Sean Penn and Lefty Temper Tantrums

Consider for a moment this statesmanlike outburst from the mouth of Leading American Intellectual Sean Penn:

Oscar-winning actor Sean Penn was the star attraction at a town hall meeting today in Oakland, where hundreds of people gathered to denounce the war in Iraq and call for an immediate withdrawal of American troops.

Neither Penn nor Rep. Barbara Lee, the Oakland Democrat who has opposed the war since before it began four years ago, offered much in the way of specifics for ending the conflict, and they were largely preaching to the choir. The enthusiastic and occasionally boisterous crowd of 800 or so crammed into the Grand Lake Theatre wildly cheered as Penn excoriated President Bush.

"You and your smarmy pundits -- and the smarmy pundits you have in your pocket -- can take your war and shove it," Penn said.

Atypically, the reporter undercut the importance of Penn's infantile diatribe by noting the small size of the crowd along with the fact that neither Penn nor the Castro-loving Rep. Lee (Idiotarian-Oakland) offered little "in the way of specifics for ending the conflict" and that they were "largely preaching to the choir" of the usual dead-end leftist suspects.

But what's more interesting to us here is Penn's sneering outrage. Anger, rage—call it what you will—has been the stock in trade since at least Y2K of America's hard left, most of which is terminally afflicted with BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome). Lefty rage has, in fact, become a virtual fashion accessory, particularly in the entertainment industry, whose members sort of keep this going as a way of giving a cheap, positive publicity shot in the derrière to flagging careers.

HazZzMat has riffed on this phenomenon many times before. But George Will had a go at it in his nationally syndicated column yesterday which neatly sums up the weird rationale behind the kind of outburst we've just descrived above. After describing a current incident, Will makes the following observation:

No wonder Americans are infatuated with anger: It is democratic. Anyone can express it, and it is one of the seven deadly sins, which means it is a universal susceptibility. So in this age that is proud of having achieved "the repeal of reticence," anger exhibitionism is pandemic.

"Anger exhibitionism." Good one. Wish we'd thought of it. Will extends his comments to encompass fulminators on the right as well as the left:

There are the tantrums -- sometimes both theatrical and perfunctory -- of talking heads on television or commentators writing in vitriol (Paul Krugman's incessant contempt, Ann Coulter's equally constant loathing). There is road rage (and parking lot rage when the Whole Foods Market parking lot is congested with expressive individualists driving Volvos and Priuses). The blogosphere often is, as one blogger joyfully says, "an electronic primal scream." And everywhere there is the histrionic fury of ordinary people venting in everyday conversations.

Many people who loathe George W. Bush have adopted what Peter Wood describes as "ecstatic anger as a mode of political action." Anger often is, Wood says, "a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted."

Wood, an anthropologist and author of "A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now," says the new anger "often has the look-at-me character of performance art." His book is a convincing, hence depressing, explanation of "anger chic" -- of why anger has become an all-purpose emotional stance. It has achieved prestige and become "a credential for group membership." As a result, "Americans have been flattening their emotional range into an angry monotone."

We'd add here that neither Will nor Wood seem to grasp, at least in these excerpts, is that this "angry monotone" also excuses its practitioners from the time-consuming inconvenience of having to think. (Book link courtesy HazZzMat.)

Moving right along, after exploring the left's complete lack of anger management skills more deeply, Will concludes with the following irony:

Today, many people preen about their anger as a badge of authenticity: I snarl, therefore I am. Such people make one's blood boil.

Read the whole thing by following the link above.

We have often decried the manner in which id-driven, theatrical emotionalism and rage, welling up from Hollywood but perhaps best exemplified in the fouled ozone layer of the lefty blogosphere, has polluted constructive political debate in this country. The ironic juxtaposition of Sean Penn's latest preening outburst and Will's column indicates that at least one widely-read and respected columnist is willing to out this phenomenon for essentially what it is: another method employed by the impossibly wealthy left to destroy the civility of traditional American culture as a prelude to some kind of strange socialist utopia over which they, as our betters, will presumably rule. Problem is, these shallow Idiotarians have begun to succeed in their subversive efforts just in time for the Islamofascists to take advantage of all their hard work.