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I coppied this from a news group.

THE WASHINGTON POST
Feb. 13, 2003
In America, it’s all the rage
We’ve made the breathless harangue a screaming success
By Peter Carlson
Hey, you psycho nutcases, you Feminazis, you Commu-Nazis, you pathetic
little parakeet males, you stupid white men, you grim quivering angry women,
you cougar-cuddlers and leg-crossers, you brutal brain-damaged degenerates, you
leeches, you hyenas, you maggots — listen up and listen good: If you’ve
gotten sick and tired of nasty name-calling, vindictive invective and
unrelenting venting, you better unplug your home entertainment center and
become a hermit, because there’s no longer any escaping from the age of the
screed, the rant, the tirade, the jeremiad, the diatribe, the venom-fueled,
white-hot harangue!
These days, one of our country’s main forms of entertainment is
listening to extremely angry humans venting, grumbling, griping, carping,
cursing, raging, railing and bellyaching.
THE MOMENTUM has been building for years and now it has reached a
critical mass: On radio, on TV, on the Internet, on the stage, on CDs and in
countless best-selling books, Americans are ranting like spit-spewing
street-corner lunatics.
These days, one of our country’s main forms of entertainment is
listening to extremely angry humans venting, grumbling, griping, carping,
cursing, raging, railing and bellyaching. The kind of people who would, in a
more genteel age, be holding forth on bar stools or soapboxes now have their
own syndicated radio shows, record deals and book contracts.
Over on the left, there’s Hunter S. Thompson, the aging king of gonzo,
denouncing Republicans as “brutal brain-damaged degenerates” and attacking
George W. Bush for “killing brown-skinned children in the name of Jesus and
the American people.”
And there’s filmmaker Michael Moore, author of “Stupid White Men,”
the best-selling screed that denounced Bush as “our idiot-in-Chief” and
“the thief-in-chief,” then offered this carefully nuanced insight:
“Hard-core Republicans are desperately hoping that Big Dick Cheney can
survive half a dozen more heart attacks and last long enough to oversee the
raping and pillaging of everything west of Wichita.” That delightful book has
been on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for 41 weeks and is
currently No. 7.
RADIO RANTERS AND TALKING HEADS
Over on the right, there’s Rush Limbaugh railing against
“Feminazis,” “Environmentalist Wackos” and other “fringe
kookburgers.” Limbaugh is so popular he has spawned scads of imitators,
right-wing radio ranters like G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, Neal Boortz, Mike
Gallagher and America’s fifth most listened-to radio personality, Michael
Savage, who uses his nationally syndicated show to savage the folks he calls
“condo commies . . . psycho nutcases . . . cougar-cuddlers . . . leg-crossers
. . . couch-warming leeches . . . and dyed-in-the-dung liberals.”
Savage isn’t just an angry man. He’s an incensed, irate, enraged man
who is absolutely livid over what those dirty liberals have done to America’s
beloved meatballs:
“Back when America was still moral and whole, our meatballs were big,
soft and tasty,” he wrote in his inevitable hardcover harangue “The Savage
Nation,” which is now the No. 1 nonfiction book on the Times list.
“Today, thanks mainly to the Demoncats, the libs, and the Commu-Nazis
who rule the courts, America’s meatballs are small, hard and tasteless. In
other words, we have replicated the Swedish meatball, which is what socialism
brings.”
This kind of incisive commentary has just earned Savage a job hosting
an MSNBC yap show.
Meanwhile, the cacophony of screaming screedmongers has drowned out the
voices of sweet reason. Just ask Ann Coulter, the author and TV talking head.
“The country is trapped in a political discourse that increasingly resembles
professional wrestling,” Coulter wrote in her 2002 bestseller “Slander.”
Fortunately, Coulter identified the root of this problem in the very
first paragraph of her book: “It’s all liberals’ fault.” That left the
remaining 204 pages for Coulter to denounce liberals as “venom-spewing
haters” and “pathetic little parakeet males and grim quivering angry
women” who are “completely unhinged” and “hate America” and “hate
all religions except Islam” and “want to take more of our money, kill
babies, and discriminate on the basis of race.”
Whew! But what really gets Coulter steamed up is the way liberals engage
in nasty name-calling: “A vicious personal smear, they believe, constitutes a
clever counterargument.”
And she’s not done. Coming in June is her next screed — “Treason:
Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.”
TIRADE AS ENTERTAINMENT
In an earlier age, a man ranting and raving in public would be locked
up, told to sleep it off, maybe thrown into the loony bin for psychological
evaluation.
Of course, political discourse isn’t the only venue for ranting. The
tirade has become a major form of entertainment. For nine years, comedian
Dennis Miller delivered weekly comic rants on his HBO show — later reprinted
in books titled “The Rants,” and “I Rant, Therefore I Am” and “The
Rant Zone: An All-Out Blitz Against Soul-Sucking Jobs, Twisted Child Stars,
Holistic Loons and People Who Eat Their Dogs!”
