[Cross-posted at My Left Wing.]
Anyone who's read John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath knows the difference between wrath and anger. Anger is when Tom Joad kills a man for insulting him and has to run from the law, leaving his family behind. Wrath is when a whole people, tired of oppression, rises up against an unjust system and, through the aggregate of their individual actions, effects real change.
The two concepts are very different, but the distinction between them is easy to miss. Wrath is constructive, anger destructive. Both involve individual action, but wrath is a collection of individual actions forming a spontaneous and surprisingly coordinated movement, while anger is the meaningless shout in the wilderness where no one is around to hear. Historically, wrath is at the heart of the visionary Populist and Progressive movements and the Vietnam protests, where anger serves as the suckling grounds of regressive jingoistic movements such as the Know-Nothings, the Huey Long organization, and the Moral Majority.
In her recent article, Maryscott O'Connor was portrayed as the poster girl for the
"Angry Left". But I think the article, authored by David Finkel, misses the point entirely, both about the lefty blogosphere in general and Maryscott in particular. The blogosphere -- and Maryscott -- aren't about anger at all: they're about
wrath. I'll explain on the flip.
I've been blogging online for a long time -- over three years now. So has Maryscott. But we come out of different traditions. Maryscott got her start in the proverbial belly of the beast -- that perennial launching ground known as the Daily Kos. My journey was somewhat different.
Everyone remembers the "Dean Scream," but people tend to forget Dean's real scream, the shout heard 'round the world that he uttered at the 2003 Democratic Winter Meeting:
What I want to know is why in the world the Democratic Party leadership is supporting the president's unilateral attack on Iraq.
What I want to know is why are Democratic Party leaders supporting tax cuts. The question is not how the big tax should be, the question should be can we afford a tax cut at all of the largest deficit in the history of this country.
What I want to know is why we're fighting in Congress about the patients' bill of rights when the Democratic Party ought to be standing up for health care for every single American man, woman and child in this country.
What I want to know is why our folks are voting for the president's No Child Left Behind bill that leaves every child behind, every teacher behind, every school board behind and every property taxpayer behind.
I'm Howard Dean, and I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.
If you want young people to vote in this country and if you want the 50 percent of adults over 30 to vote in this country that do not vote in today's election, then we had better stand for something, because that's why they're not voting. ...
My political career is about change. And this campaign is about change. What we're going to do here is, we're first going to change this party. Because this party needs to look in the mirror and ask itself: ``Is this party about the next election or is it about changing America--about changing America?''
This party needs to be about changing America, because only by changing America will we win back the White House.
I want a party that stands unashamedly for equal rights for all Americans. I want a party that stands unashamedly for health care for single American. I want a party that stands unashamedly for balanced budgets and taking care of poor kids and voting together and healing the divides, instead of expressing the divides and exploiting them the way the Republican Party has so shamelessly done since 1968.
I need your help. I need your help. We're going to change this party. And then, we're going to change this country. And we're going to take back the White House. And we're going to balance the budget. And we're going to have health care for everybody. And we're going to have an America with its best institutions right up to the Cabinet that looks, once again, like America. We're going to bring hope to America, jobs to America, peace to America. We're going to bring pride to the Democratic Party. I need your help.
Look at those words, and remember what they meant for those reading them at home, watching them on the evening news, or seeing them uttered in person at the Grand Hyatt ballroom. I knew two people at that meeting, one of them a lazy, backstabbing slimeball, the other a slick politician who later ended up in jail. (Sure, politics makes strange bedfellows.) Before that speech, the first was supporting Edwards, the second was behind Kerry. After that speech they were both for Dean. These weren't people acting out of principle, these were people gifted at sensing a collective mood and bending to it. And they knew that what was was started in that room was a cry of wrath that was just beginning to shake the very foundations of the American political system. And those two slimy politicos, who couldn't find altruism if they knew what it meant, knew one thing loud and clear: when to get out of the way.
Because Howard Dean's "scream" was the call of the war-trumpet for a pantheon of disfranchised and disaffected Americans, and they came by the thousands to join his standard. Over the next year, Dean's wrath spread to every small-town porch and urban coffeehouse in America. His message stirred the wrath of the two thousand Americans who registered for Dean Meetups before Joe Trippi had even heard of Meetup. It was present at the first Meetup held in my town, when a college chemistry professor, a volunteer precinct organizer, and I sat in a coffee shop and talked about how to take our country back, and at the third Meetup, when nearly forty of us organized a Dean for America parade float and raised a hundred dollars from the attendees to deck it out in style. It was present when half a million Americans, in one of the largest acts of civil disobedience in recent memory, offered up forty-five million dollars of their hard-earned money to make candidate Dean, for one brief moment, the most feared leader in America -- all because he was the channel through which the people's wrath flooded into Washington, D.C.
