Angry angry angry

 

There are millions of American citizens who live on anger, whose primary, if buried, fuel is neg­ativity in the forms of rage, distrust, jealousy, superiority, contempt and the infan­tile defense mech­anism of externalization of responsibility – blaming others. Racists and other bigots, Trump Repub­li­cans, white supremacists, conspir­acy believers, immigrant xenophobes, voter suppressionists, survivalists.

If this phenomenon weren’t a mental illness, we would be left with the stunning im­plaus­ibility of a per­son’s remaining fundamentally rabid and miserable every day of his life until his end.

Picture remaking day after day, year after year, such an abject and blaming life without surcease, never having self-reflection, never tiring of sulking, spitting, blaming, never grasp­ing what actual dignity and self-respect are, always feeling chained to the powerful Other as victor and victim. Isn’t it insane to see that people could live like this?

How do they never know this is wrong, that they’ve made some cosmic error in their personal philosophy?

But it is, of course, mental illness. It is what happens when the person, in his critical years of child­hood, receives no help for pain and injury and rises above them to the wounded powerfulness of anger. This elevation must be permanent, as it lies a hair’s breadth above tearful collapse.

Remember this when you see some righteous Republican pontificating his prin­ciples in the Senate, or smearing feces in its halls. Inside, he is flailing on the edge, with a child’s fear in his eyes and a gun in his hand.