This thread is a discussion of cultural attitudes about anger, so how can it be inappropriate to bring in examples from culture? Thousands of scholars devote their careers to studying cultural artifacts precisely because they provide such good information about societal trends. But hey, if you’d like to present some objective evidence of societal trends, you’re welcome to do so.
Well then, you’re cherry picking. 70 years ago batman used a gun - now he just beats people up with everything else at hand. In both cases he was the strong silent type. Superman has also always been cool, as a general rule.
I’m a little rusty on shows and movies from the 40s, but I’d be astonished if the average hero now is less strong and silent than the average hero was then. From my eperience, heroes have always been strong, and always been silent - except when making quips.
Popular music? Are you serious? ‘See, there were fewer electric guitars in music back before they were invented - solid proof there is more rage in music today’.
Your entire position is based in focusing on certain tyes of (and certain examples of) older and newer culture. This is cherry picking.
See, what did I tell you?
The ONLY way to eliminate racism was to create a society in which people were crass, vulgar, ill-mannered assholes. :rolleyes:
You may have noticed I mentioned that both ideologies were affected by these negative changes in society. To be polite and well-mannered and to eschew vulgarities these days would be like wearing a coat and tie to a biker bar.
Good lord man, where do you live, that polite and well-mannered people are so abnormal?
Yes. That was, y’know, my point. People were angry back then. People are angry now. What’s the difference, exactly ? I’m quite convinced the senatus populusque of Rome were wildly dissatisfied with the way the Empire was being run and quite vocal about it, in fact I know so - else there wouldn’t have been much need for panem et circenses to quell the ungrateful fuckers.
How do you reckon modern society encourages or doesn’t care about angry or violent citizen ? Children lashing out are punished. Adults lashing out are hauled off by the powlice. The general behaviour however is people trying not to step on each other’s toes. The internet… the internet is a different place, really. But then, virulence of opinion isn’t exactly new and exciting. J’ACCUSE !
Yes. In this decade, eminem is among the most popular and decorated artists. He has written lyrics about stabbing his mother, gang-raping his sister, murdering just about anybody, and general being filled with mindless rage at every person and object in the universe, though as has been pointed out many times, it’s not quite clear what he’s angry about. Was there any such artist in the 40’s–much less a chart-topping, Grammy-winning artist?
Well, as I said to RickJay, if you want to provide some an alternate assessment and back it up with somethin, I’ll be happy to listen.
Whole books could be written on how Superman and Batman have changed over the years. Some Ph. D. may have written them, for all I know. I could offer plenty more examples. Just look at the two most recent Bond movies and compare his behavior to Connery’s Bond. But really, try reading Peter Wood’s book. It explores this topic at length and in detail.
Ooh, another cherry. I’m soo impressed.
I already alternately assessed that increased population and increased visibility of other people’s actions would explain it all. This, of course, includes that now angry black populations can now get record deals and be heard worldwide, when there wasn’t a chance of that happening back in the 40s whether or not they existed.
The fact that books have been written about superman and batman is an “example” of what, exactly?
I’ve seen all the bond movies, in order. The two most recent movies are more violent, with hints of anger and uncontrollability. The Peirce Brosnan ones? The character wasn’t mad. In the others, it varied a bit, and did not show any particular trend up or down. (Especially with that deep ‘camp’ phase in the middle.) In all seriousness, the trends of whether characters will be ‘emo’ or not varies over time, it doesn’t increase over time. And it’s not a constant rule at any time.
Simple fact: the evidence doesn’t support your assertion. Unless you pick your cherries very carefully.
You’re confusing “what was allowed to be said” with “what was being felt”. Surely you don’t advocate a return of state censorship ?
It appears to me that you and Starving Artist are failing to draw a distinction between anger and expressions of anger. Expressing emotion is definitely more acceptable now, particularly in that men are no longer expected to be stoics. It’s not as much of an issue if you discuss violence or sex in entertainment, even in an explicit fashion. However that doesn’t indicate those things are any more common. They’re talked about because they’ve always existed.
And yes, I do think you’re sanitizing the past. Explicitic music, dirty limericks - you think these things are new?
Pardon me. Since the OP contained statements like: “Hey! You stole my space, and then flip me off? I’ll take this gun and kill you motherfucker!!!” I made the unwarranted assumption that it might have something to do with manifestations of anger, like killing people. Silly me.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever to support that? I have never heard such an assessment, most of what I’ve read disagrees with it, and I’m genuinely curious as to where you came up with this assertion.
Huh? My sentence said that schools today spend more time dealing with emotion and feelings (including anger) than before. This is the exact opposite of what you said.
Wherever you live, I’m truly sorry that you have to live there. Being polite and well-mannered is the norm around here, and while vulgarities aren’t completely eschewed by my friends, they’re kept to a minimum and generally not uttered in public places or around children.
Even in the biker bars around here people say “excuse me” when they bump into you.
Sounds to me like these two paragraphs contradict each other, but its kind of obvious that we traded a healthy society for the health individual, its just cause and effect of the zero tolerance phenom.
