Anger

After World War II, psychologists tried to use the work of Freud to explain that of Hitler. They began with the simple model, drawn from physics and the steam engine, that human energy must be channeled. If it is not, it is diverted into aggression. Without a safety valve, that aggression becomes bigotry and mass hatred.

Since last summer, when people began admitting the economy had problems, there has been an increasing number of examples of undiffused aggression when people showed up at John McCain or Barak Obama rallies primed to vent their anger. More recently, political groups have been trying to manipulate that rage to destroy Obama’s presidency.

Many in the media are trying to identify what they call the astroturfers, the lobbyists and political spokesmen who hope to gain from public demonstrations of anarchy. Others are saying the anger is legitimate and we must listen to what demonstrators are saying. Still others are suggesting it isn’t what they say that matters, but that they are so easily enraged.

With all our sophisticated knowledge of non-verbal communication and the deconstruction of language, we sometimes lose our ability to know when to listen to what people are trying to say and when to probe deeper.

When Timonthy McVeigh said he blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995 because the federal government had overstepped its powers when it attacked Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, he believed what he said. Many of the people who use their web sites as journals of self-loathing are trying to understand themselves. We would we wise to overcome our Morsberger responses and listen when people are trying to say something we have a hard time understanding.

When what we hear is pure rage it’s harder to listen. If you confronted some people at public rallies who are attacking Obama with accusations of racism they would deny they were bigots because they don’t see genocide as a solution. Their rage is simply looking for an outlet, and they take up whatever slogans are available. As Marshall McLuhan would have said, their medium is their message.

The important social question is why are so many people so angry? Even if you discount those who have been maladjusted since childhood, there is still a great deal of raw emotion floating in the ether. Everyone has a pet theory he or she can trot out - it’s the lack of jobs, it’s the role models of the media, it’s the loss of social mobility and status, it’s jealousy, sexual inadequacy, the abandonment of a religion that confronts human weakness.

My particular hobbyhorse is that we’re back at the corner Twelfth and Clairmount.in Detroit on July 23, 1967, before everyone agreed the cause of urban unrest that summer was racism rather than something structural in our economy.

We’ve now gone through forty years, while the economy has been contracting for uneducated workers, using race to argue about allocating the remaining jobs, and elected a president who made clear he wouldn’t continue the tactics of men like Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson who navigated those treacherous waters.

In a way people are right when they say we are post-racial. It doesn’t mean people are any more tolerant or that Blacks have any more opportunity, but that the rage that fed the urban riots in 1967 has now spread to the general population and cannot be dismissed as bigotry. We are challenged to confront the problems we evaded back then, but like every time a cultural problem is ignored, when we face it again, our tools have devolved, this time when decisions were made to export our manufacturing and devalue our belief in a community supported by taxes.