All the Rage

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Does this Wrath Lit explosion indicate a growing level of anger in the world or just a greater interest in the topic? Are we really angrier or just trying harder than ever to understand our anger? For that matter, is there more anger being released into our world or are our camera-phones just capturing more episodes of angry behavior and websites such as YouTube making them more accessible?

“Have rates of public rage from seemingly normal people gone up, or has our awareness of it gone up?” Colorado State University psychologist Jerry Deffenbacher asks. “We don’t know. But there are a lot of angry people out there.”

Not even episodes of road rage are easy to quantify. In 1997 the American Automobile Association Foundation for Traffic Safety released a study that detailed an increase in road rage incidents of as much as 7 percent each year since 1990. Media outlets, already awash in trend stories about the road rage phenomenon, reported the study widely. USA Today described “an ‘epidemic’ of aggressive driving.”

Then a piece by Michael Fumento in the Atlantic Monthly punched holes in the AAA study, arguing that any increase in reported incidents of road rage was the result of increased awareness. The newly coined road rage label had become a convenient way to describe episodes that might not have been reported at all in the past. The article quoted one researcher saying, “You get an epidemic by the mere coining of a term.”

Barry Glassner, in his book The Culture of Fear (Basic, 2000), asked why journalists became so interested in the road rage “epidemic,” when—even using AAA’s numbers—angry drivers accounted for no more than one in a thousand roadway deaths between 1990 and 1997.

If measuring road rage is problematic, what about violent crime? Surely statistics on assaults, batteries, and murders would help measure a welling of anger in the world. Here, too, there is a problem. As Deffenbacher points out, violent crime figures seem to be going down.

Even though taking stock of our rage on the road and our angry assaults on others proves frustrating, it is possible to quantify one particular kind of anger epidemic, directed at one particular kind of victim. Call it Vending Machine Madness. A 1988 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported 15 serious injuries, three fatal, as a result of irate men rocking vending machines that had taken their money without giving them snacks.

How did it come to this? It’s the kind of question that comes to you as you sit in your car in line at the tollbooth once you have emerged from your meltdown and regained some self-control. Is there something in the way we live our lives—maybe the frantic pace we set, maybe our relentless emphasis on personal fulfillment—that is bringing our rage to the surface? Or is it, as Wood suggests, that we have made a virtue of expressing our anger, so appearing pissed off, defiant, and aggressive is all just part of being authentic, keeping it real? Or, as Glassner argues, do Americans just have a knack for pessimistic panic-mongering so that we see crises wherever we look?

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