Curtis posted an insight today, in his wonderful Hemingwayesque do-it-in-as-few-words-as-possible style, that still has me reeling from its profundity.
It just explains so MUCH, man. Think Rush Limbaugh. Think Bill McNeil. Think Ann Coulter. Think any number of equally angry leftist shock pundits. Their whole *schtick* is righteous anger. That's what pumps their ratings up and keeps them on top. Because that's what the audience wants to hear. So *think* about that. A TV audience whose lives are so empty that they get off on righteous anger. Is that sad, or what? I really think I might have been onto something with my quipped-without-thinking-it-through "righteous anger is the closest they can get to feeling righteous" one-liner. That may really be the issue, both for the TV pundits who feed the need for righteous anger, and for the TV audiences who feed on it. It's real Old Testament stuff, man. That book was just *full* of righteous anger. And it's still a Best Seller today. So is the Gita, if you are flexible enough to look at it that way. I mean, Krishna is up there trying to convince Arjuna to go out and waste his relatives by inspiring his sense of righteous anger. Or his sense of "duty," which in my book is about the same thing when it comes to war. :-) Righteous anger is a RUSH. It gets yer heart pumpin' and yer blood rushin' around in yer veins and yer adrenaline pumpin' and it gets you HIGH, man. Be HONEST, people! The last time you lost it to a fit of righteous anger, didn't it feel GOOD, at the time? Wasn't it a RUSH? Almost as good as the other kinds of rushes you've experienced in life. Almost. If the other kind -- like samadhi, or the smile on someone's face after you help them when you didn't have to, or just the joy of watching a sunset -- aren't really happening for you. And, like the other kind of rushes, the rush of righteous anger is addicting. It *shifts your assemblage point*. It *alters your state of consciousness*. It *changes your state of attention*. One moment you are bored shitless with your life, and then you read something or see some- thing on the News and wham! -- it provokes that awesome sense of righteous anger in you. "How could anyone DO this? How could anyone SAY this? And about ME, or people like me? I've got to strike back, or everyone will think I'm a wuss." If you strike back, you're a wuss. In Buddhist thought, that is. In Hindu thought, as expressed so eloquently by Krishna, you should go out and waste the people whose words or actions affronted you. Shoot them full of arrows and leave them to die in a pool of their own blood. Yeah... that's the ticket. *That* will sure prove that we Pandavas have the market on morality and righteousness and knowing what's what, won't it? Well, will it? Or will it just prove that the "righteous" who go to war out of righteous anger are just puny-assed little egos who are so out of touch with their feelings that they mistake righteous anger for righteousness? "This person *deserves* to be flamed, because he's a liar." "This nation *deserves* to be invaded, because they're saying that they aren't developing nukes, and they're liars." As above, so below. Fairfield Life is a micro- cosm of the world, working out the angst of the world. And just as nations declare war on each other for no better reason than righteous anger, so do individuals here at Fairfield Life. And it goes on and on, no matter who mentions it and no matter what approach they take to trying to change things. The recent push to make flaming a Bad Thing, and punishable by the worst fate that some of the righteously angry can imagine -- a week without being able to be righteously angry in public -- a dismal failure. Nothing has changed, despite all the well-intentioned wishes and less well-intentioned posturing. All of them were like pouring lighter fluid on a fire to put it out. The problem, as I see it, is to somehow convey to the folks who get off on righteous anger that there are other ways of getting off. You really don't *have* to sit there at your computer, jerk- ing your mouse furiously and pounding, pounding, pounding away at that keyboard to attain a sense of...uh...release, and fulfillment. You could do the same thing by just writing something positive and uplifting for a change.