I joined the blogosphere because it was the organizational medium through which the spontaneous wrath of the American people channeled itself into the Dean campaign. Command central was the DeanBlog, a bare-bones operation founded by Aziz Poonawalla, a blogger who wasn't "angry" and wasn't even a Democrat. Aziz's site was soon mobbed by a cornucopia of Americans eager to do anything they could to help Dean. There was a role for everyone, from inveterate ranters like the immortal Annatopia to activists like Matt Singer, whose "Dean Defense Forces" formed a potent letter-writing brigade dedicated to taking down anti-Dean smears in the press. Everyone there, though present for their own individual reasons and bringing their own skills, had a single unifying purpose: their unshakable faith in the Dean campaign as a voice for their constructive wrath, and the feeling that they were part of something bigger than themselves, something truly historic and earth-shattering.
But then the Dean campaign died, and the lefty blogosphere realigned itself. Today, blogs pretty much line up in several categories. There are the online think tanks, places like TAPPED, TPMCafe, and Street Prophets, where issues, policy, and overall strategy are honed by a varied group of mostly intellectual individuals. There are the political junkie sites like MyDD, Swing State Project, and Politics1, where numbers are perpetually crunched and minutiae of Congressional races analyzed. There are the Whiners Anonymous clubs like Liberal Street Fight (many at Booman Tribune could also be classed here), where constructive action is lost in a sea of petty anger. There is Daily Kos, the blog behemoth, aimed mostly at helping Governor Dean change the Democratic Party from within. And there are the uncategorizable blogs, places like My Left Wing, where potent but unfocused groups come together to discuss and rant and plan.
None of these groups is particularly conducive to the constructive expression of wrath. In fact, the sentiment that propelled Dean to near-victory seems lost in the blogosphere of today. Where has this wrath gone? It is still out there, brooding somewhere in the depths of the American consciousness. It does not belong to one party alone. John McCain captured it in 2000, though too late to propel him to the Presidency. It was through McCain that I caught the bug; this involvement brought me to Dean, who brought me to the blogosphere, and now here. I have no idea when American wrath will be birthed again, or by whom -- but I know it will come, and when it comes, the people who were stirred by Dean's call to "take our country back" will be no less moved by the new incarnation of the same sentiment. It is this last group of "potent but unfocused" blogs, I believe, where the wrath of the American people will make itself felt once again and provide a sudden and dramatic focus for the talented blog populations present there. And when it comes, people like Maryscott O'Connor will be leading the charge.
So we've come full circle, back to Maryscott. And while David Finkel's article on Maryscott is deeply troubling to me, I'm even more disturbed by Maryscott's acceptance of his portrayal of her. It's precisely because of who Maryscott is and what she represents to our movement that I'm upset, much more so than if Finkel had written about someone for whom I had no respect or appreciation. Here's why.
You see, for those of us Americans who have found our way to Daily Kos or My Left Wing, Maryscott's daily rant is like a daily "What I Wanna Know" speech. What Dean accomplished with a single rhetorical flourish, Maryscott creates day after day with pure, unbridled passion. The expletives in her rants are merely incidental aspects of an idiosyncratic and unique style that both unites her readers and motivates them to not let their wrath be silent. Their ultimate value lies not in the rants themselves, but in the sense of empowered community they impart to all who read them -- in the wrath they arouse, not in the anger they only superficially reflect.
Unlike many others, I'm not convinced that Finkel intended to smear Maryscott in the Post. I do think that the article as it turned out amounts to a hit piece on Maryscott and the entire lefty blogosphere, but I don't think either Finkel or Maryscott understands why. I don't think either of them understands the difference between anger and wrath, but there is a difference, and it's crucial that we recognize it before we are unfairly marginalized out of existence by a press and populace that don't understand where we're coming from. Out of context, as Finkel portrayed it, Maryscott's anger is jagged and shockingly hateful; in context, as the call-to-action of a people's revolution, it is both colloquial and motivating. Finkel's focus on blogosphere swearing misses the underlying fact that rants aren't about expletives, they're about expression -- expression that in turn motivates others to band together to produce much more concrete expressions of their collective wrath.
We are not the "Angry Left", the equivalent of the Radical Right, the Ann Coulters of the Left, wild-eyed lunatics motivated to hatred by our own powerlessness. Instead, we represent the empowerment of the wrath of a people who have been disregarded by their own government for too long. It's a difference whose import cannot be overstated, most particularly regarding its impact on the American people. When presented with the almost comical specter of anger, most Americans will turn away in revulsion. But the grapes of wrath are sown deep in the American consciousness, nursed there by the continuing disfranchisement of the people by the powerful. It is for those sentiments, common to all but the most entrenched in power, that we speak as a blogosphere. We come not in anger, but in wrath. America -- look out. Your truth is marching on.