Reclaim The Right To Be Angry
Luke Stegemann
Margo Kingston's Web Diary, 22 July 2003

Jack Robertson has hit the nail on the head in many important respects in When spin starts to kill it's time to kill spin. Not only journalists, but all Australians who care about the direction in which our country has veered recently need to stand up to cant and linguistic nothingness, the vapid speech and lies of politicians and spin doctors who twist and manipulate language to make black seem white, the innocent seem guilty, the poor seem selfish and the greedy seem generous.

Jack says it is disheartening to say the least how seldom - if ever - these spokespersons are held accountable for their devious and downright dishonest use of language. It's time more and more of us said, in what he points out is the true Aussie sprit, "That's bullshit, mate!"

It's also time to realise that anger has a purpose and a goal, and is not to be held at arms length as something pathological and threatening.

John Howard and his crew make much of the great Australian traditions of mateship and the fair go. That this government lays claim to represent such abstractions is by itself reason enough to make many Australians' blood boil with anger.

But what of another Australian characteristic to which Jack refers, our ability to see through hypocrisy and pretence and to call bullshit bullshit in real time as a matter of instinct? This ability is central to our much-commented tall poppy syndrome. Australians have always called a spade a spade in our dry, laconic way. It's perhaps one of our most endearing traits as a nation.

Or it was. Times have changed and we have been increasingly educated into a denial and suppression of truth-telling. Truth-telling - revealing the Emperor has no clothes - now implies committing the relatively recent cardinal Australian sin of possibly offending others. Truth-telling or reclaiming against lies and injustice often involves conflict and anger. In our education system at all ages, in the workplace, on radio and television, through the plethora of self-help books, management training seminars and workplace workshops, we are taught NOT to argue. We are educated, increasingly, to be passive, and hence it comes as no surprise how little public ire the WMD lies have raised amongst the Australian public.

Look no further than today's Newspoll results - two in every three Australians believe Prime Minister John Howard misled them over participation in the US-led war in Iraq but support for his leadership remains as strong as ever.

We have been pacified by notions of "anger management", "mediation", "impulse control" and "conflict resolution", to name but a few. Children are taught it is rude to shout. Adults try at all costs to avoid argument. We are supposed to smile in the company of those we despise while we resolve workplace conflicts with counsellors.

The right to be angry, enraged and furious has been rationalised away as asocial, pathological behaviour. One must be calm: one must not, under any circumstances, offend or disrupt. Our discontent is suppressed within us by the notion that we must not shout, must not be rude, must not embarrass or disrupt by raw emotion, by the notion that we must always seek peaceful compromises.

We are constantly taught that anger and rage are negative, self-defeating, and ultimately, unproductive (the latter absolute heresy in a neo-capitalist world). Protest organisers go out of their way to assure one and all that any protest will be "peaceful". Why?

The dignity of the Australian people has been deeply offended and compromised consistently by the Howard government. Voices that rise up publicly in anger are treated as voices of irrational, antisocial madness (witness Downer's description of the 'feral left'). Witness the outrage and scorn heaped upon Mark Latham when he had the courage to call a spade a spade re the Howard governments subservience to the Bush administration and the subsequent disgraceful interference by the US ambassador.

As John Lydon of Public Image Ltd. once famously sang, Anger is an energy. Anger is dissent. Anger is loudly proclaiming "NO!" Whether in the schoolyard, the home, the office or the street, anger is a way of saying that we will not accept a given situation, that we see through and wish to denounce incompetence, hypocrisy, lies, cowardice, racism and a host of other hallmarks of contemporary Australian society.

Given anger is at its core a form of dissent that cannot be removed from us, is it any wonder that so much effort has been made to neutralise its potency? Anger and rage have been consistently pathologised over the last few decades, viewed more and more as a sign of illness, of wrong, of irrationality, of violence.

Any guesses who are the ultimate winners when from childhood we are taught not to get angry but to seek peaceful resolution, counselling, mediation, therapy and so on? What type of workforce, what sort of mind-numbed populace does this ideology of passivity create? Just look around Australia to find the answer.

Australia? We are a nation which has voted John Howard into office no less than three times, and may well do so a fourth, in spite of the lies, the scandals and the tearing apart of social and community networks, in spite of the impoverishment of public debate, the withering of diversity, the attacks on public health and education. Something must be very wrong deep inside.

It's time to stop believing in the bullshit, whether it be political spin or the notion that harmony must be preserved at all costs. It's time to get angry, and use that anger as an energy. If the left (Howard's opponents) are to be designated as feral why are we not deploying language in the same way, publicly designating the right (the Howard government and its supporters) as blood-sucking, voracious, criminal, myopic and irredeemably racist?

Your anger may shock some of your fellow Australians, your family or workmates, lulled as they are into a world of tame, self-censoring consensus where anything goes so long as no-one is offended or upset. So be it. Your anger might shock them out of their real-estate, lifestyle and sporting torpor.

The times call for, as Jack puts it, contemptuous rudeness and fruity aggro for the slumber to be broken and for the immorality and cowardice to be exposed. If we advocate and practice rudeness and cause offence, is that not simply replying in kind to what weve been asked to swallow for years now?

In popular discourse, anger, rage and passion are immediately disregarded as emotional responses to any given problem or injustice, as if the presence of emotion somehow precluded insight or veracity, which at the same time are apparently guaranteed by cool, dispassionate analysis. This is the appalling myth of objectivity used constantly by politicians of all persuasions, bosses, managers, teachers, parents, counsellors, therapists. This, my friends, is bullshit.

In our brave new world of schoolyard harmony, efficient workplace relations, and endlessly productive outcomes, in this brave new castrated world, the only place for anger, we are told, is when it is directed against the ill-disciplined, irrational, unproductive, quasi-sinful self. To be furious is to lose self-control, and to lose self-control is to sin. There is no place for anger and rage to be directed against others, or against institutions, forms of injustice, public lying and scandal. When we protest, we must do so where we are told, and like school children, we must promise to be on our best behaviour. The angry student is misguided and rushed before panels of counsellors and guidance officers, the angry worker is a troublemaker and marked down for removal upon the completion of a probably casual contract, the angry citizen is part of a feral left.

And yet, our final irony and misery: the shock-jock when angry is right and good, representing the silent majority. Apparently.

Let's hope enough Australians reclaim the right to be angry, the right to offend and the right to be rude, to denounce bullshit where it stands, for the state of the country urgently needs that wonderful trait which is deeply embedded in the Australian character to emerge once again.

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