The following appeared in Volume 98, Number 1 (Fall, 1998) of the APA Newsletters

January 1. It looks as if Sloth and I are the only ones who survived last night’s festivities. Greed and Lust passed out shortly after midnight. Envy began to get a little green in the gills and left just about the time Gluttony waddled in, but Pride immediately swept Big G. off in a taxi before he made a fool of himself once again with those pointless resolutions. Sloth never got around to going home — what else is new? — and I am starting the New Year as I always do, trying to figure out who deserves my wrath and who doesn’t.

February 7. I’m beginning to feel quite envious of Laughter, especially when she’s dressed to the nines to go out with Ridicule. Some of the Humanbeings seem to think that she does a better job than I do of toppling the high and mighty. Maybe they’ve forgotten that I’m the one who is responsible for bringing attention to injustice and other harms. Just where, I might ask, would the world be today if people laughed at things rather than got angry at them? If they just laugh, can they really think anything is wrong? And if they really don’t think anything is wrong, will they try to change anything? Didn’t they ever hear from Aristotle — now there’s a Humbee who really understood me — that anyone who doesn’t get angry at the right person at the right time for the right reason is a fool? Haven’t they ever heard why he thought anger is an important part of friendship? Think about it: central to being angry is the belief that some kind of injustice or other serious harm is being done. So why wouldn’t you be angry when harm is done to a friend unless somehow you didn’t care about what was happening to her? Don’t leave home without me!

But, as I said, many Humbees seem to think that laughter may be a better handmaiden than I in pulling the rug out from under the puffed-up powerful. Ok, ok, the argument here is not unpersuasive. After all, like I said, to get angry at someone is implicitly to accuse him of having done something wrong (this is why getting angry at someone for something like spilling salt on the table seems unreasonable, whereas getting angry at someone for rape does not). And in one of those paradoxes that tickle so many Humbees, accusing someone of wrongdoing acknowledges or creates a sense of his importance as an effective agent, so you elevate him in the very process of trying to bring him down to size. Someone must have pretty much power to be able to do something significant enough to be thought of as "wrong," and provoke anger to boot.

Laughter doesn’t have such problems, certainly at least not when she and Ridicule are on one of their rampages. Take for instance the rapist. While I, Anger, expose him for all he’s worth as an evil-doer, little miss L. throws light on him as a sicky with a dicky, a creepy cretin whose only weapon in life is his silly member ("You call that a what?"). I make you see him as harmful, she makes you see him as laughable. I perhaps inadvertently accentuate his power, while she makes him wilt. Anger arms the angry person, Laughter disarms her object. Or dismembers. Ha Ha.

February 10. I’m not so sure my envy of Laughter isn’t a bit misplaced (though maybe after all these centuries of people living in fear of me I’ve become a glutton for self-doubt). Just the other day I was reading about a kind of Humbee called a "humorist" (no such thing as "iratists," of course — another thing that twists my wires about those dopey Humbees). Apparently Art Buchwald has allowed as how anger underlies much of his humor — and check out Molly Ivins and Barbara Ehrenreich if you have any doubts about how important anger is to their brand of humorous commentary. Ahem. But we all know that before which Pride goeth (have you ever looked at his knees?), so I better examine this a little.

Why would Laughter need Anger, and yet disguise the need? Here’s why, giggle-face: Laughter needs me to pick out the appropriate objects of her attack. She likes going after injustice; but she has to be careful not to miss her mark. In that rape example I didn’t suggest that Laughter made us think rape was silly; it was the rapist, not the rape, that we were supposed to laugh at. My job as Anger is to locate the injustice or wrong-doing; Laughter just handles the wrong-doer differently than I do. Hosaps who praise Laughter for her ability to unplug the powerful aren’t necessarily endorsing the idea that we should make anybody and everybody the object of ridicule. Ivins, Ehrenreich or Buchwald wouldn’t get very far, would they (at least not with the same batch of Humbees), if they wrote funny columns about homelessness or impoverished people, as opposed, say, to lampooning the smug consumers of beach towels from Bloomie’s with "Les Miserables" spread across them in bold letters.