Other comedians, including Chris Rock and the late Bill Hicks, also
started ranting.
And comic George Carlin now delivers a routine that is either an all-out
misanthropic screed or a parody of an all-out misanthropic screed. Particularly
hilarious is Carlin’s spirited defense of capital punishment:
“I’d have naked upside-down crucifixions once a week on TV at
halftime of the ‘Monday Night Football’ game! . . . I’d be in favor of
beheadings on TV, in slow motion, with instant replay!”
And let’s not forget rap. Rap consists, in large part, of people
ranting and cursing to a monotonous beat. It is now America’s most popular
music.
The best-selling album of 2002 was “The Eminem Show,” which sold
nearly 8 million copies. In it, Eminem, the perennially irate white rapper,
vents his prodigious anger about his mother and his ex-wife and his
“[expletive] father.” Here is the heart-warming conclusion to his screed
“White America:” I am the derringer aimed at little Erica to attack her
character / The ringleader of this circus of worthless pawns / Sent to lead the
march right up to the steps of Congress / And [expletive] on the lawns of the
White House / To burn the casket and replace it with a Parental Advisory
Sticker / To spit liquor in the face of this democracy of hypocrisy /
[Expletive] you, Ms. Cheney! [Expletive] you, Tipper Gore!
In an earlier age, a man ranting and raving like that in public would be
locked up, told to sleep it off, maybe thrown into the loony bin for
psychological evaluation.
But this is the age of the screed, so Eminem has been nominated for a
Grammy for Album of the Year.
A HALLOWED TRADITION
In the 1800s, the press was viciously partisan and journalists were
encouraged to let off steam with a full-throated harangue instead of wasting
time digging up facts.
“The President eats dirt and excrement for his daily meals, likes it
and tries to force it on The States!”
Sounds like Hunter Thompson railing about Bush or Limbaugh railing about
Clinton, but actually it’s America’s bard, Walt Whitman, the good gray
poet, railing about Franklin Pierce.
Whitman didn’t like Pierce and he didn’t much care for the other
pols of 1856: “Office-holders, office-seekers, robbers, pimps,” he called
them in a screed published that year, “body-snatchers, bawlers, bribers,
compromisers . . . blind men, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred inside with the
vile disorder . . . crawling serpentine men, the lousy combings and born
freedom sellers of the earth.”
Obviously, the screed is a hallowed tradition in America. In the 1800s,
the press was viciously partisan and journalists were encouraged to let off
steam with a full-throated harangue instead of wasting time digging up facts.
This tradition was carried into the 20th century by H.L. Mencken, who wrote
delightfully comic screeds about fundamentalists, the South and the
“booboisie.”
But by the mid-20th century, the diatribe had almost disappeared from
the mainstream press, replaced by the cult of objectivity and by columnists
like Walter Lippmann, ponderous rationalists who wrote in a genteel voice that
Tom Wolfe once called a “pale beige tone.”
Then along came Hunter Thompson, who invented “gonzo journalism,”
interspersing his coverage of the 1972 presidential campaign with accounts of
his drug-induced hallucinations and diatribes about Nixon and other “geeks”
and “greedheads.”
In 1976, Sidney Lumet made “Network,” a movie about a TV network so
desperate for ratings that it allows its news anchor to start ranting on the
air, bellowing “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”
Back then, “Network” was considered outrageous satire. Now — after the
advent of “The McLaughlin Group,” the Fox News Channel and countless TV
scream-fests — it seems like simple realism.
In 1983, the Weekly World News — a tabloid famed for stories on Elvis
sightings and B-52s found on the moon — introduced a columnist called Ed
Anger, a right-wing Everyman who is mad as hell about almost everything.
“I’m madder than a tomcat with his tail in a light socket over this
latest bleeding-heart campaign to outlaw capital punishment,” Anger wrote in
one column. “If the whining, sniveling liberals want to stop these weekly
executions of human cockroaches, then I’ve got a wonderful solution. Let’s
kill ‘em all once a year in electric bleachers!”
In the early days, Ed Anger seemed like outrageous satire. Now, in the
age of the screed, he barely stands out from the crowd of radio ranters. You
get the impression he might be picking up extra cash ghostwriting for Liddy or
Savage.
REVVING UP THE AGE OF THE SCREED
Maybe Americans don’t want nuance. We’d rather be entertained than
enlightened, and ranting extremists are so much more fun than rational
fulminators.
But what really revved up the age of the screed was the rise of cable
TV, with its endless talk shows, and the Internet, with its flamers and
bloggers.
“There’s so much media for people to choose from,” says Greg
Beato, who edits Soundbitten, a five-year-old Web site that covers ranters and
rappers. “To break through the noise and the competition, you have to have an
exaggerated comic-book message. There’s no room for nuance.”
Maybe Americans don’t want nuance. We’d rather be entertained than
enlightened, and ranting extremists are so much more fun than rational
fulminators. And it feels so good when you agree with them.