Declan
Why This Anger?
Because we are animals. It’s nothing new, and it won’t go away soon (until we can genetically engineer it out of us). We have consciousness, which is really nice software, but it is running on hardware built of the same parts as apes, dogs, lizards, etc. The patterns that allowed us to evolve this far are still hard-wired in us. Aggression is perfectly natural. It is just one more catalyst in the big stew on life on earth. Most of us cannot think ourselves past it, and even those who are aware and try their best still fail sometimes.
I want to recommend Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle to everyone in this thread. Bloom devotes a lot of the book to this question about Anger. The Google Preview includes a pretty good amount of the book. Sample chapter titles:
The Value of Having an Enemy
How Hatred Builds the Walls of Society’s Bungalow
Are There Killer Cultures?
Why Prosperity Will Not Bring Peace
…and of course … The Importance of Hugging
:smack:
deep breath, not in the Pit, not in the Pit
No, what I am TRYING to say, is that if people felt so free to use words like nigger, or kike, or jap, etc commonly, then maybe, just MAYBE, the fifties weren’t as polite as you seem to think they were.
Starving Artist, once again, people have always been saying that the past was so much more civilized than the present. Not just now, but they’d have been saying it in the 1950s about the 1910s. And in the 1910s about the 1860s and so forth. All the way back to the dawning of time. It’s human nature.
We only SEE it more today, with the advances in mass media.
It’s your job, pal. You’re the one saying people are angrier. You made the claim, you must defend it.
Saying that people seem angrier in movies, and that this proves people are angrier in real life, simply holds no logical water at all. Japanese entertainment is vastly more violent than North American, but Japanese are not more violent than Americans. European television has more graphic sexuality in in than American television but there is no evidence Europeans have more sex. People aren’t allowed to kiss in Indian movies, but they do sing and dance a lot, but in real life Indians do kiss and very rarely break into spontaneous choreographed musical numbers. Perhaps, expressing anger in entertainment serves as a safety valve and REDUCES its expression in real life. Perhaps not. You’ve provided no reason to believe anything about anger in everyday life.
Sometimes anger is the appropriate emotion to feel and it needs to be dealt with in an appropriate way. Keeping things inside can eat you alive. If you can figure out what you are really angry about and direct you anger in the right direction, that will save you a multitude of woes.
But when you deal with it, being assertive is helpful. Being aggressive usually creates as many problems as it solves.
Starvin’, Darlin’, I wish that people knew that side of you that isn’t talking about politics. No one sees that there’s a whole nuther you.
Well, 1950…
http://www.rockabilly.nl/lyrics1/b0153.htm
No, no. Far too recent.
How about 1928? I admit, I’m using the 1956 translation… Louis Armstrong is such a horrible and angry man. And that horrid Bobby Darin and Duke Ellington!
http://soulblending.blogspot.com/2009/01/die-moritat-von-mackie-messer-mack.html
But… that’s just violence, right?
Aw, c’mon. It’s not like they have a term for it.
Yeah, Stagger Lee, anyone?
Not exactly, but sure. I think anger is something we feel when we don’t get what we want; it’s related to disappointment and frustration. In some ways I’d say it’s not about heightened anger now, that anger existed before, but it was directed at disenfranchised groups (heck, today I am amazed at the number of people I come across who are truly angry at illegal immigrants).
Also, I imagine that, even if a person owns a home, has a job, etc etc, there are a lot of ways in which a person is not nearly as autonomous or self-important as in the past. Spheres of control and influence in the home, traditionally related to gender, are blurred and confused (I am not trying to argue that that is a bad thing). A job can involve sitting in a grey box for eight hours a day typing on a computer, working in a relatively anonymous environment, and often there is nothing specific or concrete a person can point to at the end of the day to say, " that’s mine, I made that." It can be hard to feel one’s worth in a world where no one has to listen to what you say, where mass media pervades and undermines your attempts at parenting and controlling your children, where you spend most of your waking hours in a place lacking concrete evidence of your necessity.
It’s not about property ownership, it’s about being in control of one’s realm, and feeling necessary to it.
I think RickJay has sort of already said this, but there are a few flaws in your reasoning here.
First, television culture at face value is not necessarily an accurate representation of the population. For example, if TV of the 1950s didn’t deal with racism, does that mean it didn’t exist? If TV of the 1950s was more restrained, maybe it means that the culture of the time wasn’t as interested in seeing its dark elements on the screen, but it doesn’t mean that those dark elements don’t exist.
Also, TV and mass media are very very new to the world. The beginnings of TV were experimental, and probably tame and simple because the technology and budgets were tame and simple. Writing for TV was new, and simple. As the medium grew it became more sophisticated and pushed more boundaries, not necessarily because society was growing in the same way (though, of course, it was in many ways), but because people were becoming more sophisticated in the application of TV.
My point here is just that TV is a useful tool to view the past, but if you look at it without context you’ll get a skewed perspective of the past; if you rely on it to help you remember the past, you will have a fatally flawed memory.