So Laughter needs me, counts on me to keep her attacks from being simply wanton cruelty. But why does she have to keep me in the closet? I’m so glad you asked. No doubt it has something to do with what the fact of being angry tells us about the angry person. As we know from that viciously clever put-down, "You’re so cute when you’re angry," to be angry is to take yourself seriously — seriously enough, anyway, to trust and perhaps express your own strong sense that something really crummy is going on. Telling someone they are so cute when they are angry is a way of trying to erase or cancel their assumption that they have the right or the ability to pass the kind of judgment on a person or on a state of affairs that being angry assumes. Laughter wants to keep me hidden because she doesn’t want to come across as the heavy. Why? Perhaps — here’s another nice little paradox for those chuckle-head Humbees — because the less she appears to take herself seriously, the more serious her attack will be. At her most effective Laughter kind of scoots out of sight. It is as if the quality of being laughable is in the person laughed at, and the person laughing simply registers the facts that are there for all to see. Anger has the reputation — undeserved, if I may sniff so — for making her own presence too well known in the process of bringing attention to the unjust person or state of affairs. This may have the effect of making it look as if what the angry person attributes to the object of her anger is simply something of her own making, and not something that inheres in the object that anger notes and responds to.

In fact such a picture is suggested by a couple of familiar facts about the way we often talk about anger. Did you ever notice that at least in English there is no word that stands to "anger" as "laughable" does to "laughter"? ("Irascible," of course, won’t do. "Infuriating" might do the trick if it weren’t so damn hyperpolysyllabic.) We’ve got "you make me so angry," but that illustrates the point: it is difficult to express anger at someone without it seeming to be more about me than about him. Even though we also have "you make me laugh," this usually succeeds in suggesting that it is something in you that produces laughter in me — the plain fact of your being laughable. Notice, too, how easy it is for people who are angry to be described as, or charged with, being bitter. Indeed a tried and true way of trying to divert attention away from the object of anger (an attention already attenuated in ways I’ve just been talking about) is to quietly re-describe the person as bitter. Bitterness seems more clearly simply an interior state of the person, and a festering self-induced state at that, rather than anything like the robust response to external events that Aristotle thought of as characteristic of anger. A few years ago a Humbee of my acquaintance made clear her anger at her employer for his unfair treatment of her. Several days later a fellow worker came up and said he’d heard how "bitter" she was about how she had been dealt with. She noticed how neatly the reference to her response as "bitterness" rather than anger depoliticized the situation she was in by removing the implicit reference to a plausible reason for her feeling.

You know what that sneak Laughter is hoping I’ll say now, don’t you? That she is more objective than I am. That when one responds in helpless explosive laughter to a person or situation, it’s not because one is irrational or blinded by passion but on the contrary is responding directly to what is there for all to see or notice. Your saying "I can’t help but laugh" suggests not that there is anything amiss about you but simply that there is something out there that can’t help but produce this effect in you. On the other hand the not uncommon idea that people are "blinded" by their anger implies that an angry response is an obstacle to seeing clearly, not an automatic effect of doing so, as in laughter.

I only say all this by way of trying to explain why Laughter wants to keep at bay recognition of my role in her stiletto attacks. After all, think what it would do to her claim to objectivity were my job as her head hunter and my alleged lack of objectivity kept clearly in view! Maybe this is why George Bernard Shaw counseled that "If you tell people the truth, make them laugh or they’ll kill you."1 Maybe Humbees don’t go much for clear and impassioned revelations of injustice — they might have to do something about it! Maybe they find it easier to think of the world as filled with silly people rather than nasty ones. Or maybe they just think the best way to get at nasty people is treat them as if they were silly.

Time to give it a rest already. Good night, Dear D.

