The culture of anger: Our fractured media landscape offers plenty of venom
Our screens and phones fume with righteousness. Social media taunts have poisoned our political discourse and disfigured our reality. Our superheroes have forsaken us and our fictions pale against our headlines. We have become an angry, fractious lot, a “Game of Thrones” for a digitized and unsettled century.
When did art and popular culture become so angry, and is it a good thing?
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Our screens and phones fume with righteousness.
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In 1995, O.J. Simpson case lead prosecutor Marcia Clark was fighting a battle against anger.
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It’s hard not to be angry about much of what’s going on in politics this hyper-partisan election year — and comedians are no exception in their standup and on social media.
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“12 Angry Men” “The Angry Hills.” “Anger Management.” “The Last Angry Man.” “Angry Birds.”
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Music may be the food of love, but anger has long been its faithful foot soldier.
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It has been burned. It has been memed. It has been stomped in protest.
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In the hullabaloo over the Brexit vote several weeks ago in Britain, while many commentators were obligatorily running through the implications for the European Union and the global market, a voice stood out.
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The critically derided “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” has not been singled out for praise in many departments, its writing least of all.
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In every national election cycle in recent decades there has been a segment of voters who say they are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
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Tom Morello, who is perhaps best known as the guitarist for Rage Against the Machine, has long paired music with activism.
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At a time when voters are by all accounts mad as hell and not willing to take it anymore, the conditions seem ripe for an American version of the Angry Young Men movement that transformed the postwar British theater.
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You want anger? Go to the opera. Go to the symphony.
