Angry Young Men

"Sing, O goddess, of the anger of Achilles..." ~ Homer

Are you angry? I'm angry. Why shouldn't we all be angry? Why the hell not? Anger is a vital emotion. It's even the central theme of the Iliad. It can motivate great revolutionary changes. And undoubtedly this is why the Circus of Crime seeks to prevent its expression in any way.

A few weeks back, Brendan O'Neill, writing in the Spectator, described the perverse lengths that the regime of New Labour in Britain was going to stamp out the expression of rage at, what else, itself.

Seems there is, like in North America, too, an "epidemic" of anger among "young people," as older snobs like to patronize us, and the general public, too.

Indeed, everywhere we look, we see the signs of this epidemic of wrath. Road rage. Air rage. Desk rage. Spam rage. Computer rage. Noise rage. Work rage. School rage. The congressional elections of 1994 were dubbed the results of "angry white men" acting out in a fit of anti-Clinton hatred. This past whorefest was said to be the time of the "Angry Democrats," enraged at the Bush administration for reasons of style rather than of substance, apparently.

It's no coincidence that the rage over the Sept. 11th attacks was corked and stowed by the regime for its own purposes. The anger of the public, directed not at the absolute failure of the federal circus to do anything other than watch it all on TV, but at the millions of Muslims who would be served up as proxies for the 19 dead hijackers, matched Bush's innate dry alcoholic rage, and Georgius Maximus was born, ready to put all that anger to use to kill foreigners in the wake of 9/11.

And al'Qaeda? They're angry. The whosits and whatnots in Iraq? Better believe they're angry, too.

And what do the ringmasters tell us is the solution to this boiling Muslim stew of frustration and anger? The all-purpose solution to all our problems. State-run democracy, managed and policed by the political-industrial elites. Yay!

Funny thing is, though, why doesn't democracy reduce the rage here? Democracy seemingly should prevent this rage, since the angry masses can peacefully suggest changes to the system, right?

Well, maybe not. There's always that little problem of majority and minorities. Divide and rule, and let the bureaucracies figure it out. Whenever there is a problem, who hasn't been told by a politician or some bureaucrat that "there's nothing they can do, it's just 'the system'," whether it's some state slob, or the increasingly bureaucratized private businesses and organizations produced by the regulatory-managerial state?

And this omnipotent statism and legal privileges for the connected and the existing establishment fuels the widespread sense of powerlessness in the face of oligarchy and plutocracy, and leads many into the weeds of socialism or some other nonsense, that only allows the establishment to discredit them as a threat to the middle class' property and lifestyles. Some improvement. If I was of a conspiratorial mindset, one could almost see how the elites ally with their supposed opponents on the Left or Right in order to maintain the status quo and loot the public.

The seemingly impregnable tyranny of the status quo certainly breeds the widespread distrust and crisis in confidence in both private and state institutions, but also surely encourages the belief in the more absurd conspiracies (as opposed to the real ones to cover up the role of self-interest in governmental decision making).

I certainly remember feeling this sense of powerless when I was younger, but I didn't know why or couldn't articulate the source of this frustration at a sense of not having control over one's destiny. The rage of the youth, the anger of the Muslim world, the frustration of the Europeans and others around the world all have in common the expression of powerlessness at the behavior of entrenched and unaccountable foreign and domestic elites.

No doubt, it will be the aim of Bush's mental health Gestapo and anger management mandates in other countries, to stamp out for all time this common sense revulsion at the regime. We will become the sheep, and the establishment will sharpen and strengthen the tyranny of these self-imposed sheepherders to screw us all into conformity with their goals and aims.

The regime and its social allies in the media and psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries want to put a lid on this boiling pot of frustration, or when they can't to divert its target onto approved scapegoats; Arabs today, "Leave-Us-Alone" Conservatives yesterday, and tomorrow, who knows who the target will be.

History showcases societies where pent-up rage festers and finally explodes. Colonial America. France. Russia. The Boxer Rebellion in China. Before the next explosion occurs, hopefully we can convince enough people that the source of their rage and frustration is the state, and the solution is not democracy and "political liberties," but the true freedom of laissez-faire liberty.