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Ranting can be a sudden spasm of outrage or a cynical manipulation (the wise demagogue practices ranting in front of a mirror). Private citizens rant at public figures to vent feelings of powerlessness (Muggins to Lincoln, for example). Public figures instinctively use the irrational to call up the irrational --the rant to enlist the people's power, a passion to follow the leader. One man's rant is another's eloquence. General George Patton ranted at his troops to get them to fight. Winston Churchill had a genius for the eloquent rant: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."
Churchill and Hitler staged a fascinating theater of ranting. Hitler perfectly demonstrated an essential truth: a person, when ranting, is often talking about himself. Thus Hitler, in 1941, speaking of Churchill: "For over five years this man has been chasing around Europe like a madman in search of something he could set on fire."
Ranting sometimes defeats intelligent argument because it possesses the glamour of the prerational, an animal force. Words get fired up. They go on crusade. They storm across the countryside with aggressive and even annihilating intent.
The Old Testament contains masterpieces of apocalyptic rhetoric, notably from Amos and Jeremiah: rants to reduce the ungodly to the finest dust. Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century New England Calvinist, was a genius of the punitive theological rant: "The God that holds you over the pit of hell much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked."
Ranters are everywhere. The good ranter is the one you agree with. Jesse Jackson rants. The Klan rants. Most of the United Nations rant. John McEnroe rants at linesmen. Phil Donahue rants at housewives. King Lear rants at the cosmos. New York street crazies rant at something that only they can see.
Zealotries spawn rants. Feminism has summoned up some splendid ranting. In the '60s, Valerie Solanis wrote, "It is now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males (or for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene state ..."
Ranting may be a hot wind carrying lies. But sometimes it is a way of marching out the truth in a noisy parade of dudgeon. In ranting, veritas--sometimes. What happens in ranting is that the little editor normally on duty in the brain gets shouldered aside. The words come clambering out of their cells, free at last. Japanese businessmen are encouraged to get together with co-workers in the evening. A man gets drunk and delivers a violent tirade against his boss, but nothing will be said of it next morning, or ever. Ranting is permitted as a form of release from the pressures of Japanese business life.
It is the ranting held inside that is most scalding. That is the internal rant, the rant that is never spoken or written down. It is the rant of what-I-should-have-said. It is the magnificently composed and scathing reply that would have left the son of a bitch for dead, had I but said it.