In a recent post about Barack Obama’s Philadelphia speech, I wrote:
Krauthammer takes Obama to task for suggesting in Philadelphia that whites should be ashamed they were ever surprised by Wright’s remarks. I didn’t understand Obama to be saying that, exactly. I thought, instead, that Obama was pointing out that whites underestimate black anger. That might well be true. Obama’s error was the implication that anger approaching Wright-like anti-American dimensions should be taken seriously by whites or by blacks who aspire to lead America.
This prompted the following insight from our friend Dafydd ab Hugh:
To me, one of the greatest crimes of liberalism is that it has “normalized” Rage Syndrome: black rage, lower-class (income) rage, feminist rage, road rage. The chimera of authenticity is invoked to justify any rage-response that benefits liberal fascism. From Ginsberg’s “Howl,” to Spike Lee’s Joint, to Michael Moore’s rage of the overfed, pampered, and perpetually aggrieved, mindless fury is dubbed the most authentic of all emotions, thus unassailable and uncritiqueable. Rage is beyond good and evil… it simply IS, and is its own justification and excuse.
To people like thee and me, the question isn’t whether black rage is *understandable* but whether it’s rationally justifiable: Colin Ferguson gunning down Whitey on the Long Island Railroad should be no more rage-privileged than Harris and Klebold’s murder spree at Columbine High School. But because Ferguson is black (a privileged race) and had William Kuntsler (privileged socialist) as his attorney. . .we got endless lectures about the “defense” of black rage… that Ferguson was not guilty because he was a black man full of rage against Whitey.
I personally believe rage is the *least-authentic* emotion, because it’s the most bestial: It’s barely even human, and a human in a fit of rage is barely distinguishable from a wild animal. That a person committed a crime in a state of rage should augment, not mitigate the sentence!
But that of course marks me as a man of the Right, despite the fact that I reject many of the Right’s critical theses. Deep down, the Left-Right split is primarily about free will and personal accountability — and since I believe actual crime is an act of evil, not a medical disability, I am forever locked in the conservatives’ camp.
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