Anger

When I was a child the news was 15 minutes of facts. Today the news lasts all day, and whether it is Amy Goodman (soul of integrity) or Fox News (soulless idiocy), the news is bad. It enrages people. Good news is not news. As Bob Boardman points out, if you are part of a group that has accomplished something positive, you will seldom be covered.

Politics is a place where people can freely vent their anger, whatever its origin. Then they can stay mad all day.

If you need to vent anger, in the political news each day there will be a series of terrible crimes to enrage and justify you. For starters, there is, on this planet, always a genocide in progress, beginning with the sack of Troy.

Look at the anger in the Massachusetts election. Fundamentalist Christians were so mad that they endorsed a candidate who had paraded his photographed privates in a national magazine. Teabaggers were so enraged at deficits that they supported the party that had created the deficits. Some liberals were so committed to the public option in health care that they voted for the candidate who had promised to block health care, leaving thousands of poor people to die each year.

Consider the rage at Obama, coming from the Angry Right and Angry Left, blaming one mild-mannered man for the mess we're in.

In the worst of times, the mild (and ignorant) center of the country usually puts aside its distaste for the angry political classes just long enough to prevent catastrophe. During the last Bush regime, which was close to totalitarian, when it seemed Bush could do anything he (or Dick Cheney?) decided, including start unjust wars, the center blocked an attempt to turn social security over to Wall Street. Bush never recovered. But in Massachusetts the center did not hold.

The Left can not hope to win an election without unity or without the Center. We had better learn to work together. It might help if we turn off the TV Bad News, stop using politics as an arena for the expression of personal rage, and instead focus on the good that we can do. (But that lacks the appeal of the cleansing denunciation of the dude across the street whose politics are an inch different from yours in exactly the wrong way.)