Rage is the new black
Are drivers becoming more aggressive?
This really happened. Let me lay out the scenario for you.
I was on the eastern part of Yacht Club Drive heading west toward Eglin Parkway. I approached the intersection of Yacht Club and Eglin and entered the right-turn lane. Immediately to my right is a convenience store. To my left is a Bank of America.
Eglin Parkway is a six-lane thoroughfare. In Florida you’re allowed to turn right on a red light, but I sometimes don’t do that if the middle of the three oncoming lanes is occupied. Some drivers don’t have sense enough to realize it’s a bad idea to change lanes in an intersection. This intersection is notorious for drivers doing that – on impulse they decide they need something from the convenience store and swoop into the right lane just as I’m tempted to pull out.
On this day I waited for both the right and middle lanes to clear. Suddenly, I heard somebody behind me lay on his horn.
I looked and it was a fellow in, to borrow an expresson from Dave Barry, a big honkin’ el jeffe penismobile Dodge Ram pickup. He gesticulated angrily and threw up his hands. Clearly he was not happy with my decision to wait.
He yanked the penismobile into reverse, backed up, screamed into the convenience store parking lot and took their exit to Eglin Parkway just as I made my turn. In 10 seconds he probably burned more gas than I would use during my entire drive to work that morning.
It irritated me that he would have me jeopardize my life and tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of property, and risk a lawsuit, all so that he might be on his way a few seconds earlier. But what troubled me was his rage – because I see it every day.
In awful comments left on websites. Rude people standing in lines at checkout counter. Airline passengers who balk at turning off their phones during takeoff. And nasty politicians who hit so far below the belt you wonder how they were let in the ring to begin with.
It seems rage has become the new black.
Why are people so angry?
I have a number of theories about that. For instance, maybe because I’m older, and a tad more frugal with my mortality, I see the world differently than I did when I was 25. Maybe what I see today as “rage” was a perfectly acceptable form of social interaction when I was 25.
Maybe it’s crowding. The world is more crowded today than it was when I ws 25 – by about 2 billion. I seem to remember a study from one of my education classes. It involved rats in a cage. As more were added, the rats became aggressive and attacked each other.
It could be that parents don’t teach their children manners anymore. Or spend enough time with them. Or spend enough time together as a family.
Also, people may be emulating behaviors they see in the media, from angry shouting matches between talk show antagonists to shoot ’em up movies and videogames, and violence-inspired music.
Possibly all these factors, if they are valid, have something to do with the rage quotient in our culture. But I would add another, which doesn’t get talked about very much:
Technology.
In 2004 Hurricane Ivan struck the Gulf Coast between Mobile, Ala., and Pensacola, Fla. Here in Fort Walton Beach I was without electricity about four days. I live in a townhouse complex and I can say with dread certainty that a townhouse without electricity in the middle of September in Florida is a no-win proposition. A townhouse, depending on its construction, can become an oven.
It was during this time I noticed something strange taking place in my little townhouse community, something I hadn’t noticed since the mid-1960s. Forced out of their townhouses by the heat, people began meeting their neighbors, learning their names and sharing information about each other. Soon they began holding cookouts, helping each other with repairs, and generally interacting like the communities of old.
Once electricity was restored they retreated to their now air-conditioned townhouses and resumed being strangers.
I think that’s what technology is doing to us: It’s making strangers of us all.
For all its benefits – and I won’t dispute them because they’re undeniable – technology (and by that I mean the web, computers, tablets and smart phones) exerts a dehumanizing influence on people. It destroys communities, be they towns, neighborhoods or even families, and replaces them with ersatz online communities that do nothing to socialize their constituents but do plenty to amplify some of their worst traits.
For instance, you would never tell the woman behind the cash register at the convenience store where you buy gasoline that she’s an ugly pig. You might think it but you wouldn’t tell her. Online it’s a different matter.People are not only telling the woman she’s an ugly pig but virtually stoning her to death. They do it because they can – without risk to life or limb. Try that at the convenience store and she might just climb over the counter and knock you cold. Online, however, you’re likely anonymous. She will never know who you are. You can indulge your animal instincts.