Of course, political events have given screedmongers plenty to rant
about. The Clinton impeachment launched a million diatribes. The disputed 2000
election inspired a million harangues. Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
On that day, Oriana Fallaci, the famous Italian journalist, was in her
New York apartment, writing a novel. But the attack made her so mad she
abandoned fiction. For 12 days, she typed furiously, not sleeping or eating,
fueling herself with coffee and cigarettes, banging out an enraged book-length
screed against Osama bin Laden and his “defunct ultra-polygamist father”
and Yasser Arafat (“You big mouth! . . . You moron!”) and Saudi Arabia
(“that stinky bank vault”) and Islam itself:
“I’m an atheist, thank God. And I have no intention of being
punished for this by retrograde bigots who, instead of contributing to the
improvement of humanity, salaam and squawk prayers five times a day.”
Her book, “The Rage and the Pride,” sold more than a million copies
in Europe. American sales were more modest, perhaps because American
screedmongers had beaten her to the punch. Within days of the attack, Coulter
had out-Fallacied Fallaci in one incendiary sentence: “We should invade their
countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
FORGET ABOUT ANGER MANAGEMENT
These days, you can’t swing a dead cat by the tail in a TV greenroom
without hitting at least one screedmonger.
Meanwhile, black nationalist poet Amiri Baraka was venting his anger
in a long punctuation-free diatribe called “Somebody Blew Up America,”
which contained these immortal lines: Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna
get bombed / Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers / To stay home
that day / Why did Sharon stay away
When Baraka read the poem in public, an uproar ensued, but he is still
managing to hold on to his lofty post as, believe it or not, poet laureate of
New Jersey.
These days, you can’t swing a dead cat by the tail in a TV greenroom
without hitting at least one screedmonger. The zesty spirit of the screed has
inspired once-conventional writers: Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, Bill
O’Reilly, Camille Paglia, Michael Kelly and Lewis Lapham now regularly enjoy
venting their anger in public.
A lot of anger is being vented through the media these days. Even Eminem
is perturbed by it. “So much anger aimed in no particular direction, just
sprays and sprays,” he says in “White America.” “Straight through your
radio waves it plays and plays.”
Michael Savage enjoys sending his anger through the radio waves. He’s
proud of his rage, although he senses that women don’t like it: “Women are
afraid of angry men. Particularly in this homosexualized, feminized America.”
And don’t talk to him about anger management. Anger management is a
Commu-Nazi plot.
“You manage your anger, Mr. Liberal, because that’s another one of
your liberal tricks,” Savage wrote in his book. “You find the man who gets
furious and really wants to change things. You tell him he’s psychotic and he
needs anger management. You know what I say? ‘Drop dead.’ That’s what I
say.”
Another thing that sparks Savage’s anger is when a reporter calls to
ask him why America is so fond of rants. He’s irate at being compared to
Michael Moore: “He’s an uneducated dolt.” He’s incensed at the idea
that he rants.
“It sounds like you’re a real schmuck,” he says. “What’s the
point of talking to you?”
Then he hangs up.
RESTORING CIVILITY
Reasoning together gets a little difficult when you’ve got these
loudmouth screedmongers screaming like banshees.
And so, gentle reader, America now faces a vexing problem: How can we
as a society restore civility to the public discussion of our common problems?
First, we must realize that there are no simple solutions to any issue,
that no one side has all the answers, that we must reason together in an
atmosphere of mutual respect.
Of course, reasoning together gets a little difficult when you’ve got
these loudmouth screedmongers screaming like banshees. What’s wrong with
these people? Can’t they carry on a civil conversation without hurling
insults at anybody who doesn’t agree with them?
I’m getting sick and tired of them. And it’s high time we stopped
pussyfooting around and tell it like it is! These knuckle-dragging knuckleheads
are ruining the country!!
Are we gonna take this lying down? HELL NO! I say we get these
un-American weasels off the air RIGHT NOW! We, the people, own the airwaves
these spit-spewing loons use to spread their wretched drivel and I say we PULL
THE PLUG!!
As for the rappers, spitting hate and expletives in their idiotic
rhymes, I’ve got a solution for them, too: Put a nice hefty tax on
crotch-grabbing and we’ll bankrupt these antisocial thugs in no time!
Probably balance the budget, too.
And I refuse to sit idly by while America’s precious forests are
chopped down to print a Michael Moore screed blaming Dick Cheney for killing
Bambi or an Ann Coulter rant on how liberals cause earthquakes, floods, the
common cold and the heartbreak of psoriasis! I say we boycott all books by
authors whose sole qualification is that they once screamed incoherently about
the topic on TV! That’ll make bestseller lists once again safe for self-help
books and celebrity autobiographies — the way God intended it.
That’s my simple solution to the screed problem and if you don’t
agree with me, you’re a psycho nut case, a brain-damaged degenerate, a
cougar-cuddling Commu-Nazi hyena, and who cares what you think anyway?

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