March 3. I’ve made myself some nice bones to gnaw on while trying to figure out my relationship with Laughter. One I can’t put down is the "You’re so cute when you’re angry" routine. It makes me angry just to hear myself so badly misused! Plus of course the taunt all too often works just the way it is supposed to — it makes its object even more angry, now at the unjust belittlement of not being taken seriously. But I would just like to point out for the record that probably the person who says such a thing is himself angry or anyway indignant at the nerve of the other person to get angry. He may be trying to laugh at her, may even be laughing at her, but he also can’t help but reveal that he finds her anger threatening. Otherwise why would he be trying to defuse it? So while on the one hand the usefulness of the taunt reminds us of why some Humbees think laughter or ridicule or mockery may succeed in popping hot human air balloons where anger might not, it also reminds us that behind such attempts at laughter lies something not at all light-hearted. It might be anger, or fear, or fear of anger. Oh damn now I’ve got to think about my connection to Fear. But maybe Sloth will stop by as promised and save me. Oops, there she is now, late as usual. Mosey on in, sweetheart. The kettle is on.

March 5. Whew! I thought she’d never leave. I do like being around her, though; it makes me feel less riled up. In such a mood I can consider at my ease and without Consternation just what it is about me that makes so many Humbees fear me or anyway not want to be around me. What is it? I brush, I floss, I remove unsightly hair; for Chrissake I even have a couple perfumes named after me — Serious Anger, for the men, and Hysteria, for the gals — but still they treat me like Halitosis City. Of course I do know deep down what the issue is, and they do too. It really is no secret, like I said earlier, that I work for justice; ok I Lust for justice. Humbees hate being the object of anger because they know it means somebody is accusing them of doing wrong or doing dirty. (Sometimes of course they like being the object of anger for exactly the same reason.) That’s why there are all those ruses I was describing earlier, all those sleights of hand to make it look as if anger is all about the person feeling angry and not about the object of her anger. If we really thought someone’s anger had no implications about the object of her anger we wouldn’t be so worried about being the object. We could just say to ourselves, "Betty is angry today" in the same way we say "Betty has a headache today." True, we might still fear that Betty would lash out at us because of her anger, just as we might because of her headache, but we could be confident that no accusations were directed our way in virtue of the state Betty is in. When Frank tells Betty how cute she is when she is angry at him, we know he’s trying to change the subject, trying to shift the burden — as if all that’s wrong here is Betty’s insides, not Frank’s deeds.

I don’t mean by all this that I’m always right on target. People can get angry at the wrong person, or for the wrong reason, or out of proportion to the harm, which is why Aristotle thought it so important to get anger "right," and so easy to get it wrong, to miss the mark. But it is uncomfortable when people get angry at us even when they aren’t entitled to — perhaps because we feel guilty about something we have done that they could get angry about! But go talk to Guilt about that stuff if you’re interested.

March 24. You know, D., it isn’t simply that Humbees often fear me that bothers me so much. They also tend to refer to me in disgusting or distasteful ways. Exhibit A: "I’m really pissed." In fact they seem to confuse me with various stages of watery things. Exhibit B: "Yikes is the boss ever steamed today." "Look out, Charlie’s boiling." "She’s been simmering over this for weeks." That’s when they’re not treating me like one of the other well-known elements — as in Exhibit C: "That really burns me up!" "Wow is Irma ever hot under the collar!" And oh how I wish that all those Humbees talking about "getting in touch with their anger" would find something else to do with their clammy little hands. Plus the things they say or do to one another and then use me as an excuse! You know what I mean: "I’m really sorry I called you a bitch and punched you in the face, but I was so angry I couldn’t control myself." I seem to be at the top of every known list of the Basic Feud Groups. Don’t like what you’ve done? Just call on good old Anger to bail you out. What are they going to do if one day I blow my fuse?

