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Not just "righteous anger" but anger of any kind has also become the accepted proof of moral conviction. It is the way we act out certainty when we do not really feel it. As other emotions become less sure, less confident, anger amalgamates with them. Even love, itself, can become a junior partner. What fierce, cannibalistic love scenes we stage in films and even in private lives! Such Who's Afraid of Virginia foolishness! Such ripping and tearing! Such savage, winner-takes-all grappling! The fistfights in Five Easy Pieces seem like friendly interludes of token mayhem compared with the knockdown and drag-out lovemaking. Not the least among the crimes of angry art is that it makes sentimental art (Love Story, etc.) the polar alternative.
The astonishingly high standing of anger today can be verified thus: it is not only regarded as moral but as something even better, healthy and therapeutic. A fight a day keeps the doctor away, Psychiatrist Theodore Isaac Rubin suggests in something called The Angry Book. With a burst of earnest lyricism, he asks: "Have you ever experienced the good, clean feel that comes after expressing anger, as well as the increased self-esteem and the feel of real peace with one's self and others?" In The Intimate Enemy, Dr. George R. Bach, a clinical psychologist, turns anger into an art, or possibly a science. "Intimate hostilities," he guarantees, "can be 'programmed.' " Dr. Bach has his own slogan: The family that fights together stays together. And don't worry if you aren't very good at being angry. Dr. Bach will teach you.
"Anger," Dr. Bach concludes, "cannot be dishonest"—the security-blanket generalization that all the anger buffs cling to, and one as perilously misleading as "in vino veritas." Upon Bach's misapprehension, America's newest industry, group therapy, founders. Venting hostility is so simplistically scripted as the "Moment of Truth" that a whole cult of anger fakers has developed, not unlike the faith fakers who also deceived themselves into salvation at other and earlier camp meetings.
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Anger ought to be an alarm system that warns us of our deepest concerns.
But left to itself, it can become an undiscriminating rant, equalizing the serious and the trivial, the horrors of Biafra and the poor quality of frozen dinners.
What should be the most generous of emotions too often ends up as a variety of egotism. I am angry, screams the man of the Apocalypse, therefore I am.
We are accustomed to daily anger. We cannot live without it. Civilization and its discontents are too burdensome to bear with equanimity. But we can at least improve the quality of our anger. We can refuse to glamorize it when it is self-indulgence, the sound of baby shoes stamping. We must acknowledge its profound shortcomings as a purgative. Anger finally is the emotion of impotence—mortality up against its limits and refusing to recognize them.