I Blame Oscar the Grouch

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As a child, I never learned how to be angry. This is not to say I was never angry. In fact, I was frequently furious, enraged. I threw temper tantrums, and I can still feel my little body go taut with uncontrollable emotion. What was I angry about? Who knows? That wasn’t the point; the point was that I was angry. The last time I had a temper tantrum, I was 13.

And although I haven’t had a temper tantrum since, I’m still angry. I am still so motherfucking angry.

Anger is the least acceptable emotion. Greed, lust, hatred—all of those can be expressed with decorum; you can be subtle or cold, amusing or calculating. But anger is a tough one. To feel it fully, to experience its power, you must lose control. You revert to that toddler stage. You admit to helplessness and seethe, publicly and helplessly, at the state of the world.

As a word, anger has a meaningful history. It comes to (Middle) English via an Old Norse term meaning “grief, vexation,” with an earlier root in Indo-European that produced branches in Latin ("suffocation, anguish”), Sanskrit ("anxiety, trouble,"), and Greek ("to squeeze, strangle"). All of which suggest an emotion produced by an inexorable force—if one is strangled, squeezed, troubled, or grieving, the idea of control is fantastical. The other negative emotions may emerge from within, and thus come under the sway of our intellect, but not anger: It is produced, and the foreman is not about to shut down the factory anytime soon.

Did other kids learn to control, or annihilate, their anger? I don’t know. Fury—the kind of fury that can possess your body like a demon—is not the kind of thing anyone ever talked about, either in childhood or now. It’s weird. In Brooklyn, the only place I really know (and even then only a tiny corner of it), you can be upset about things, you can protest, you can try to do something, but anger—the inexpressible rage that demands expression—is foreign. We imagine ourselves too sophisticated for that.

For my inability to express and accommodate one of the basic human emotions, I would like to blame PBS.

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Go Fuck Yourself, Fred Rogers

I was born in 1974, so I was part of the first generation to really, fully grow up on PBS: Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, The Electric Company. I don’t know for certain at what age my parents allowed me to start watching them, but it must have been early—4 or 5. Maybe even younger?

What I saw on the TV was wonderful: Big Bird and his real imaginary friend, Mr. Snuffleupagus; Bert and Ernie, pals ever bickering; Grover the schlemiel; the land of make-believe and its puppet population; Spider-Man, lithe and silent. The shows covered so much of what I needed to know, from how to count in English to how to count in Spanish, from how to pronounce the alphabet as a single word to the basic roles of the people throughout my neighborhood. They dealt with sadness, loneliness, friendship—even with the death of Mr. Hooper, Sesame Street’s local bodega owner. All of that I got, and it meant something to me. The soft, empathetic voices of Bob, Luis, Gordon, and Mister Rogers were what I needed to help me make sense of the world I was growing into.

And the only thing missing was a character, or a situation, that matched the anger I felt as well. But there was nothing. Grover’s slapstick failures could provoke deep annoyance (“There are no potato chips on my sandwich—forgot the potato chips”), and Bert and Kermit were adept at expressing exasperation, anger’s pale cousin. Neither of those, however, was anger, the indiscriminate, gut-level railing at the injustice of it all that I felt so often.

Oscar the Grouch came closest to representing what I experienced, but even he fell short. Oscar was simply grouchy, reflexively hating what everyone else liked, and loving what they found disgusting. He wanted noise and dirt; he hated propriety. I could get with that; I was a burgeoning punk and nonconformist. But Oscar’s attitude was just that—an attitude. It wasn’t rooted in an emotion, it was intellectual and contrarian. It was a trash-can pose. One cannot be both furious and grouchy. The degrees are incompatible.

Star Wars didn’t help, either. The Jedi code, with its rejection of negative emotions, was something to aspire to, but as both the Jedi and I learned, you can deny your feelings for years, you can train your brain to neutrality and rationality, you can embrace a monklike life of ritual and discipline, but the underlying anger, jealousy, fear, insecurity, and hatred remain. To deny them is not to deal with them. But I wanted to be a Jedi, so I denied.

Was there any kid-focused pop culture of the 1980s that dealt with the full force of anger? Not the Hasbro shows, not Pee-Wee, not Robotech, not the 5 o’clock sitcoms like Gimme a Break! Anger’s a tough one for adults—no one was going to address it in kids.

And so I grew up angry. I doubt anyone really saw this, because early on I learned to control it, hide it, channel it elsewhere. In junior high, when things got bad, I’d take a couple of cardboard boxes out behind the house and beat them to death with a stick. Skateboarding surely assuaged my anger. The adrenaline, the noise, the inevitability of bruises and blood tamed me, or maybe distracted me. The over-the-top cooking, the distance running, the commitment to unending publication of so, so many words—those, too, have been ways of transmuting the anger into something the rest of the world can understand and accept.

But none of those really express anger in a way that feels real, adult, productive. They’re ways of hiding it, when all I want to do is shout it to all who pass by:

Is there a grown-up way of being angry? I’m struggling to think of any public figure or modern fictional character who’s angry in a functional, productive way. That guy who’s about to become president, and his entourage? They don’t feel angry to me—I feel hatred coming off them, and its expression is easy to mistake for anger. Instead, it’s calculated, overt, vehement, but motivated by resentment, not fury. And forget the Left—they’re Sesame Street all the way down.

I do connect, of course, with Bruce Banner, the genius scientist who, having been given a megadose of gamma-ray radiation, now transforms into the Incredible Hulk whenever his anger levels spike. There’s a lovely moment in one of the Avengers movies when Captain America needs Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to Hulk out against some alien monsters, so he urges him to, you know, like, get angry? Banner responds with this beautiful line:

It me! It me!

Still, although this acknowledges that many of us are angry but hiding it, it doesn’t feel like enough: It maintains that fiction that we can hide it or let it out at will, when all we—I—want to do is stop hiding. Not that I want to Hulk out constantly. Fuck, that would be exhausting! But I want to find a way to be angry, all the time, out in the open, and not feel like I’m succumbing to the temperamental 3-year-old who lives inside me. I want to Hulk out and remain in control. Is that too much to ask?

Even more important, I don’t want to be angry in order to rid myself of this feeling. I want to stay angry. I’ve lived with it my whole life; I know by now that it’s real and justified, that it burns in my soul with unquenchable righteousness. It motivates me, it is responsible for so much of who I am and have been. The last thing I want is to see my anger vanish, unless along with it vanishes its root cause—the fundamental unfairness of life. And that sure ain’t gonna happen anytime soon.

For now, I’m trying to imagine what being angry could even look like. It’s hard. So much of what I do in life, especially here in this newsletter, involves converting messy emotions and slippery ideas into thoughtfully structured, reasonably high-quality prose—not what you’d associate with anger. Will I need to change how I communicate to get across that anger? Or is it just a matter of coming out as angry to everyone I know, so that friends can make sense of it the same way they would a cancer diagnosis? Ah, there’s his motivation!

Maybe that is my best hope—not so much to engender greater understanding as to get other people to accept and admit their own unfathomable furies. So: Come on, everybody! Stand up from your computers, throw down your iPhones! Open your bedroom window and lean out into the street and shout it with me: I’m as mad as hell! And I’m gonna take it as long as I need to, so I can channel it into productive pursuits and eventually change the world!

If that doesn’t work, you’re welcome to quietly seethe. It usually works for me. And if that, too, fails? Start a newsletter. 🪨🪨🪨

Read Yesterday’s Attempt