heather being brilliant as usual.
Bitterosity
Child's word defines modern state of grumpiness
July 23, 2007
Bitterosity. It's not a new disease, but there's a lot of it about, on your street, in your workplace and in every piece of news that emerges from your screen or paper to make you feel edgy, wired, uncomfortable with your fellow man. Maybe it's because we're all supposed to be successful now, and that's impossible by definition.
Here's the definition, courtesy of New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik: "Bitterness born of betrayal and disappointment, jealousy and resentment — half of life here involves safeguarding yourself from the plague of Bitterosity. [A young person with dreams] becomes another grumbling embittered crank, a querulous angry radio-talk-show caller, an anonymous poster, a failed writer complaining about his publisher."
Bitterosity in Black
There are exceptions. What always puzzled me most about Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel was not the social climbing and the fantasizing of their years together. It was their constant rage, always kicking out in the nastiest, most bullying way against journalists without power and money. In other words, other writers. Black called himself a historian rather than a businessman and Amiel was a columnist. But Black thought "weedy" Linda McQuaig should be "horse-whipped." He had allowed his Bitterosity to make him sound like a deviant.
But did anyone retaliate by saying, "Who are you calling weedy, you vitriol-node, you bilious blubberstick with a secret sickbag in your breast pocket?" No, we passed it off as dignity. But really, we feared a lawsuit.
And Amiel, lashing out at "vermin" and "sluts"? Why the sexual undertone to the insults? I understand her eternal rage at having been mocked for her clothes in her youth, having endured this myself, but why was the rage-meter always set to 11? Her face seemed strangely tight, as if nature had hiked it too high at the hairline and shaken it about a bit. Her face didn't allow her to express sadness (downward), only wrath (upward). But there has to be more to her Bitterosity ailment than that.
The Blacks were never happy, even when the money was believed to be theirs, even when the rich and famous consented to come to their parties. And that's because Bitterosity had been nibbling away at them for decades.
What happens to the non-rich Bitterist is that someone sits them down, tells them they're weird, insists on family counselling, sends them to HR and gives them a deadline to start approaching accommodation with other humans.
I think Black's first wife may have told him this, but he didn't listen. And Amiel Scissorhands would have done any such adviser serious damage. Now Black will wait in Florida for his sentencing; I had dreaded him returning to Toronto, leaving a trail of gall and wormwood on the Yorkville sidewalk.
A child's view
Gopnik, a writer much better than the magazine he works for, came up with the definition by accident. His three-year-old daughter Olivia invented the word, as Gopnik describes in his 2006 book Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York. She had an imaginary friend, as children do, named Charlie Ravioli. What worried her parents was that Charlie Ravioli was always too busy to play with Olivia. He had meetings; he was cancelling lunch; he screened her calls. In other words, he was a New Yorker on the hustle.
Eventually he married a girl called Kweeda, who, according to Olivia, died of "Bitterosity." It's not bitterness, which is specific to an event, it's an all-pervading resentment that poisons the soul and pickles the heart.
How have children managed to pick this up from adults? My friend Connor, who is five, doesn't have an imaginary friend. He has an imaginary country that appeared after a family visit to Germany. In Connor's Trönchbach, everything is made out of steak. Worryingly, red ghosts come out at night. And the police shoot on sight (Connor's from Toronto).
"Well, there's also Blönchbach," he told his parents. There, "buildings always fall down on you. But there's as much chocolate as you can eat."
Both nation-states appear to be uninhabited. Neither sounds very nice. Have Connor and Olivia been watching Fox News on the sly?
Gopnik was well placed to understand his daughter's assessment of grown-ups. A clever, kind man who deserves his success, Gopnik was the target of a bitter attack in Harper's magazine after his Paris memoir, Paris to the Moon, sold in huge quantities and to the kind of non-Oprah audience New Yorkers lust for. The review misrepresented the book. Worse, it was written by an American freelancer living in Paris without a New Yorker salary while writing her book on Paris.
Then Gopnik published the Children's Gate observational memoir and was bitterly attacked in the Atlantic Monthly for using the winsomeness of his children as material, literary child abuse, what a creep etc.
Stabbing and slicing at the vulnerable
Adults taking out their failure on others is one thing. But when three-year-olds notice this and name it, you've got a Maisie on your hands. I’m referring to Henry James's What Maisie Knew, and that child didn't miss a thing. Most unhealthy.
We are bottled in Bitterosity. Look at Bob Rae lashing out after losing the Liberal leadership. Buddy, you changed parties. Lower your expectations. And look at the insults heaped on Michael Moore, even in reviews that grudgingly praise Sicko (and Canada). He likes us. He must be a jerk because he admires us.
Online in Britain, on a dire Guardian site called Comment is Free, talentless Bitterosity sufferers stab and slice at the successful and the vulnerable. J.K. Rowling is called "rubbish." People! She writes books for children, not adults. Cindy Sheehan, whose son died in Iraq, is called a "narcissist" for fighting back against the government that caused his pointless death. Elizabeth Edwards’s inoperable cancer is "political."
Let no one, especially a woman, stick her head above the parapet; people who are boiled in the bitterness of their own obscurity slice heads off and cackle as the blood of the brave flows over them.
Back in the realm of children, Connor prefers Trönchbach. He loves steak. For him, it's simple. His parents, on the other hand, are working on their uncomfortable laugh.
In New York, Olivia still calls out to the widower Ravioli in her sleep. Perhaps he's working on a cure for Bitterosity. It wouldn't come a moment too soon.
This Week
TV's Stewart and Colbert went on holiday for two weeks, damn their eyes. Needless to say, I was scarcely functioning. Nothing was funny without them, not even Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted.
I followed that with Ayaan Hirsi Ali's memoir, Infidel, in which she recounts how her Qur'an teacher fractured her skull with a stick — she was a child at the time — and her mother and grandmother only noticed after they had tied Ali's legs together and whipped her some more. This was some time after her circumcision, naturally.
Ali, along with Salman Rushdie and other prominent people, have just signed a public declaration that Islamism is as dangerous as fascism, Stalinism and Nazism. Yes, Ali's sufferings as a Muslim girl put me in mind of the Magdalen Laundries of the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. She is brave beyond words.
But it does seem that aligning a many-branded religion with the fantastically well-organized slaughter mechanisms of the past century is far-fetched. Perhaps people under death sentence from a religion's violent freaks aren't the experts to consult, however much they have suffered. Or perhaps they know better than the rest of us. I cannot say.
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