That’s how social interaction works in the real world. It delivers consequences for actions. Consequences exert a moderating influence on people’s behavior.
The end result is something we call “civilization.”
But technology dehumanizes people another way.
Need a plane ticket? Visit Travelocity, punch a few buttons and it’ll be waiting for you at the airport. Want to know if it’ll rain in the next 10 minutes? Punch up the MyRadar app on your phone. Want to fill those empty minutes driving to work by telling Aunt Sue about the cute thing your cat did this morning? Send her a text. You might kill a 12-year-old crossing the road but oh well, that’s the price of progress. Besides, it’s not your fault. Apple shouldn’t have built such an attractive nuisance into your phone – at least that’s what your lawyers will argue. Oh, and if you don’t like the bias MSNBC serves up on its web news you can call up Fox. They’ll spin the news just the way you like it.
You don’t have to wait for anything. You don’t have to work for anything. You don’t have to sacrifice. You don’t even have to think. Technology creates the expectation that everything is easy and fast and tailored to your personal tastes. To borrow a John Varley title, just “press enter.”
Technology is creating a generation of people who are selfish, rude, stupid … and angry.
A chilling example: I was once contacted by a young lady who haughtily ordered me to remove online comments that were critical of her brother. Bro had just been accused of driving drunk and running over and killing a young married couple, and commenters had a few choice words about him. “He’s not a bad person,” she snarled, “he just made a mistake.”
A mistake? I was flabbergasted, both by her lack of compassion for the couple and her apparent real concern: the online image of her brother.
You probably believe I’m a raving Luddite who would unplug the world’s computers and go back to writing notes on paper to Aunt Sue. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I love being able to purchase airline tickets online. I have the MyRadar app on my phone and I upped my text-message allowance to 500 per month because I use that feature for all kinds of communication. I regularly peruse the news sites, from Fox to CNN and SpaceNews.
But there’s something to be said for perspective.
I consider myself lucky to have grown up in a world that did not have the internet. That world endowed me with qualities that serve me well today: patience, the ability to solve problems, an appreciation for consequences, a degree of creativity, and most important, a willingness to turn the other cheek.
I look upon those qualities as virtues, not liabilities. Sure, they’re slow and old-fashioned. But in my opinion they represent the very best of what civilization has to offer.
I confess to being suspicious of a generation that does not read or write. I am suspicious of people who do not care about their community – their physical community – and who value their own comfort over everybody else’s.
And I guess I’m suspicious of people who would blow their horn at you because you won’t pull out into traffic, and who would risk the lives of everybody around them to satisfy some primal urge to get ahead.Ironically, it’s technology that allows me to post this message and communicate it to the entire world. I am a true believer in better life through technology.But I don’t let technology control me. Moderation in all things.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .
Image courtesy of Paramount.
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“Transformers: Dark of the Moon” Starring Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Tyrese Gibson, Josh Duhamel, Patrick Dempsey, Frances McDormand. Directed by Michael Bay. 157 minutes. Rated PG-13.
Mladen’s take
Two questions frequently visited my mind as I watched, in 3D, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” on its opening weekend.
The first was: Where can I find the clearcoat that the Autobots use to protect their paint? The finish on every Autobot, when it was configured as a vehicle, shined brilliantly and the luster was undefeatable. Autobots would roll through a desert, but no dust clung to their paint. Autobots zigzagged through toppling, burning Chicago, but no soot attached to their exteriors. Amazing, I want protection like that for my non-GM car.
The second question was: When will this movie end?
Transformers 3 was “Battle: LA” multiplied by 2. Peril was interminable.
Every instance of Sam Witwicky, portrayed again by Shia LaBeouf, surviving a maelstrom of exploding light pulses and short-recoil hypervelocity projectiles was more absurd than the one that preceded it.
But, part of sitting down for a long time to watch this PG-13 blockbuster is suspending, completely, disbelief. That was made easier by the screenwriter’s effort to make Transformers 3 somewhat serious.
The film is coherent.
There are at least two betrayals in the toy-based movie. What Sentinel Prime, voiced by Leonard Nimoy, does to Optimus Prime would make former Vice President Dick Cheney flush with pride.
