There is no single word for the state of being speechless with rage, frozen by fury. It is time we invented one. Ragezen? Angerlytic? Paramadic? Furorleptic? Consider Robert McNamara dying at the advanced age of ninety-three, the man who coldly dispatched tens of thousands of his teenage countrymen to grotesquely premature and futile death. This cosmic bad joke elicited a couple of pious op-ed pieces in the New York Times, dutiful biographies on NPR, judicious assessments elsewhere. But where was the massive outpouring of righteous rage against this monstrous mass murderer of the last century? It cannot all have been diverted by the Palin-Jackson-Sanford spectacle. It must have been bottled by furorlepsis.
And how about those Iranians, pouring into the streets in their hundreds of thousands to rage against the theft of an election and the fraudulent installation of a dangerous imbecile as their head of state? Despite arrests, beatings, and slaughter en masse by the thugs of the regime, the protests go on. We experienced precisely the same electoral theft in this country in 2000, right down to the actual sanctification of the fraud by men (and one woman) in black robes. But no mass protests. No irrepressible outpouring of righteous anger. Gore beat Bush by over five hundred thousand votes, only to watch Bush take the oath of office from the same black-robed charlatan who handed him the election. The reaction was dumb acceptance, mute resignation. It can only have been ragezen.
Today the Congress we elected to serve our interests has legalized usury, passing laws permitting credit card companies to charge interest of 39%. The president we swept into office on a wave of reformist zeal is carefully tending the interests of the same giant corporations whose larcenous practices have thrown millions out of their jobs and homes. Instead of the immediate cessation of the wastage of lives and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan, we hear McNamara's old obscene song of escalation.
No fury? No millions taking to the streets to protest the theft, injustice, and murder being done in our names? We are all paramadic now.