This is funny....
It's All the Rage
America Has Made the Breathless Harangue Into a Screaming Success
By Peter Carlson - Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 13, 2003
washingtonpost.com
Hey, you psycho nutcases, you Feminazis, you Commu-Nazis, you pathetic little parakeet males, you stupid white men, you grim quivering angry women, you cougar-cuddlers and leg-crossers, you brutal brain-damaged degenerates, you leeches, you hyenas, you maggots -- listen up and listen good:
If you've gotten sick and tired of nasty name-calling, vindictive invective and unrelenting venting, you better unplug your home entertainment center and become a hermit, because there's no longer any escaping from the age of the screed, the rant, the tirade, the jeremiad, the diatribe, the venom-fueled, white-hot harangue!
The momentum has been building for years and now it has reached a critical mass: On radio, on TV, on the Internet, on the stage, on CDs and in countless best-selling books, Americans are ranting like spit-spewing street-corner lunatics.
These days, one of our country's main forms of entertainment is listening to extremely angry humans venting, grumbling, griping, carping, cursing, raging, railing and bellyaching. The kind of people who would, in a more genteel age, be holding forth on bar stools or soapboxes now have their own syndicated radio shows, record deals and book contracts.
Over on the left, there's Hunter S. Thompson, the aging king of gonzo, denouncing Republicans as "brutal brain-damaged degenerates" and attacking George W. Bush for "killing brown-skinned children in the name of Jesus and the American people."
And there's filmmaker Michael Moore, author of "Stupid White Men," the best-selling screed that denounced Bush as "our idiot-in-Chief" and "the thief-in-chief," then offered this carefully nuanced insight: "Hard-core Republicans are desperately hoping that Big Dick Cheney can survive half a dozen more heart attacks and last long enough to oversee the raping and pillaging of everything west of Wichita." That delightful book has been on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for 41 weeks and is currently No. 7.
Over on the right, there's Rush Limbaugh railing against "Feminazis," "Environmentalist Wackos" and other "fringe kookburgers." Limbaugh is so popular he has spawned scads of imitators, right-wing radio ranters like G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, Neal Boortz, Mike Gallagher and America's fifth most listened-to radio personality, Michael Savage, who uses his nationally syndicated show to savage the folks he calls "condo commies . . . psycho nutcases . . . cougar-cuddlers . . . leg-crossers . . . couch-warming leeches . . . and dyed-in-the-dung liberals."
Savage isn't just an angry man. He's an incensed, irate, enraged man who is absolutely livid over what those dirty liberals have done to America's beloved meatballs:
"Back when America was still moral and whole, our meatballs were big, soft and tasty," he wrote in his inevitable hardcover harangue "The Savage Nation," which is now the No. 1 nonfiction book on the Times list.
"Today, thanks mainly to the Demoncats, the libs, and the Commu-Nazis who rule the courts, America's meatballs are small, hard and tasteless. In other words, we have replicated the Swedish meatball, which is what socialism brings."
This kind of incisive commentary has just earned Savage a job hosting an MSNBC yap show.
Meanwhile, the cacophony of screaming screedmongers has drowned out the voices of sweet reason. Just ask Ann Coulter, the author and TV talking head. "The country is trapped in a political discourse that increasingly resembles professional wrestling," Coulter wrote in her 2002 bestseller "Slander."
Fortunately, Coulter identified the root of this problem in the very first paragraph of her book: "It's all liberals' fault." That left the remaining 204 pages for Coulter to denounce liberals as "venom-spewing haters" and "pathetic little parakeet males and grim quivering angry women" who are "completely unhinged" and "hate America" and "hate all religions except Islam" and "want to take more of our money, kill babies, and discriminate on the basis of race."
Whew! But what really gets Coulter steamed up is the way liberals engage in nasty name-calling: "A vicious personal smear, they believe, constitutes a clever counterargument."
And she's not done. Coming in June is her next screed -- "Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism."
Of course, political discourse isn't the only venue for ranting. The tirade has become a major form of entertainment. For nine years, comedian Dennis Miller delivered weekly comic rants on his HBO show -- later reprinted in books titled "The Rants," and "I Rant, Therefore I Am" and "The Rant Zone: An All-Out Blitz Against Soul-Sucking Jobs, Twisted Child Stars, Holistic Loons and People Who Eat Their Dogs!"