Humans, hit by photons, disappeared in puffs of gray ash, mimicking scenes in the 2005 remake of “War of the Worlds.”
The realism endures, though the director, I assume inadvertently, tried to wreck it.
Sam’s love interest is unconvincing.
Witwicky’s parents could have been deleted from the movie without it suffering one bit.
And, the film’s panoramic 3D shots looked childish. Cybertron at war was a tangle of metallic structures with fighting robots in stark relief against the background. They looked like plastic models set in motion. Air Force special operations airmen gliding through the Chicago skyline looked more like flying squirrels than hotshots trying to save Earth.
Product placement – I want to go buy a Lenovo computer now – is exceptionally annoying in 3D.
Another of the film’s strengths is decent acting.
America’s national director of intelligence is the woman who won the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of a cop in “Fargo.” One of the human bad guys, I was told by a friend, is the man who plays “Dr. McDreamy” in the TV show “Gray’s Anatomy.” John Torturro does an OK job reprising his quirky spy character.
“Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is the best movie of the franchise. Presumably, because the leader of the Decepticons, Megatron, is beheaded and his second-in-command, Starscream, blasted apart, there’ll be no others. There’s risk, of course, that the director and production company will opt for a prequel. Stay tuned, as I’m sure you will.
Transformers 3 is worth seeing in the theater, but the movie and all its mostly entertaining excess can be enjoyed without the extra several dollars you’d have to drop for 3D.
Del’s take
I don’t think Megatron is the only entity beheaded by this awful example of Hollywood bad-storytelling. Mladen must have been conked on the skull by a piece of Chicago’s falling skyline.
“Transformers: Dark of the Moon” is a disaster from top to bottom, the absolute worst of the three movies and the one that will convince me to never again waste my money on another Transformers movie.
Where do I begin? The bizarre score? The lousy acting and cheesy script? The absolute lack of internal logic? Or maybe the subtle discrimination. Everywhere I look in this movie I see: train wreck.
Let’s start with the score. It’s peppered with trendy clips from bands like Linkin Park, Stained, Skillet and My Chemical Romance, songs that have no business being in a rock ‘em sock ‘em action movie. It’s as if the movie’s makers wanted to endow their creation with a sound of currency, and introduce a note of empathy on the personal level. It didn’t work for me. Music is every bit a plot device as characterization, pacing and visuals. Movies like “A Clockwork Orange” and “Silence of the Lambs” used the score to, if you’ll pardon the pun, underscore the emotional amplitude of certain scenes. Here the music seems merely added on, as if cake icing were used to dress up a taco-cheeseburger-pizza.
There’s no fun in this script. There’s no fun in the actors’ performances. “Dark of the Moon” is 157 minutes of Shia LaBeouf screaming, “ GOTTA GO! LET’S GO! GO, GO, GO!” and “CARLY!” John Malkovich is a power player who looms large in LaBeouf’s employment future but becomes a simpering lap dog once the Autobots hit the fan, and the great Frances McDormand must surrender her role as national intelligence director who doesn’t care what LaBeouf did in the past to an irrelevant footnote once the Decepticons occupy Chicago and begin eradicating the populace. Critical scorn has been heaped upon Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who plays LaBeouf’s love interest, but I found her performance to be one of the most consistent of the movie.
“Dark of the Moon’s” fatal flaw is the rampant contradictions of its own logic. I could compile a list as long as your arm but for brevity’s sake I’ll mention only two. Early in the movie the Autobots are told about a crash site on the moon that may contain the body of their leader, Sentinel Prime. They fly their own spaceship to the moon to recover his body. Yet when the Autobots are banished from Earth they must ride into space aboard a modified NASA shuttle. Um, what happened to the Transformer spaceship, guys? Second, when the Decepticons take over Chicago they seal off air access and shoot down anything trying to fly in, including speedy F-18 Hornets. Yet a flight of subsonic cruise missiles is able to penetrate their defenses, a formation of Ospreys manages to make it into the city, and soldiers hoofing it on the ground enter unmolested. It’s as if the rules of “Transformers” only apply for a few seconds.
