I never thought that I would see the level of resistance to Israeli and American bullshit that we’ve been seeing these last forty-some-odd days. Still, the fact that it has taken so long to get here, and this amid such brutal atrocity, and is still very likely not going to change much while not actually being able to keep thousands and thousands of people from being heinously murdered makes me very, very angry.
We think of being really angry as a temporally bounded spike in intensity: it comes in a rush and is extreme in its sensation and expression, before it eventually peters out. Intensity is the pertinent metric, and things that are intense are thought of as unable to sustain themselves, because of the metaphor’s reliance on basic caloric logic or the physics of energy conservation. A finite amount of calories get consumed and eventually the energy is expended, and things come to a rest.
Interestingly, it is also thought of as both a personal problem and a symptom of the mob, both characteristics that are unable to be prescribed either to a justifiably angry populace OR to an individual who is adjusted, functional, happy or peace-loving.
All of this about anger is wrong, or: we should make it wrong.
People like to pose, or tweet, the question of one’s radical politics as a question of “what radicalized you?” As much as I think I understand it to be the beginning of a conversation the end of which involves an understanding of the interconnected quality of global oppression and resistance to it, I don’t like it very much, because the problem of anger— a problem inextricably bound up with the issue of justice— that has been hijacked by ideology (see: the previous two paragraphs) is that it wants you to forget. It wants you to forget the assemblage of heinous realities that interlock and work together to cause harm in the world, and the myriad effects of this totality on our friends and loved ones and families and people we don’t even know and will never meet or even really understand and everyone, and the way in which the multiple fronts of the daily and lifelong experience of these harms make us angry.
They tell us to not be angry because it will lead to hatred or some shit, but that isn’t correct: they tell us not to be angry because when the anger leaves it tends to take that which we are angry about away. And the vast assemblage of harmful bullshit that harms us and angers us slips into something like a long covidish fog, and it becomes difficult to make sense of, and the justification of the anger at our harms becomes more and more difficult to articulate.
For more on anger check out the November issue of The Peregrine Eloquent by signing up for the official patreon of the parallax conspiracy for the articulation of thaumaturgical research/ ideas, or sending me a quarter.
More soon, XO— Joshua