ONE of the most chilling modern parables is a short scenario of the absurd by Eugene Ionesco titled Anger.
The playlet takes place on an idyllic Sunday in an idyllic country town, where strollers shower coins and smiles on the local beggar, and husbands treat their wives with adoring deference. Eventually, in all the town's houses and apartments, everyone sits down to Sunday lunch. One after another, the husbands discover flies in their soup. Smiles turn to frowns, soothing words to cross ones. Insults are delivered and returned. Crockery goes smashing. Soup (with flies) pours in torrents from under doors. The police arrive. The civic disturbance turns, absurdly, into global war, and then into an atomic Armageddon. The final scene, projected on television, is of the planet exploding—because of a fly in the soup. Ionesco's black joke scarcely exaggerates the monstrous disproportion, the near pathology, of latter-day anger. If every period has its characteristic emotion, anger must surely be ours—the mask of cracked civility, the furious heart beneath. Yale President Kingman Brewster described the comparative calm of the American campus last winter as "eerie tranquillity," and the U.S. as a whole now seems to be enjoying relative quiet after the stormiest period of demonstrations, bombings and riots. That very calm gives us time to look back on anger. But eerie is nevertheless the operative word. The fact that we find tranquillity unnatural is the most terrible confirmation of what we have come to accept as natural.
Anger is the emotion we tend to feel when in doubt about what else we feel. Anger, once justly listed among the seven deadly sins, today is becoming one of our most praised values. In raising anger to an emotional ideal, we have gravely misgauged the limited utility of adrenaline's quick flashes. In art, anger is regularly mistaken for sincerity, if not inspiration. One is advised to peddle one's cool art with a hot sell. A masochistic public quivers deliciously not only before the real fire of the Genets, the Becketts and the Mailers but before the plastic brimstone of their less gifted imitators. All too often the angry mediocrity gets away with bullying his audience, like Jimmy Porter in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, that pilot project for the personality of the '70s.
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In politics, anger is too easily confused with moral indignation. But moral indignation purges itself through action, while anger tends to purge itself through rhetoric. As Organizer Saul Alinsky suggests, anger in politics substitutes for all other games the game of "Kill the umpire!" Far right and far left, the angry man in politics prefers the pleasure of being furious to the pleasure of actually having an effect. Demanding final solutions only, he chooses, in Critic Renata Adler's words, "to use the vocabulary of total violence, cultivate scorched-earth madness as a form of consciousness (of courage, even), to call history mad."