On Anger and the Failure of Imagination

In response to the rather amazing collection of Shaker Quotes, Waveflux said:

What I like best about the political quotes here is the obvious passion, a quality that would be derided by some blighters as mere anger. Those folks don't understand—or work hard to not understand—what Atrios put so well a while ago:

One thing I've observed is that what really drives the elite chatterers crazy is the notion that people actually give a damn about anything. Sure, some of that giving a damn gets channeled into anger, but I often find simply "giving a damn" recast as "anger" when it isn't deserved.

The posters here give a damn.

He’s totally right. I was struck with precisely the same thought as I compiled the quotes; the passion, the giving a damn, was overwhelming. And yet some of it is indeed angry—an inevitability when the things about which one does give a damn are continuously, ruthlessly, under attack. I nearly chose as my own quote for the compilation an expression of my own anger that also happens to explain its impetus:

[The things I love about America] are precisely the things the Bush Brigade endeavors to crush, turning America into a nation where everyone who is not blandly, mindlessly like its self-appointed True Patriots are de facto threatening, where the natural and philsophical resources are raped and destroyed in the acquisition of more wealth, where philanthropy and empathy are relegated to little more than cute, clichéd memories, where the barrel-chested barons of a new Gilded Age stand astride the bodies of those who have been condemned to less fortunate fates, singing the praises of social Darwinism and bellowing about the superfluity of a social safety net. “The government never gave me anything!” they declare, as they deposit their million-dollar checks from their latest no-bid Defense Department contract then head off to Tiffany’s to get The Little Woman a bauble with their fat tax return.

They’re a truly disgusting lot. And the next time one of them has the temerity to accuse me of hating America, I’m going to tell them flat out, “No, I don’t hate America. I hate you.”

It’s this—the source of our anger—that the elite chatterers miss, too, even when they manage to correctly cast anger for what it is. They naïvely look at us, wide-eyed, from the pages of newspapers, perplexed as to why we’re so angry, or grimly knit their brows as they report on the slew of angry emails they’ve received in response to something they’ve written, positing the only explanations they find in their Handy Desktop Book of Conventional Wisdom: Liberals are crazy. Or: This must be about the war, because these angry Lefties remind me of those hippies during Vietnam. Never do they seem to stumble upon anything approaching the real source of our anger; never do they offer a glimpse of appreciating the depth of the betrayal we feel.

We seem to have on our hands a failure of imagination.

“A failure of imagination” is what the 9/11 Commission concluded was the essential failing of top administration officials leading up to that fateful day—and their failure of imagination persists yet, nearly five years later. They couldn’t predict the Iraq war wouldn’t be a walk in the park. They couldn’t predict that a hurricane could drown an entire city. They can’t understand why so many people are so angry. And the press scratches their heads right along with them.

Why the anger?

William Rivers Pitt, in An Open Letter to Richard Cohen, spectacularly addresses the excuseless befuddlement of Cohen (and, by extension, the rest of his clueless cohorts):

Why the anger? It can be summed up in one run-on sentence: We have lost two towers in New York, a part of the Pentagon, an important American city called New Orleans, our economic solvency, our global reputation, our moral authority, our children's future, we have lost tens of thousands of American soldiers to death and grievous injury, we must endure the Abramoffs and the Cunninghams and the Libbys and the whores and the bribes and the utter corruption, we must contemplate the staggering depth of the hole we have been hurled down into, and we expect little to no help from the mainstream DC press, whose lazy go-along-to-get-along cocktail-circuit mentality allowed so much of this to happen because they failed comprehensively to do their job.

George W. Bush and his pals used September 11th against the American people, used perhaps the most horrific day in our collective history, deliberately and with intent, to foster a war of choice that has killed untold tens of thousands of human beings and basically bankrupted our country. They lied about the threat posed by Iraq. They destroyed the career of a CIA agent who was tasked to keep an eye on Iran's nuclear ambitions, and did so to exact petty political revenge against a critic. They tortured people, and spied on American civilians.

You cannot fathom anger arising from this?

The answer, sadly, frustratingly, appears to be no. The question then is: Why? And the answer to that can be found in the way that the administration and press have allowed their failure of imagination to diminish the importance of another group’s anger, which will inescapably result in a greater catastrophe for us all than the anger of liberals ever will, no matter how voraciously we are cast as traitors.

At the end of his trial, Zacarias Moussaoui made the statement, “You wasted an opportunity to learn why people like me, like Mohamed Atta, have so much hatred of you. ... If you don't want to hear, you will feel [pain].” The guy was evil, and quite possibly nuts, but he spoke the truth there. The conventional wisdom, constructed and propagated by the administration, dutifully disseminated by their vigilant ally, the press, is that the terrorists hate us “for our freedom.” But that isn’t why they hate us, why they’re angry. They’re angry because of our support of Israel; they’re angry because of permanent US military bases in the Middle East; they’re angry because we reduce their anger to irrational reactions to “our freedom.” We might disagree with the positions they hold, and their reasons for holding them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.

Yet, doggedly, we resist understanding the real source of the anger. It’s just so much easier to try to wish it out of existence by repeating the blithe sound bite they hate us for our freedom. It’s just so bloody convenient to chalk it up to something neat and tidy, rather than distract ourselves with the tedious burden of confounding details. We’re far too lazy to engage in thinking.

And we’re far too arrogant to admit that maybe we’ve done something to justify that anger.

We avoid understanding this anger, and facing up to the accountability it would require, at our own peril. We liberals-who-give-a-damn know this. When we blanch every time we hear the president, one of his administration minions, or one of their media shills gravely murmur that the terrorists hate us for our freedom, it’s not just because it’s stupid. It’s because it’s dangerous. No wonder it makes us angry.

And it is here that we are then called traitors and terrorist-sympathizers, here in the great ironic intersection of our being angry about the administration’s and the press’ failure to flush out and examine the real impetus of our enemy’s anger. Here the anger of all the people they hate is reduced to irrational rabidity, by way of an immutable reliance on the conventional wisdom that fuels their lazy and contemptible failure of imagination.

Terrorists hate us for our freedom. Liberals are crazy.

Except liberals-who-give-a-damn don’t have the time to go crazy. The laundry list of grievances offered by Pitt is just the Cliffs Notes version—and aside from keeping up on everything going so horribly, horribly wrong, liberals-who-give-a-damn are also drawn by the vast, interconnecting web of all the things that make us angry. It isn’t just that the administration ignores the real issues underlying terrorism, or lies, or goes to war based on cherry-picked intelligence, or attacks women and gays, or gives corporate hand-outs to their cronies. It’s that they court the financial support of corporations to gain and keep power, and attack women and gays to court voters to put them in power, and then use that power to lie and cheat and launch preemptive wars for which they glean support by turning terrorists into cardboard cut-outs who hate our freedom. It’s all part of the same ugly mess—and so when you give a damn about any of it, you give a damn about all of it.

And sometimes, dammit, that can make a person angry.

Imagine that.