Anti-Climacus

WHAT NOW?

Londonist, pardon the, um, colorful language, but I think it's appropriate:

"Yeah, they hit us. But we didn't go down. Londonist's sympathies go to the victims, and we like to think of the hot sweat that is breaking out across the brows of a fair few terrorist nutters right now - we're coming for you, you fuckers."

As it says underneath my blog name up there:

"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it, that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment to wrong causes."

And that's it, right? You have to have the anger: that shows that you're having the right reactions. But it's not enough to have the anger alone, because it's at best just a means to an end. Undirected anger, as Christopher Hitchens points out

"It will be easy in the short term for Blair to rally national and international support, as always happens in moments such as this, but over time these gestural moments lose their force and become subject to diminishing returns."

And that feels like it's been missing lately, right? We have arguments about some or another topic, but even those of us who really believe in global democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention and all of that other stuff have felt beat down latety, engaged in merely political arguments. And even we forget, just a little bit, about the anger, which is the impetus for all of this. Look at Andrew Sullivan today. Say what you will about the man's politics in general (and I've been less than impressed in the past), but there's a man who knows how to get angry about things he thinks he should be angry and stay angry about them. I don't mean to speak in favor of anger as such, but rather mastered anger. Brownie at Harry's Place quotes Winston Churchill (the king of mastered anger, perhaps):

"This wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to try to break our famous Island race by a process of indiscriminate slaughter and destruction. What he has done is to kindle a fire in British hearts, here and all over the world, which will glow long after all traces of the conflagration which he has caused London have been removed."

And so get angry and do something about it.