Anger and Toasters

Anger is a funny old thing. It springs up from nowhere and can practically incapacitate you what with all the nostril flaring and muscle clenching it encourages you to do. Anger intoxicates the mind in that brief moment as much as any drug and can for some minutes leave you feeling as a supercharged beast, all red of tooth and claw and ready to turn your anger into hate and to spill that venom upon the poor soul on which you vent.



And inspired this 'comedy' film



 I once read a philosophical essay called ‘On The Pleasure of Hating’ (William Hazlitt, c1826, http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/Hazlitt/Hating.htm ) which argued that hate was the purest of all emotions and that in fact without it, we would stagnate without it to rouse up our passions and force us on to the acts and deeds which have arguably shaped mankind and civilisation.

‘Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is a bittersweet, wants variety and spirit. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal.’

I don’t necessarily buy into this. The unfettered acts of good throughout the ages have probably done as much to influence the path of man, and have certainly and repeatedly inspired the hearts of many, to lead them to emulate and imitate the saints of the past, both secular and religious, but equally so have acts of hate and cruelty. It has often been commentated that much evil has been blindly done in the name of good, but that is as much shaped by us looking back at the past with a hypocritical and superior eye and judging them by our own morals and social norms. That’s fine though, in a hundred years our own soiled offspring will denounce us as barbarians and savages for the way we discriminate and abuse and we will just be another barbarous age they feel grateful no longer exists in their time.

However as the essay comments upon, even in times where we see ourselves as good and kind, liberal and informed, we still need these public totems on which to thrust our hate upon. Bin Laden and the ever shifting, practically irrelevant Al-Qaeda network, is an obvious example of one. In the past decade we have been bombarded with images, articles and stories about the atrocities of these men and their organisation, and many sane people now believe there is a risk of their overwhelmingly white, Christian/secular and generally non-Muslim country turning into a nightmare Caliphate with televised beheadings and mandatory beards. I get a sneaking suspicion that some of the more right wing of our country wouldn’t disapprove of the beheadings too much, what with their love of ‘justice’, and personally I like the beards, we’d look like a nation of 70’s rock stars.

‘How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the people of England in breath, and supply them with nicknames to vent their spleen upon! Had they done us any harm of late? No: but we have always a quantity of superfluous bile upon the stomach, and we wanted an object to let it out upon. How loth were we to give up our pious belief in ghosts and witches, because we liked to persecute the one, and frighten ourselves to death with the other! …Even when the spirit of the age (that is, the progress of intellectual refinement, warring with our natural infirmities) no longer allows us to carry our vindictive and head strong humours into effect, we try to revive them in description, and keep up the old bugbears, the phantoms of our terror and our hate, in imagination. We burn Guy Fawx in effigy, and the hooting and buffeting and maltreating that poor tattered figure of rags and straw makes a festival in every village in England once a year’

We’ve always needed these figures of public hate because they unite us much more than anything else, and the state has always been willing to provide them and encourage that hate. They will happily provide the seeds of this hate because what sustains power is public unity.  We are more defined by what we hate than what we love. Whatever you love someone else will hate and they will just as likely hate you as well for the love you bare. A joint love of something might briefly connect you but you will feel more connected and united by a shared hatred of something. A good example are public protests, whether it be at Cuts, reform, corruption, taxes, the G8 or any number of things, hundreds of thousands of people from many diverse groups often with differing long term agendas are united to rage against that one thing that unites them, the object of their hate. The West encouraged us to hate the communists, and now the fundamentalists and the terrorists, whilst in other parts of the world they are encouraged to hate the West, the ‘Great Satan’ and the ‘Imperialist Crusaders’. It all amounts to the same thing, unity, fear, hate and control.

George Orwell commented on it well in ‘1984’, where support for the perpetual war is mobilised during the ‘Hate Week’ and when the alliance between Oceania and Eastasia changes to an alliance with Eurasia, with Eastasia now as the hated enemy. When in mid-sentence an orator changes the name of the enemy from "Eurasia" to "Eastasia", the public are enraged at noticing that the wrong flags and posters (supporting Eastasia) are displayed and they tear them down with howls of anger. That always chilled me, and though you wouldn’t think such a thing was possible, I wouldn’t be surprised if the population of North Korea would react in a similar way.