And, keep in mind that the “past” you’re talking about is barely the past at all. People born in the late 40s are still our CEOs, executives, and leaders of today. I question how much better the 50s and 60s could have really been when the products of those times are the ones responsible for the world today.
Bewcause violence is usually linked with anger? I mean, it’s impossible to measure how angry people are, but it’s pretty easy to see how often they kill eachother. It’s my guess that someone running you through with a sword is a little ticked off at you.
Achillies’ downfall wasn’t in the Illiad.
It’s certainly true that film, music and TV show more yelling, cursing, sex and violence than they did in the fifties. But this thread wasn’t about trends in popular culture, it’s about where free floating anger comes from. Your contention, if I understand it, is that there was very little anger in the fifties, and then hippies came along and ruined everything and now everybody’s full of rage. I’d like to see some evidence that there is more anger now than in the past (and by the way the past doesn’t just mean an idealized 1950’s, it means all of human history) and then a demonstration of the logical connection between trends in pop culture and increased anger. But please start by showing that there is more anger now than at any other time in history. All of history, because they didn’t have 24 or Boll O’Reilly in the 1750’s or the 650’s either.
And of course, there was violence in the fifties-lynchings, anyone? In 1963, we saw the president gunned down, and then HIS murdered murdered on live tv. And this wasn’t just “pop culture.”
It’s funny, Starving and ITR go on and on about the fifties, and yet, they ignore the times before that-the twenties and thirties. The days of Capone and Dilllinger and Gambino and Luciano. You want violence?
Would you rather have a society where we ignored what was going on in the world?
I hate to pull out the whole, “well, I’m an expert” and such and such, but this is why I chose to major in history (well, one of the reasons.) It’s because I HATE the whole, “Well, life is going down hill, blah blah blah.” This is one of the things I learned-life has ALWAYS been violent. It’s always been crass and hard and nasty.
I reccomend the following books:
Inventing the Victorians and The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible!
Are you even slightly aware of how infinitesimal was the percentage of the population that ever participated in, or even saw or personally knew of a lynching? Are you even slightly aware of how infinitesimal was the percentage of the population that was affected by the Capone, et al.? (Not to mention the fact that mobsters were hardly created by the more polite and civilized societal mores of the time.) Are you aware that the much more civilized and well-mannered society that in existed in America pre-1968 had absolutely nothing to do with the Kennedy murders, which were carried out by a commie sympathizer in the case of JFK and a disgruntled Palestinian in the case of RFK?
Now, are you even slightly aware of how many murders have been committed in the last few decades by criminals in their twenties and thirties with multiple felonies on their record (including in some cases, second-degree murder or manslaughter) who are nonetheless prowling the streeets due to soft-on-crime liberalism?
Do you have any idea how many people have died as a result of drugs, which have so thoroughly permeated American society due to attitudes of liberal permissiveness that began in the late sixties? Do you have any idea how many people have been killed in drive-by shootings related to drugs? How many family members and loved ones whose lives have been ruined because someone else in their family died due to drugs or drug-related crime?
Do you have any idea how many people have died, and their loved ones been made to suffer, because of the glamorization of thug life portrayed in rap music, which the left has defended and typically slung accusations of racism and/or fogeyism at anyone who dares suggest it should be banned?
Do you have any idea how many perfectly sentient little babies (i.e., second and third term) have been killed in horrible ways due to abortion since Roe v. Wade?
Don’t come getting in my face over such inconsequential things as Al Capone or Sirhan Sirhan and then try to paint the entire pre-1968 culture either as causing them and/or being typical of the overall culture that existed then, especially in light of the killings, pain and suffering that has occurred since then due to liberal permissiveness.
And no one I know of is ignoring the 20s/30s. IMO, there has essentially been two Americas: pre-1968 and afterward, and afterward is worse in tons of ways, both philosophically and in practice.
Yes, racism is better now, but the true fact of the matter is that it would have been better by now anyway. The civil rights battle (and its concomitant necessary legislation) had largely been won by 1968. And besides, civil rights played virtually no role in the counter-culture movement of the late sixties which has resulted in the permissiveness that has caused so much of the fuckupedness that permeates the way people behave in society today. Take a look at just about any movie or magazine of the time which touted the counter-culture lifestyle that has resulted in so many of today’s standards, and you’ll see virtually nothing having to do with race. Drugs, long hair, funky clothing, crass language, (i.e., freedom of ‘expression’), sexual freedom, and an overall attitude of ‘out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new’ were the driving forces behind the societal changes that occurred starting in the late sixties, and again they had virtually nothing to do with race.
I’d wager you’d find very few people who were adults at that time that would tell you any of the societal upheavals of the late sixties were race-driven. Most of the people who believe that either didn’t live through that time and were taught differently in school by leftie revisionists, or they have a vested interest in adopting that view in order to excuse what has become of American society since then.
In other words, you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid and you don’t know what you’re talking about.