Other comedians, including Chris Rock and the late Bill Hicks, also started ranting.
And comic George Carlin now delivers a routine that is either an all-out misanthropic screed or a parody of an all-out misanthropic screed. Particularly hilarious is Carlin's spirited defense of capital punishment:
"I'd have naked upside-down crucifixions once a week on TV at halftime of the 'Monday Night Football' game! . . . I'd be in favor of beheadings on TV, in slow motion, with instant replay!"
And let's not forget rap. Rap consists, in large part, of people ranting and cursing to a monotonous beat. It is now America's most popular music.
The best-selling album of 2002 was "The Eminem Show," which sold nearly 8 million copies. In it, Eminem, the perennially irate white rapper, vents his prodigious anger about his mother and his ex-wife and his "[expletive] father." Here is the heart-warming conclusion to his screed "White America:"
I am the derringer aimed at little Erica to attack her character
The ringleader of this circus of worthless pawns
Sent to lead the march right up to the steps of Congress
And [expletive] on the lawns of the White House
To burn the casket and replace it with a Parental Advisory Sticker
To spit liquor in the face of this democracy of hypocrisy
[Expletive] you, Ms. Cheney! [Expletive] you, Tipper Gore!
In an earlier age, a man ranting and raving like that in public would be locked up, told to sleep it off, maybe thrown into the loony bin for psychological evaluation. But this is the age of the screed, so Eminem has been nominated for a Grammy for Album of the Year.
A Hallowed Tradition
"The President eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it and tries to force it on The States!"
Sounds like Hunter Thompson railing about Bush or Limbaugh railing about Clinton, but actually it's America's bard, Walt Whitman, the good gray poet, railing about Franklin Pierce.
Whitman didn't like Pierce and he didn't much care for the other pols of 1856: "Office-holders, office-seekers, robbers, pimps," he called them in a screed published that year, "body-snatchers, bawlers, bribers, compromisers . . . blind men, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with the vile disorder . . . crawling serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom sellers of the earth."
Obviously, the screed is a hallowed tradition in America. In the 1800s, the press was viciously partisan and journalists were encouraged to let off steam with a full-throated harangue instead of wasting time digging up facts. This tradition was carried into the 20th century by H.L. Mencken, who wrote delightfully comic screeds about fundamentalists, the South and the "booboisie."
But by the mid-20th century, the diatribe had almost disappeared from the mainstream press, replaced by the cult of objectivity and by columnists like Walter Lippmann, ponderous rationalists who wrote in a genteel voice that Tom Wolfe once called a "pale beige tone."
Then along came Hunter Thompson, who invented "gonzo journalism," interspersing his coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign with accounts of his drug-induced hallucinations and diatribes about Nixon and other "geeks" and "greedheads."
In 1976, Sidney Lumet made "Network," a movie about a TV network so desperate for ratings that it allows its news anchor to start ranting on the air, bellowing "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this anymore!" Back then, "Network" was considered outrageous satire. Now -- after the advent of "The McLaughlin Group," the Fox News Channel and countless TV scream-fests -- it seems like simple realism.
In 1983, the Weekly World News -- a tabloid famed for stories on Elvis sightings and B-52s found on the moon -- introduced a columnist called Ed Anger, a right-wing Everyman who is mad as hell about almost everything.
"I'm madder than a tomcat with his tail in a light socket over this latest bleeding-heart campaign to outlaw capital punishment," Anger wrote in one column. "If the whining, sniveling liberals want to stop these weekly executions of human cockroaches, then I've got a wonderful solution. Let's kill 'em all once a year in electric bleachers!"
In the early days, Ed Anger seemed like outrageous satire. Now, in the age of the screed, he barely stands out from the crowd of radio ranters. You get the impression he might be picking up extra cash ghostwriting for Liddy or Savage.
But what really revved up the age of the screed was the rise of cable TV, with its endless talk shows, and the Internet, with its flamers and bloggers.
"There's so much media for people to choose from," says Greg Beato, who edits Soundbitten, a
five-year-old Web site that covers ranters and rappers. "To break through the noise and the
competition, you have to have an exaggerated comic-book message. There's no room for nuance."
Maybe Americans don't want nuance. We'd rather be entertained than enlightened, and ranting
extremists are so much more fun than rational fulminators. And it feels so good when you agree with them.