Ahh, but why all this talk of hate and anger? I am not especially angry today, in fact I’m not at all, and I would say that currently I have never felt more love in my life, which in itself will arouse the hate of others. I am for the most part a calm and peaceful person I think, but I had an encounter with rage recently which surprised me, both in its power and in it’s relative ridiculousness.

I was making toast one lazy Saturday morning. I was hungover and shuffling about in a vague manner and was generally in a pleasant, but sleepy mood. I put the bread in the toaster and then set about eating peanut butter from the jar with a knife, because even if I’m making food I have to be eating something at the same time. The toast was done and the little thingy popped up. Like an expert I quickly extracted the first slice of toast, not even taking the time to marvel at my agile dexterity and flawless toast control skills. I went for the second slice confidently, some would say too confidently, and tried to pull it out. It stayed put. The slice of bread was too big and once hardened by the toasting process wouldn’t shift out of the toaster. I wasn’t worried; I’m a pro and have dealt with this before. I tried to pull the toast out again, at a slightly different angle, but little chunks of it came off in my hand. Panic seized my brain like a questing zombie and I grabbed a knife, trying to do the old stabby, shifty technique to ease it out. It began to break up more and with a sudden surge of rage I picked it up and banged the goddamn thing upside down on the kitchen counter, only to watch in horror as dust and small chunks of toast dropped mockingly out in front of me. A flood of hate and rage poured through me, adrenaline pumped, my muscles tensed, my blood pressure rose and my brain joyfully released a bag of chemicals into my bloodstream. A flurry of fucks poured out of my mouth and I desperately looked around the kitchen for something to destroy.



As illustrated

  As I stood there, primed and ready to go to war, my girlfriend came into the kitchen looking curious at the swearing and general bashing sounds that were involved in breakfast preperation and with soothing words calmed me down. I quickly got over it and we made some more toast and nobody had to die so it’s a pretty happy ending. What surprised me so much though was the power of the emotions that surged through me over an utterly unimportant act and how quickly they turned me into a briefly irrational and raging man. I rarely get angry, even when there is good cause, and the strength of the emotions that appeared suddenly frightened me somewhat. Why did the anger appear so pointlessly? Even if I’d hulked out and crushed the toaster the result would have been a broken toaster and mild electrocution and neither of those help me much.

I have rarely had fights, not since I was a schoolboy have I engaged in scrappy and highly erotic grappling with other men, but I have had several altercations where it looked like it would happen. When this has happened and I’ve been staring the real threat of physical violence in the face, did i gain the same level of highly powered, adrenalized alertness and intensity as I did with my old nemesis, the toaster?

Fuck you, seriously i will hunt down your family for generations

No, I tended to feel a colder level of anger coupled with the real fear that someone’s massive fist might soon be crushing my lovely face into a bloody pulp. I gained none of the feelings which I did that Saturday morning, is it possible I am more insulted by a toaster’s poor design than I am by actual insults? At a time where it could have actually been of benefit to feel like that I get nothing, but when there is no danger I’m ready to roll. Perhaps it is some sort of self-preservation technique, and my brain denies me that feeling because it’s a pussy and it desperately wants to extricate itself from the situation rather than Alpha-maleing itself into a punch fest which will damage my selfish brains precious casing.

So what have I learnt? I hate toasters and i'm probably a pussy? Nice one brain

It's classic passive/aggressive, I want to act aggressively when I’m threatened but my base fear of harm holds me back. But when it’s an inanimate object I’ve free reign to let all that repressed, middle class rage out. I guess from now if I’m in a dangerous situation I must simply imagine I am surrounded by a horde of angry toasters and let the rage pour out. There is little research that describes how a man feels having bread stuffed into his mouth during a fight, but I imagine surprise would be at the forefront

No one wants this to happen to them