Worse is the subtle discrimination the movie presents. Not to be a standard-bearer for all things politically correct but I was alarmed by the dialogue applied to LeBouf’s two “pet” robots, who tended to speak in black dialect and behave like clods. George Lucas took a hit for the same lapse with Jar-Jar Binks in “The Phantom Menace.” Also, an extended scene where a distraught Ken Jeong, in a men’s room stall, presents LaBeouf with evidence that the moon landings were a cover-up for something more insidious, struck me as an attempt to say, “People think we’re gay. Aren’t you embarrassed?” Would the audience have laughed if the joke had been at the expense of a Native American, a woman, or a disabled person?
“Dark Side of the Moon” has made a kabillion dollars at the box office, but I don’t care. It’s a lousy movie replete with contradictions, cheap stereotypes, a bad script and crappy acting. I’m tired of Sam Witwicky and his unbelievable foibles.
If this is what people consider quality entertainment I am clearly out of place with the times.
Mladen Rudman is a former journalist and technical editor. Del Stone Jr. is a former journalist and author.
It was a Saturday in late May, 1979, that I walked through the front door of the Daily News not as a tennis columnist but an employee. I was there to learn … the COMPUTER.
I had been writing the column “Tennis Time” for the Fort Walton Beach Tennis Club about two years when I was approached by then sports editor Ron Balicki, who told me the editor, Jim Welsh, wanted to see me. Jim was a wiry fellow with lots of energy. Strangely what I remember best was his mustache, a big, bushy beast that lay across his lip like an attack dog awaiting the command to rip out my throat.
Jim needed a police reporter. Was I interested?
Incredibly, I wasn’t.
I still had delusions of becoming an English teacher, despite the scathing evaluation I’d received from my supervising teacher during my student teaching term at Pryor Junior High School. What scared me was the notion of writing under deadline, something I’d never been good at, nevermind the rushing out to crime scenes and car accidents, monitoring the scanner and possibly landing the newspaper in a lawsuit because of an errant quote or misstated fact. I said no and went back to substitute teaching, a different kind of nightmare.
About six months later Ron again directed to Mr. Welsh’s office. He had a different job offer: Would I like to work on the wire desk laying out pages? Now that sounded interesting, but even more interesting was the $235 per week paycheck I would receive. My savings were nearly depleted. I was living with Mom and Dad, almost two years out of college. I needed to do something with my life, even if it didn’t fit in to the grand plan of teaching by day and writing by night.
I said yes.
And so there I was that Saturday afternoon, two days before my scheduled start of work, learning how to use the computer.
Truth be told the idea of using a computer scared the hell out of me. In 1979 computers were as ubiquitous as unicorns. You could buy a Radio Shack “Trash 80” and spend two hours programming it to play 10 seconds of “My Dog Has Fleas,” and that was about it. As I dropped off my tennis columns to Ron I would stare in wonder at the “computer” on his desk – turns out it was only a terminal; the real computer sat in a cold room off to the side – and marvel that anybody could be smart enough to use it. Now, here I was, responsible for learning it myself.
Shudder.
My instructor was city editor Jim Shoffner, who is now the newspaper’s editorial page editor. Jim showed me the basics of how to navigate the folders, create a file, and mark up the file so that when it was sent to a machine that composed the type, it would come out the way it was supposed to. Miss one keystroke and you could end up with yards of wasted film in “Texas agate,” body copy text set in 30 point Helvetica type. That would earn you an evil glare from Ken, the IT guy, who was also a biker.
Shoffner gave me my first writing chore for the newspaper that afternoon. The newspaper published something called the Business and Industry page, B&I for short. The page was surrounded by ads and featured a space in the middle where a “story” and photo of one of the businesses would be positioned. This week’s business was Henry’s Fina, a gas station in downtown Fort Walton Beach that sold other items popular among a certain crowd. He gave me a sheet of paper with information provided by the folks at Henry’s Fina – a precious five or six lines of type as memory serves – and somehow I was to produce a 10-inch “story” from this information.
I padded. I included information not on the sheet. I think I came up with 6 inches.
When I was done I sent the file to Shoffner and after he read it he paid me a high compliment – “You did a pretty good job of getting the most out of this.”
I was loaded with a three-ring binder of “documentation” for the computer, most of which didn’t apply as Ken had customized it for the newspaper’s use. I left late that afternoon and would spend the night studying.
