Oh, Shut Up! The Uses of Ranting

By LANCE MORROW

"While in the parlors of indignation," Saul Bellow wrote, "the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil." Bellow's character Moses Herzog did that. Herzog wrote crank letters to ex-wives, to Dwight Eisenhower, to Adlai Stevenson, to Spinoza. "There is someone inside me. I am in his grip," Herzog confessed. It was as if his mind had been hijacked.

The little terrorist within the skull can overpower even the steadiest mind. Everyone rants now and then. More than occasionally, it happens behind the wheel of a car.

Sometimes one commits a rant to paper. That is almost always a mistake. A rant should be transient. It should blow away like sudden, violent weather.

The U.S. Supreme Court considered one kind of ranting not long ago in the case of a North Carolina man who wrote two colorful letters to the President urging him not to appoint a judge named David Smith as U.S. Attorney for North Carolina. Smith sued the man for libel. The letter writer said that the First Amendment surely protected a citizen's right to send an angry letter to Washington. The court said no, a nasty letter to the President or Congress, even if sent in exercise of the constitutional right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," is just as much open to a libel suit as, say, a newspaper editorial.

In a way, it seems a shame to inhibit a good ranter. But ranting is not always entertaining. Often it is embarrassing, even shaming. Sometimes, if it issues forth from a politician or religious zealot with ambitions, it becomes sinister. The U.S. has a fairly rich tradition of ranters, from Thomas Paine to Joseph McCarthy to Spiro Agnew (whose ranting was actually a satire on the form) to Louis Farrakhan. A citizen named Peter Muggins caught the essense of the rant in an intense if repetitious letter to Abraham Lincoln: "God damn your god damned old hellfired god damned soul to hell" and so on.

But ranting is a form of verbal fanaticism, and other cultures often do it better. The Middle East today is to ranting what Elizabethan England was to theater: the cradle of geniuses. Every faction and tribe has its Shakespeare of denunciation, from the Ayatullah on down. Communist bloc countries have bureaucratically institutionalized ranting. The East German government once issued a list of approved terms of abuse for speakers describing the British: "paralytic sycophants, effete betrayers of humanity, carrion-eating servile imitators ..."

Ranting has many styles, many purposes. Sometimes its only ambition is to vilify. Robert Burns once let fly at a critic in these terms: "Thou eunuch of language; thou butcher . . . thou arch-heretic in pronunciation, thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis . . . thou pimp of gender . . . thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax." On and on he went.

Ranting can be a sudden spasm of outrage or a cynical manipulation (the wise demagogue practices ranting in front of a mirror). Private citizens rant at public figures to vent feelings of powerlessness (Muggins to Lincoln, for example). Public figures instinctively use the irrational to call up the irrational --the rant to enlist the people's power, a passion to follow the leader. One man's rant is another's eloquence. General George Patton ranted at his troops to get them to fight. Winston Churchill had a genius for the eloquent rant: "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

Churchill and Hitler staged a fascinating theater of ranting. Hitler perfectly demonstrated an essential truth: a person, when ranting, is often talking about himself. Thus Hitler, in 1941, speaking of Churchill: "For over five years this man has been chasing around Europe like a madman in search of something he could set on fire."

Ranting sometimes defeats intelligent argument because it possesses the glamour of the prerational, an animal force. Words get fired up. They go on crusade. They storm across the countryside with aggressive and even annihilating intent.

The Old Testament contains masterpieces of apocalyptic rhetoric, notably from Amos and Jeremiah: rants to reduce the ungodly to the finest dust. Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century New England Calvinist, was a genius of the punitive theological rant: "The God that holds you over the pit of hell much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked."

Ranters are everywhere. The good ranter is the one you agree with. Jesse Jackson rants. The Klan rants. Most of the United Nations rant. John McEnroe rants at linesmen. Phil Donahue rants at housewives. King Lear rants at the cosmos. New York street crazies rant at something that only they can see.

Zealotries spawn rants. Feminism has summoned up some splendid ranting. In the '60s, Valerie Solanis wrote, "It is now technically possible to reproduce without the aid of males (or for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene state ..."

Ranting may be a hot wind carrying lies. But sometimes it is a way of marching out the truth in a noisy parade of dudgeon. In ranting, veritas--sometimes. What happens in ranting is that the little editor normally on duty in the brain gets shouldered aside. The words come clambering out of their cells, free at last. Japanese businessmen are encouraged to get together with co-workers in the evening. A man gets drunk and delivers a violent tirade against his boss, but nothing will be said of it next morning, or ever. Ranting is permitted as a form of release from the pressures of Japanese business life.

It is the ranting held inside that is most scalding. That is the internal rant, the rant that is never spoken or written down. It is the rant of what-I-should-have-said. It is the magnificently composed and scathing reply that would have left the son of a bitch for dead, had I but said it.

But the internal rant eats at the ranter. It degenerates into impotent eloquence. It tears apart the system like hard drugs. Ranting, after all, is a form of theater, just as theater, too often, is a form of ranting. Both require an audience. --By Lance Morrow