Here's the Outrage

Dan Rather is getting mad. He writes, at The Daily Beast, that after interviewing Professor Elizabeth Warren about the current financial crisis, something boiled up in him:

In the hours following the interview, a question that had been nagging at me for months now was growing in volume and insistence. That question, regarding the economy and our government, is: Where's the outrage?

Where is the outrage from We The People? And where is the outrage-or sense of outrage-from the Treasury Department, from Congress, and, yes, from the White House and the new president himself.

As I read Rather's piece, I was immediately reminded of the perfect personification of that outrage, so perfect as to almost be trite: Peter Finch's monologue from the film Network.



That film was made 33 years ago, but if you substitute terrorism for crime, it could've been shot this morning. It's a great scene, very cathartic, but I think people forget about the rest of the film while they're riding high from the spleen buzz.

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PD toolbar!There's plenty of outrage. It's the one thing there seems to be enough of. I sat and watched the news all day yesterday, and I saw the TARP CEO's display of testicular largesse, reminding us that they didn't ask for our bailout money. I saw poison peanut butter manufacturers plead the fifth in the face of Congressional prop comedy. I saw Wall Street jump all over Tim Geithner's un-plan with both feet, and finally, I saw both houses of Congress throwing dressing-room diva fits over the passage of the stimulus package.

It pissed me off, and I'm sure it pissed off an already outraged nation.

The problem is, the outrage has become just more grease for the wheels. When we, the people, get outraged, "They" just glom it all up and sell it back to us.

The Republicans have convinced almost everyone that tax cuts are the answer for everything, that if the corporations have more money, it will trickle down and make everyone prosper. Americans never seem to get tired of being trickled on.

They've been so effective, in part, because the Democrats have failed, for decades, to challenge this. Instead, they've adopted a Republican-lite attitude in which they still spend, but they also magically cut taxes, too. Both sides have been selling this no pain, all gain horsecrap for 30 years now.

And here we are. The trickles have been choked off, and the puddles and dewdrops on the ground are evaporating. Our outrage is being sold back to us again, some of it by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, anxious to seize this moment of national crisis to try and regain their relevance.

Some of it is being sold back to us by the national media and their obsession with bipartisanship, as if East and West can just meet in the middle, at Weast.

Outrage junkie Darragh Murphy of PUMAPAC points out that we could grow the economy much more effectively if we just poured our money into food stamps and infrastructure spending, forgetting that during her last bout of outrage, she spent every ouce of effort she could trying to elect a guy who resurrected the Red Scare.

A majority of us bought our outrage back from Barack Obama in November. We've had 30 years to get into this mess, and now we want to see the path out of it after 2 weeks. Granted, Geithner's performance Tuesday didn't inspire huge amounts of confidence, but I'm not sure what would have. A grenade went off in our economy, so no look under the hood is going to be pleasant.

I agree that there needs to be transparency, and we ought to demand it before any more bailout funding is passed, if any more is passed. How do we do that? I've never been convinced of the efficacy of calling or writing your Senator or Representative, although that's certainly one way.

Another way would be to call your White House reporters. Tell them to ask the questions you want answered, and tell them to follow up until they get you an answer. Just make sure you're prepared not to like it.

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