America the ornery: Peter Wood thinks we luxuriate in our anger. You got a problem with that?

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: A Bee in the Mouth - Book review

A Bee in the Mouth BY Peter Wood $25.95, Encounter

One of the tropes of New Journalism was itself the attachment of the word "New" on some phenomenon or personality that had gussied itself up with fern plants or sideburns or a listener-friendly vocabulary, and thus had changed sufficiently enough to warrant a fresh article in a stylish magazine or newspaper section: "The New Nixon," for example. But with newness having been so profligately ascribed to so much of the same old stuff, the now-threadbare concept has been all but consigned to the cliche bin. However, in A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, Peter Wood, an anthropologist who is provost and academic vice president of King's College in New York, would have us believe that there is a New Anger stirring up trouble in the land.

Or at least a New Anger Style. Wood doesn't think we are angrier than we have ever been, or angry more often; he does think we express ourselves more angrily, more often, that at the merest provocation we act indignantly and speak harshly. Why? "New Anger ... is the expression of a new cultural ideal that emphasizes the importance of individual authenticity achieved through the projection of personal power over others. New Anger is ... perhaps the most important modality of an increasingly common personality type ... that the historian Christopher Lasch called 'narcissistic' a generation ago." Wood sees New Anger in rap music, in the snarling looks of today's cars, in NBA brawls, in movies like The Upside of Anger and Anger Management, and, of course, in politics. There Wood says we have moved "beyond vituperation to a kind of anger that luxuriate[s] in its own vehemence ... New Anger elevates style to a new prominence ... [and] is about declaring one's identity as it is about taking umbrage at someone else's infraction." Moreover, Wood says we not only tolerate expressions of anger, we encourage them, extolling them as examples of self-empowerment.

The idea that we are angrier today than we were before is a hard sell. "The heroic figures in the eyes of Americans from the eighteenth through much of the twentieth century generally were not angry men," he writes. "Although they may have been men who had good grounds for grievance, most kept their wrath from getting the better of them. Dignity, manliness, and wisdom called for self-control and coolness of temper." But Wood's grasp of history can be quite slippery: in the election of 1800, the tie in the...