In a video posted on his YouTube channel, The Quartering, Jeremy Hambly viciously attacked a video game reviewer for giving a low score to a game because all its zombies were white. “Keep your politics out of our video games,” the social media influencer told the reviewer. Following this, the reviewer’s social media pages were flooded with hatred from other users. Hambly is not alone. There is a culture of gamers using rage and foul language on YouTube to increase engagement and generate more revenue. This kind of monetisable rage is nothing new. But it made me wonder, when did we get so angry about everything?
These days, it seems everyone is angry at everyone else: MAGA supporters at immigrants, Hindus at Muslims, Russians at Ukrainians.... And it is not just one group against the other. It might be someone smashing their racket on a tennis court, a passenger yelling at an air hostess on a plane, a brawl between two colleagues in your office, or a shouting match inside a hospital waiting room to see the doctor first. Somehow, it feels like it has all gotten so much more virulent.
Take the case of comedian Learnmore Jonasi translating a Zulu chant in The Lion King as “Look! There’s a lion. Oh my God.” Lebo M., who composed it, alleged his reputation was damaged because the chant actually translated as “All hail the king, we all bow in the presence of the king.” The controversy went viral on social media, with netizens vehemently taking sides. Ultimately, Lebo slapped a $27 million lawsuit against Jonasi, who probably never in his wildest dreams imagined the joke could turn out to be so expensive.
Author Kat Timpft would disagree with Lebo. After all, she’s written a whole book on it. In You Can’t Joke About That. Why Everything is Funny. Nothing is Sacred, and We are All in This Together, she argues that those jokes that we are afraid of speaking for hurting someone’s sentiment are exactly the kind of jokes we should be cracking. Traumatic breakups, cancer, being broke, Dave Chappelle, rape jokes, ageing, the lab leak theory, religion, transgender swimmers—nothing should be beyond the realm of comedy, according to her, because there is healing in humour.
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The answer to why there is so much rage may lie in the deep polarisation in the world today. If it is religion in India, it is ideology in America. This ‘us vs them’ mentality is especially prominent there. According to a 2022 Pew study of 25 countries, “Americans were especially likely to view fellow citizens as morally bad.” It makes me think of two American leaders separated by a gulf of over 60 years: President Donald Trump and Martin Luther King Jr, the architect of the Civil Rights movement in America. Right from the beginning, King was convinced that the only way to bring about change was through love and not hate.
Take two instances when both men found themselves in an American court. During his $250 million civil fraud trial in New York, Trump and his lawyers resorted to what Rolling Stone referred to as ‘Fyre Festival strategies’—“kick up as much dirt as possible, enrage the judge, trash some of the witnesses and turn the process into a media circle.” Instead of trying to win the case, they turned it into a PR stunt, delaying the proceedings by asking long-winded questions on each document submitted by the New York Attorney General Letitia James. “Trump, who keeps delivering angry speeches outside the courtroom and maintains a scowl inside the courtroom, has essentially resorted to theatrics to draw public attention to himself,” stated The Daily Beast.
Decades ago, in 1958, King also faced charges, albeit trumped-up ones. When his friend was accused of being involved in an illicit relationship, King accompanied the friend to court. Two white policemen attempted to prevent them from entering the courtyard. When King tried to summon a friend from inside, the policemen grabbed him, twisted his arm and kicked him into a cell. He was found guilty and asked to pay a penalty of $14 or spend 14 days in jail. Without hesitation, King chose jail. He reiterated that he was not doing this out of a “desire to be a martyr”. This was an expression of protest rather than some “histrionic gesture or publicity stunt, for moral convictions never stem from the selfish urge for publicity”, said King.
Two men. Two forms of protest. One with rage, noise and theatrics. The other with love, faith and dignity. Take your pick.