What I remember most about that day, however, is when Shoffner showed me the wire folders in the computer. They were divided into basic categories: Natwire, State, Foreign, Washington, Weekday, Weekend, Sports. When he opened a queue what appeared were hundreds of stories from The Associated Press, stories from around the world … 99 percent of which people would never see as we didn’t have room in the newspaper to publish them all. Out of those thousands of stories the newspaper might publish 50 – and that was in a day when pages and advertising were plentiful.
To this day I remember my initial reaction:
My God, if people had one of these terminals in their homes they’d never buy another newspaper.
Today when I look at Yahoo News, Google News, CNN, MSNBC and other online news sources, I think back to that day in late May, 1979. People do have that “terminal” in their homes. They have it on their phones, their TVs, even their refrigerators for crying out loud. News, i.e., “information,” is as ubiquitous as computers were not in the days of KC and the Sunshine Band.
Newspapers are struggling to survive in their printed form. Even their online counterparts are competing with a multitude of wannabes who would steal their advertising dollars. But there’s hope.
Just today the newspaper covered a brush fire that threatened the neighborhoods off Lewis Turner Boulevard. As the newspaper’s coverage appeared on its website one commenter wrote: “Good Work NWFDN! Breaking News is what this site should be all about!”
Clearly there’s a hunger for news, real news. The form doesn’t matter. The song remains the same.
I look at the jobs I do on a daily basis and marvel at their difference from the jobs I did on a daily basis in 1979. I am living in age of science fiction. I am grateful I can still do them.
But I am also grateful to recognize that although decades have passed, and technology has changed, human nature has not. We all want to know what’s going on.
With luck we can still tell you.
About the author:
Del Stone Jr. is a professional fiction writer. He is known primarily for his work in the contemporary dark fiction field, but has also published science fiction and contemporary fantasy. Stone’s stories, poetry and scripts have appeared in publications such as Amazing Stories, Eldritch Tales, and Bantam-Spectra’s Full Spectrum. His short fiction has been published in The Year’s Best Horror Stories XXII; Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; the Pocket Books anthology More Phobias; the Barnes & Noble anthologies 100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, and 100 Astounding Little Alien Stories; the HWA anthology Psychos; and other short fiction venues, like Blood Muse, Live Without a Net, Zombiesque and Sex Macabre. Stone’s comic book debut was in the Clive Barker series of books, Hellraiser, published by Marvel/Epic and reprinted in The Best of Hellraiser anthology. He has also published stories in Penthouse Comix, and worked with artist Dave Dorman on many projects, including the illustrated novella “Roadkill,” a short story for the Andrew Vachss anthology Underground from Dark Horse, an ashcan titled “December” for Hero Illustrated, and several of Dorman’s Wasted Lands novellas and comics, such as Rail from Image and “The Uninvited.” Stone’s novel, Dead Heat, won the 1996 International Horror Guild’s award for best first novel and was a runner-up for the Bram Stoker Award. Stone has also been a finalist for the IHG award for short fiction, the British Fantasy Award for best novella, and a semifinalist for the Nebula and Writers of the Future awards. His stories have appeared in anthologies that have won the Bram Stoker Award and the World Fantasy Award. Two of his works were optioned for film, the novella “Black Tide” and short story “Crisis Line.”
Stone recently retired after a 41-year career in journalism. He won numerous awards for his work, and in 1986 was named Florida’s best columnist in his circulation division by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. In 2001 he received an honorable mention from the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association for his essay “When Freedom of Speech Ends” and in 2003 he was voted Best of the Best in the category of columnists by Emerald Coast Magazine. He participated in book signings and awareness campaigns, and was a guest on local television and radio programs.
As an addendum, Stone is single, kills tomatoes and morning glories with ruthless efficiency, once tied the stem of a cocktail cherry in a knot with his tongue, and carries a permanent scar on his chest after having been shot with a paintball gun. He’s in his 60s as of this writing but doesn’t look a day over 94.
Contact Del at [email protected]. He is also on Facebook, twitter, Pinterest, tumblr, TikTok, and Instagram. Visit his website at delstonejr.com .