Of course, political events have given screedmongers plenty to rant about. The Clinton impeachment launched a million diatribes. The disputed 2000 election inspired a million harangues. Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
On that day, Oriana Fallaci, the famous Italian journalist, was in her New York apartment, writing a novel. But the attack made her so mad she abandoned fiction. For 12 days, she typed furiously, not sleeping or eating, fueling herself with coffee and cigarettes, banging out an enraged book-length screed against Osama bin Laden and his "defunct ultra-polygamist father" and Yasser Arafat ("You big mouth! . . . You moron!") and Saudi Arabia ("that stinky bank vault") and Islam itself:
"I'm an atheist, thank God. And I have no intention of being punished for this by retrograde bigots who, instead of contributing to the improvement of humanity, salaam and squawk prayers five times a day."
Her book, "The Rage and the Pride," sold more than a million copies in Europe. American sales were more modest, perhaps because American screedmongers had beaten her to the punch. Within days of the attack, Coulter had out-Fallacied Fallaci in one incendiary sentence: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."
Meanwhile, black nationalist poet Amiri Baraka was venting his anger in a long punctuation-free diatribe called "Somebody Blew Up America," which contained these immortal lines:
Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away
When Baraka read the poem in public, an uproar ensued, but he is still managing to hold on to his lofty post as, believe it or not, poet laureate of New Jersey.
These days, you can't swing a dead cat by the tail in a TV greenroom without hitting at least one screedmonger. The zesty spirit of the screed has inspired once-conventional writers: Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Bill O'Reilly, Camille Paglia, Michael Kelly and Lewis Lapham now regularly enjoy venting their anger in public.
A lot of anger is being vented through the media these days. Even Eminem is perturbed by it. "So much anger aimed in no particular direction, just sprays and sprays," he says in "White America." "Straight through your radio waves it plays and plays."
Michael Savage enjoys sending his anger through the radio waves. He's proud of his rage, although he senses that women don't like it: "Women are afraid of angry men. Particularly in this homosexualized, feminized America."
And don't talk to him about anger management. Anger management is a Commu-Nazi plot.
"You manage your anger, Mr. Liberal, because that's another one of your liberal tricks," Savage wrote in his book. "You find the man who gets furious and really wants to change things. You tell him he's psychotic and he needs anger management. You know what I say? 'Drop dead.' That's what I say."
Another thing that sparks Savage's anger is when a reporter calls to ask him why America is so fond of rants. He's irate at being compared to Michael Moore: "He's an uneducated dolt." He's incensed at the idea that he rants.
"It sounds like you're a real schmuck," he says. "What's the point of talking to you?"
Then he hangs up.
Restoring Civility
And so, gentle reader, America now faces a vexing problem: How can we as a society restore civility to the public discussion of our common problems?
First, we must realize that there are no simple solutions to any issue, that no one side has all the answers, that we must reason together in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
Of course, reasoning together gets a little difficult when you've got these loudmouth screedmongers screaming like banshees. What's wrong with these people? Can't they carry on a civil conversation without hurling insults at anybody who doesn't agree with them?
I'm getting sick and tired of them. And it's high time we stopped pussyfooting around and tell it like it is! These knuckle-dragging knuckleheads are ruining the country!!
Are we gonna take this lying down? HELL NO! I say we get these un-American weasels off the air
RIGHT NOW! We, the people, own the airwaves these spit-spewing loons use to spread their
wretched drivel and I say we PULL THE PLUG!!
As for the rappers, spitting hate and expletives in their idiotic rhymes, I've got a solution for them, too: Put a nice hefty tax on crotch-grabbing and we'll bankrupt these antisocial thugs in no time! Probably balance the budget, too.
And I refuse to sit idly by while America's precious forests are chopped down to print a Michael Moore screed blaming Dick Cheney for killing Bambi or an Ann Coulter rant on how liberals cause earthquakes, floods, the common cold and the heartbreak of psoriasis! I say we boycott all books by authors whose sole qualification is that they once screamed incoherently about the topic on TV! That'll make bestseller lists once again safe for self-help books and celebrity autobiographies -- the way God intended it.
That's my simple solution to the screed problem and if you don't agree with me, you're a psycho nut case, a brain-damaged degenerate, a cougar-cuddling Commu-Nazi hyena, and who cares what you think anyway?
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