a great post on madness. i'd say "anger" but that doesnt quite work in this context. its true though, people do get off on getting mad.

I'm Not Mad
by imperturb on dailykos

Mon Jun 08, 2009
When Diogenes was asked why he was walking around with a candle looking for an honest man, he is reported to have remarked that he thought it would be easier than his previous failed attempt to find a man who wasn't angry. Some accounts of his response, which I'm inclined to accredit, have it that he appended to the forgoeing, "not that it's any of your fucking business, dipshit".

Now, this is likely to get some people mad, but I'm not mad. No, I'm not mad, or fucking mad, or so fucking mad, or livid, or incensed, or apoplectic, or pissed, or furious, or enraged, or any of those things. I'd open up the window and scream, "I'm not mad as hell," but that would risk waking the baby downstairs, and, besides, people who are not mad do not scream out of windows. And I won't pretend rage just to try to fit in--to avoid being seen as heretical for cultivating an unseemly placidity.

Diogenes, my man, what with your special candle and all, you should have easily seen past my unconvincing feigned rage and realized I was always your guy-- the not-angry man. And, hey, if that candle of yours is so unhelpful in your cute little quests, maybe we can think of something else you can do with it...

Seems everyone is mad. Always. Brown, white, black, old, young, male, female, or whatever-- everybody is mad. Madness is not a state we enter into intermittently in response to a provocation but a permanent condition that varies only in its intensity (although it's usually maximal) and object. We "mad" in the same way we respirate, hydrate and sleep--it is basic to our existence. And, so, it is inarguably the case that the tent of mad is the biggest of all big tents; everybody is there, and even the most implacable foes stand shoulder to shoulder, allied in their commiment to the logic of anger.

In the tent, "doing mad" has become a kind of performance art. Tee up any object as the target of anger, say, fudge, for example, and the maddening crowd will so savagely and comprehensively attack and pummel it (the fudge) that it will come to bear almost no resemblance to the innocent little sweet we all took it to be. Now, I know fudge sucks, but I never imagined it was at the root of all civilization's ills. And, speaking of fudge, whose bright fucking idea was it that fudge was a good thing to sell at beach resorts?--it's 93 bleeding degrees and I'm supposed to want to bring some fudge down to the beach with me? Why?-- to watch it melt into a brown glop and intermingle with the sand like a fuckin chocolate oil spill?

And then it all just devolves into one of those execrable and unforgiveable TV talent contest things, America Does Mad--my mad is the maddest mad ever madded; my mad is the best a mad can get; my mad is asylum-ready-caliber mad; compared to my magisterial mad your weak-assed mad is really nothing more than a miffedness, a pique, or, on your best days, maybe an irkedness. And what a wonderful chance to parade our most withering profanity-laced putdowns. Oooh, did she just say "laminated, lip-synching ultramegadouchenozllete?" And during the ritual of maddening, the object of the madness quietly recedes into the wings, eclipsed by the ritual itself. Hey, who was it that we just flambeed so exquisitely? Was it McConell, a bankstah or just some media blowhard? Don't know, but does it matter?

I've put in my time in the big tent of madness, written my share of fulminous rants and lobbed my share of contemptuously derisive condemnations, many of them, I'll have you know, plucked from the rich Yiddish tradition of insult--shmuck, gonif, pisher, putz, etc-- but I'm moving on and pitching my one-man yurt outside the circle of anger and onto the arid and uninviting plain of flat affect and willed imperturbability. I'm giving up on madness because, frankly, I suck at it and always lose in the my madness is bigger than your madness contests I'm giving up madness in the way that Arianna Huffington gave up conservatism-- because it is too crowded. I'm giving up madness in the way that a NYC resident gives up smoking-- because it is too expensive(nearly ten bucks a pack). I'm giving up madness in the way I gave up sex--because it was unavailable to me. I'm giving up madness to spend more time with my family.

From this moment on, I vow not to call Phil Gramm a pustule, though he most assuredly is a pustule, as, by the way, is his wife. My only regret is that I never got to tell anyone "zol der vaksen tzibbeles fun pupik" --which translates as, "onions should grow from your naval." Perhaps a site member who has not forsworn anger as I have and has a taste for exravagant imprecation will do me the honor of laying the onion thing on a particularly vile winger scumbag.