody, but nobody, needs to know the colour of my skin or where my great-grandparents hailed from. They are matters of supreme irrelevance to anyone but my nearest and dearest.
“I must admit I have been puzzled by the reaction to Trump (and Brexit) ever since the election (and referendum). It all seems so out of proportion.”
Not to the passengers on the gravy-trains which those events threaten to derail, it isn’t. This is the sort of thing they stand to lose:
“I was hoping for a readership of aristocracy and jet-setters. People with yachts, basically.”
I visited the Royal Yacht Britannia once at Leith, if that’s any… oh, actually, now I come to think of it, I have attended a Royal garden party at Holyroodhouse. Twenty years ago. Didn’t actually meet the Queen, to be fair, but I did see her quite close up. She’s shorter than you expect.
Yeah. This isn’t helping, is it?
My parents get a Christmas card from an actual Baroness every y… nah. She’s only a life peer anyway.
English, Irish, Scots, Welsh, and German, here. If I got any whiter I’d be an albino.
Brit, French, Spanish, German. I’m constantly at war with myself.
I was hoping for a readership of aristocracy and jet-setters. People with yachts, basically.
Well, my ancestors owned and ran the west coast of Scotland and the outer isles . . . . where I expect by this point there’s only a few million of us about some point or another on the globe . . .
Is it time for tiffin?
She’s marvy.
I was hoping for a readership of aristocracy and jet-setters. People with yachts, basically.
This is what we yacht-owners have to put up with. Even mention the sea and some Johnny-come-lately blogger who probably eats peas with a knife is angling for an invitation.
Heh. It was the “eats peas with a knife” that felled me.
Californian by birth (to my eternal shame). Texan by choice!
Somebody hand me another Bud Light.
Now, now. No need to punish yourself like that.
I was hoping for a readership of aristocracy and jet-setters. People with yachts, basically.
– No refunds. Credit note only.
People with yachts, basically.
I have a yacht; if you saw it you’d realise what a low bar you’ve set. It may be a mouthful, but can I suggest ‘People with yachts who don’t see all the other yachties put out extra fenders every time they enter a marina’ as an alternative? For the aspirational…
I have a yacht; if you saw it you’d realise what a low bar you’ve set.
Clearly, I should have specified giant bejewelled yachts. With helipads. And heated pools.
No refunds. Credit note only.
I see what you did there.
Clearly, I should have specified giant bejewelled yachts. With helipads. And heated pools.
I used to look pretty good in a speedo. No, seriously. Girls even said so. Well, they were competitive swimming girls…but still…
I used to look pretty good in a speedo.
I’m not sure where this is going.
“People with yachts…”
I spent decades crewing on small racing yachts, from which I concluded: If you like yachting, make sure somebody else owns the damn thing and will cough up for the expensive repairs. There was hardly ever a race where we didn’t do at least a couple hundred $ in damage, and quite often $1-2 K. In other words, only the nutty own yachts. I was happy to trade getting bruised on the foredeck in exchange for keeping my bank account intact.
“I used to look pretty good in a speedo.”
Kids, take advantage of that while you can. That is, for instance, how I got my wife 33 years ago.
David, I have just the girl for you. Check out the “Fancy Kristen” posts at
https://jalopnik.com/tag/fancykristen
“Hello, poors.”
Remember – potato goes in front.
I’m not sure where this is going.
…says the man in a velour blogging thong…
says the man in a velour blogging thong…
Ooh. That reminds me.
[ Reaches for shopping list. ]
“Talc. Large.”
David, if you get white marks on the George V chairs again, the morning shift cleaners (motto: Cathargo Delenda Est) are gonna be pissed.
I saw Adnan Khashoggi’s yacht in Puerto Banus many moons ago. Not that that’s anything to brag about…
WTF am I supposed to write down?
My friends and I, indeed our entire class, faced just this sort of problem way back in grade 6 when the govt sent a survey around to the schools. We managed it readily enough on our own, and under “ethnicity,” we wrote “Canadian.” Problem solved, and we never gave it moment’s thought after that.
…(motto: Cathargo Delenda Est) are gonna be pissed.
I hope you know that motto is rayciss and triggering to those of us with North African-American heritage, and don’t get me started on “Berber” carpeting.
Sorry, but shouldn’t it be carthago delenda est?
Or, rather fuller: ceterum censeo delendam esse Carthaginem
I do like that Cato’s family name means piggy.
Boat (noun): A hole in the water into which you throw money
Tolkein, thanks for reminding me not to drink while posting.
Snobbery is a terrible thing, David. It’s a Tradition, you know.
“I eats my peas with honey;
I’ve done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on my knife.”
– – – And gone, totally VANISHED from the Hive-Mind, is even a faint recollection of Eight Full Years of:
“The people have spoken.”
“Elections Have Consequences”.
“We WON — get over it”.
“This is how democracy is SUPPOSED to work”.
“You can try again in another four
years, until then HE IS OUR PRESIDENT”.