The Joy of Anger
I'm tired of advice on love and of books and lectures and television panelists who preach the wonder of love and how to make love to women, men, animals, plants and dining-room furniture and the joy that comes of loving all humanity. Love is nice, love is swell, and I'm in favor of it, but these love bores constantly telling us, ''Love is everything,'' are creating a terrible distortion of emotional values.
What about anger? Why don't any of these experts on human emotion tell us something useful about anger? Judging from the news, there's at least as much anger as love pumping through the American bloodstream.
Pick up any day's newspaper, and there it is: ''Angered Parent Kills Spouse and Four Children''; ''Angered by Firing, Man Slays 10''; ''Angry Son Mails Mom a Letter Bomb''; ''Angered Citizen Punches Supreme Court Justice,'' and on and on. It's senseless to say the problem with these people is that they don't know how to love.
When you're angry, as these people are, you don't want somebody shoving Leo Buscaglia's ''Living, Loving and Learning'' or Michael Morgenstern's ''How to Make Love to a Woman'' under your nose. As the Book of Revelations must say somewhere, there is a time for love and a time for anger, and when it's time for anger you don't want either bromides or technical manuals about love; you want some way to let everybody know you're sore without having to slay spouse and four children.
What we need is not another volume on ''How To Make Love'' but some foolproof advice on ''How To Make Anger.'' I was struck by the lack of sound advice on the subject when, one day this summer, I found myself shouting and pounding the desk in front of an airline clerk because a flight had been oversold and he refused to permit standing in the airplane aisles. I was astonished by my outburst, for I am so ignorant of the art of being angry that I haven't let myself enjoy a refreshing public outburst in 20 years.
Fortuntely for the airline clerk, I am one of those odd Americans who never carry a sawed-off shotgun or even a handgun, so he was able to sneer at my rage with impunity. Fortunately for the passengers who were not being left behind, none approached me with counsel on the joys of loving, for I was furious enough to kick luggage to pieces with tennis shoes.
What still burned in my soul after a sedative four hours in the airport waiting lounge was the utter calm with which the officious devil at the airline desk ignored my show of anger. I realized he must have seen anger in all its forms, including the great masters of rage so skilled at outrage that he had quaked, gone aboard airplanes to haul off passengers already seated and given their places to those of whose anger he stood in awe.
I was not one deserving such respect. He had seen thousands like me. The trembling voice, the purple face, the bulging eyeballs, the quivering hands. He had sized me up perfectly, had said to himself, ''Utterly ineffectual when abused by airline, hotel and car-rental clerks; hasn't the slightest notion how to make anger; can be easily crushed by my calm, superior manner which I shall use to give him a twist of the knife by showing that not only do I not love him, I don't even respect him.''
Because the Leo Buscaglias and the Michael Morgensterns of the world have concentrated solely on improving my competence at love, I can find no useful tips on how to sharpen my competence at being angry with airline clerks.
Because of this weakness, over the years I have found it wiser to confine my expressions of anger to long bouts of sullenness and sulking. The immediate rewards are not bad. Once the people with whom you're angry - a wife, say, or a child - notice you are sulking, their curiosity will stimulate questions.
''All right, what are you sulking about this time?'' Answer (very sullenly voiced): ''I'm not sulking.'' ''Of course you're sulking. You've been sulking for days. Now get it off your chest.'' The one thing you mustn't do at this point is get it off your chest. This is not a friendly invitation, but a trap designed by the other party to make your voice tremble, your face turn purple and your eyeballs bulge. ''How childish'' the object of your anger can then say, luxuriating in the sense of being calm, unchildish and superior to a person whose anger is so incompetently expressed.
All I can recommend is continued sulking, and I recommend it with grave reservations. Years of quiet sulking, whether at a wife, a child or an airline clerk, often build up a residue of poison which calcifies into hate, and we all know what an unhappy effect hate has on love, don't we?
There will probably be a new book about it published soon. ''Love Your Way Out of the Sulks.'' Just thinking about it makes me grind my molars, quietly, sullenly.