"Not even Barack Obama can save us now."

There's no way I could ignore an essay that starts out that way, so I read Stanley Kurtz's review of "A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Today (linked by Glenn Reynolds) with great relish.

This is a familiar topic for me, as I try to use blogging as a method of anger avoidance (or at least not letting anger influence me unduly). Yet for many, blogging has become quite the opposite -- the medium of anger expression. Kurtz elaborates:

Compelling as Wood's treatment of blogging is, it's even more fun to take some of Wood's general characterizations of New Anger and apply them specifically to blogging. For example: "[New Anger involves] deriding an opponent for the sheer pleasure of expressing contempt for other people....New Anger is a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted....If in your anger you reduce your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange, real politics come to an end....Whoever embraces [New Anger] is bound to find that, at least in the political realm, he has traded the possibility of real influence for the momentary satisfactions of self-expression." Although not about blogging per se, these comments all amount to dead-on characterizations of the downside of the blogosphere. Best of all is the longish passage Wood quotes from St. Ambrose, which could serve, I think, as a tiny manual on how to handle an angry blogger. In short, one way to read A Bee in the Mouth is to treat it as a kind of extended commentary on the weaknesses of the blogosphere.

"For the first time in our political history, declaring absolute hatred for one's opponent has become a sign not of sad excess but of good character." That, Wood says, is why our political anger is now New Anger. For Wood (a conservative who's written for National Review Online) New Anger is a phenomenon of both Left and Right. Yet Wood eschews false symmetry, and one of the fascinations of A Bee in the Mouth is following Wood's attempt to make sense of New Anger's long, slow, and decidedly incomplete seepage from the Left to the Right side of the political spectrum.

I am by no means immune. Burned out and cynical though I may be, it doesn't take much to get me provoked. Any attempt to manipulate my emotions will tend to anger me, and often all I need to do is pick up the newspaper. There is no shortage of anger for me to get angry about.

Anger makes me angry. It's meant to.

I try to think of anger avoidance as a game, but I often fail. What ticks me off is activists who are seemingly dead to all reason and who crank out arguments the way lawyers in litigation crank out pleading papers. This leads the activists on the other "side" to crank out their stuff, and unfortunately it also leads otherwise reasonable people to conclude that these sides represent true choices.

Of thought!

The idea that thought should be dictated from above -- that we can't or shouldn't think for ourselves -- is an unending source of anger for me. And that elitist premise underlies almost every manipulative or misleading argument. I tend to take it personally, for it's as if the activists are trying to lead me. And then blogging becomes an exercise in remaining logical and not succumbing to anger.

The real challenge is what to do with truly hopeless arguments. Gun control is a perfect example. To the people on one side urban shootings are an argument for taking away guns; to the other, they're an argument for providing guns to the law abiding. The best I can hope for is to try to avoid the ad hominem insulting approach, and I like to remind people that yes, I am biased ("I'm the NRA" even) but that I try to be a thoughtful, hopefully polite, human being.

Barack Obama is someone with whom I couldn't disagree more on the gun issue, but he strikes me as someone who would be able to be civil about it, which is a welcome change in American politics. I hope it might even become a trend.

The hardest thing for me is not succumbing to anger in the face of an "argument" which is actually an ad hominem insult masquerading as an argument. Thus, I tended to see Dinish D'Souza's recent book as an accusation directed against me -- that I was responsible for 9/11 because my "cultural leftist" views offended the Islamists.

Presented with an argument like that, what's to argue? "No, sorry, but I do not believe I am responsible for 9/11" just has a hollow ring to it. These sorts of "arguments" invite recriminations, and when they have been published in book form and they're advertised for sale, there's little an ordinary person can do by way of debate. Blogging, by empowering the traditionally powerless, has changed things for the better.

The goal for me is to keep it civil. How successful I am, I don't know. Sometimes I worry that even my attempts at gentle satire might be seen as less than civil. But what the hell. My inclination is to say, "Yes, Mr. D'Souza, I am responsible for 9/11." And I'd remind him that this goes onto the long list of crimes to which I have already confessed:

I killed the kids at Columbine, and my collective guns regularly murder hundreds of children in Philadelphia. I have murdered millions of unborn babies. I tortured Iraqis at Abu Ghraib! I pulled the tube from Terri Schiavo! I also clubbed the baby seals, and probably helped Richard Speck murder all those nurses in Chicago in 1966.

(Oh, yeah, I also owned and transported lots of slaves. Lots and lots of genocide was committed by the "we." I am therefore guilty as charged!*)

When an argument strikes me as a ridiculous attack, it's very tough for me to see it as other than ridiculous. The result becomes ridicule. Whether this is a shortcoming, I do not know. Does it sink to the level of "reduc[ing] your opponent to the status of someone unworthy or unable to engage in legitimate exchange"?

That depends on whether there is:

a) an opponent; and

b) whether there is any possibility of "legitimate exchange."

Applying the traditional thinking with which I grew up, would be very foolish of me to imagine that Dinesh D'Souza or any other bestselling author I might criticize in a blog post is my "opponent." Blogging only creates the appearance that he is. As to "legitimate exchange," while it is possible, it would be foolish for me or any other blogger to expect such a thing. That's because I'm a David, and D'Souza, along with his publisher Doubleday, are Goliaths.

Yet the undeniable fact is, blogging has made legitimate exchanges -- even with the most unlikely Goliaths -- a possibility. Which is why remaining logical and avoiding anger ought to be primary goals of any blogger.

Not always an easy task, and while I'm not expecting to be "saved" by Barack Obama, I find his politeness refreshing.