April 3. And don’t get me started about the "Angry White Male." Some Humbees must have paid that hussy Hypocrisy a tidy sum of money for this one. First of all, haven’t most of them been saying for years, for eons, that angry people are in the throes of irrationality? (No matter that a little dose of Aristotle, a carefully drawn tincture, might have made them think twice about that.) All these centuries they’ve been insinuating that irrational people need to be calmed down, sedated, maybe institutionalized, listened to not to find out about the state of the world but simply to find out about the wires loose in their heads. But then along comes the angry white male and suddenly it’s "Listen Up, Folks! If he’s angry there must be something important going down. Let’s look! What does his anger tell us about life in the United States in the 1990’s?" Now mind you I don’t object to taking people’s anger seriously. Talk to my friends, who accuse me of droning on endlessly about how anger is no more necessarily irrational than fear is — some anger, like some fear, is irrational, but some isn’t, and I’ve got no less than Mr. Aristotle to back me up. But I do object to the double standard that is at work when some people’s anger is offered as evidence of troubled hormones while the anger of others is read as evidence of serious grievance. But I know that strumpet Hypocrisy — I saw her slinking through town at dusk just the other evening — and how she seduces Humbees into such devilish double talk.

And this double standard stuff is going on at an even deeper level. Do you know the enormous difficulty Black women in the United States have had convincing courts that there are some forms of discrimination experienced specifically by Black women? The courts have for the most part been unwilling to acknowledge the specificity of such discrimination. Look, they in effect tell Black women, there are other women on the job — it is irrelevant that they are white — so you hardly have a case of sex discrimination; and there are other Blacks in your workplace — it is irrelevant that they are male — so there are no grounds for a charge of race discrimination. As one judge put it, recognizing a form of discrimination specific to Black women would open up a veritable Pandora’s box (where has the Cliche Patrol been on this one?), and the indefinitely large number of permutations and commutations of cases based on people’s multiple identities would keep the court dockets filled till the end of time. (Interesting, isn’t it, that as early as 1790 those assiduous census takers in the US of A wanted to know whether residents were "free white male," "free white female," or "slave.")

Thus it is just about impossible for Black women to bring discrimination suits before courts of law, because they must show that they are discriminated against either because they are women or because they are Black, but not because they are Black women.2 Meanwhile, that other intersectional group, Angry White Men, don’t even need courts to recognize and understand their plight: somehow lots of Humbees can’t get their heads around the idea of Black women being discriminated against as Black women, but they seem to understand perfectly well what it is for white men to feel aggrieved as white men. Note that the angry white man is not just a man, race unspecified, or even a white man, emotional state unspecified. He’s the angry white man, in whose name not too long ago both Democrats and Republicans were bemoaning how skewed so much of public policy has become. And so while focusing on the specific condition of Black women in the United States, perhaps especially poor Black women in the United States, is taken to be proof positive of one’s having caved in to treacly, fuzzy-headed PC thinking (except when accusing that particular group of being welfare queens), focusing on white men, more particularly angry white men, is taken to be a sure sign of having one’s finger on the serious political pulse of the nation. No matter that we were supposed to be worried about the Pandora’s box of complex identities; no matter that last time we checked, anger was associated with irrationality. Angry white men are serious business, bub.

Oops, the fax machine has started to purr. Forgive my fickleness, dear D. Catch you later.

April 5. Sorry for that interruption, but for once it was worthwhile: Gluttony let me know he was going to be sashaying through town, and was eager to take me out to dinner. (He spends a lot of time with Greed and as a result is used to picking up the tab. I wasn’t about to protest.) We went over to that nice spot on the Alighieri Boulevard. I ordered my old stand-by, Penne Peccata, and the more adventurous G. tried what turned out to be a delicately seasoned breast of Penance Under Glass. We split a bottle of the ‘72 Pinot Purgatorio, which was out of this world.

1. Quoted in Claudia Roth Pierpont, "The Strong Woman. What was Mae West really fighting for?" The New Yorker, November 11, 1996, p. 106.