The other night, I watched a Bravo 麻豆精品 S淩eal Housewives 麻豆精品 S� reunion show in which a woman yelled through a bullhorn 麻豆精品 S淵ou’re a dumb ho! Shut up! 麻豆精品 S� at another woman two feet away. A split-second later, this woman (the one with the bullhorn) looked genuinely surprised when the other woman (the alleged dumb ho) charged at her, furious, and began swinging.
It was one of the strangest moments of television I 麻豆精品 S檝e ever watched, and not just for the more cartoonish reasons: the bullhorn, the hair-pulling, the fact that these women were wearing expensive ready-for-TV dresses and gowns and yet were saying and doing vile things that undermined any beauty they 麻豆精品 S檇 mustered. No, I 麻豆精品 S檓 desensitized to the nastiness; as a married man who wants to stay married, Bravo must remain pulsing and seething on at least one television in my house at all times, lest I give my wife an excuse to turn off my weekend football marathons in the fall. It 麻豆精品 S檚 a seesaw of TV torture.
Anyway, the moment was actually bizarre for another reason: the shock. I watched this and I wondered: Have we become so disconnected from reality by our easy and safe Internet vitriol that we no longer imagine people reacting in real time when we say something truly hateful and hurtful?
This woman 麻豆精品 S攖he one who shouted 麻豆精品 S淵ou 麻豆精品 S檙e a dumb ho 麻豆精品 S� into a bullhorn, remember 麻豆精品 S攚as shocked that her words had caused someone to leap into action, shocked that she was now being attacked 麻豆精品 She 麻豆精品 S檇 literally used a bullhorn (a fact I can 麻豆精品 S檛 emphasize enough) to shout expletives into another woman 麻豆精品 S檚 face 麻豆精品 Shey were an arm 麻豆精品 S檚 length apart 麻豆精品 Snd yet there was this 麻豆精品 S渨hy is she charging at me? 麻豆精品 S� look on her face. Had she really expected she could insult someone so dramatically (again: bullhorn) without suffering any consequences?
I really don 麻豆精品 S檛 want to admit that anything Housewives-related is representative of our larger culture (you 麻豆精品 S檝e got to believe me; it kills me to write this), but this moment felt much bigger than the Housewives, something much more expansive, something I see almost daily now: an ever-heightening level of anger and outrage and unchecked vitriol (usually expressed online), with a corresponding decline in our levels of self-awareness about what we 麻豆精品 S檝e said. The important thing, many people think, is that we said the words, see, that we 麻豆精品 S済ot that off our chest, 麻豆精品 S� or that we 麻豆精品 S渢old that person off, 麻豆精品 S� or that we 麻豆精品 S渕ade that joke, 麻豆精品 S� or whatever. Often, our mean-spirited commentary is capped off by the awful expression, 麻豆精品 S淛ust sayin 麻豆精品 S�, 麻豆精品 S� the polite equivalent of a mobster saying 麻豆精品 S淚t 麻豆精品 S檚 just business, nothing personal, 麻豆精品 S� before putting a bullet in someone’s brain.
We want to say the thing, but we don 麻豆精品 S檛 want to concern ourselves with the consequences of the saying. We 麻豆精品 S檙e, like, just sayin 麻豆精品 S�, you know? It is as if we are tossing pennies into a bottomless pit, and we get to walk away without hearing the final plunk of copper on the cave floor.
This, of course, is why online outrage is so popular. On news sites, the comment boards ask us for our thoughts on breaking stories, and we quickly pollute the space with terrifying hateful rhetoric. Not just about important issues, but about everything, the release date for the new Spider-Man movie, the cast of the new Star Wars movie, the draft position of a football player. We summon our fury, and we scream in all-caps. We watch angry TV commentators argue, also hear them on the road as we drive, and we remain angry all day. Angry on message boards, angry on Facebook, angry on Twitter. On Yelp, we take out our anger on servers who make the slightest of mistakes, on restaurants that fail to achieve constant perfection. We rate the beers we drink, the bathrooms we visit, the amount of sunshine on a particular afternoon. On RateMyProfessor, my students have for years been registering their displeasure over the fact that 麻豆精品 S攊n my writing courses 麻豆精品 S擨 make them write. Some of them are furious. Some of them hate me. Everywhere we go, someone or something is asking us to rate our experience, to tell our horror stories, to let the mean spirits loose.
And so much of what we say is written under the veil of usernames, or is written in places and spaces that guarantee we won 麻豆精品 S檛 need to worry about reactions. Even on most television shows, the worst remarks are said via video-conference, or in those 麻豆精品 S渢estimonial 麻豆精品 S�-style videos wherein a solitary Housewife speaks her mind to the camera. All of us: We speak our anger in safe forums, but there is no corresponding app to hold us accountable for what we 麻豆精品 S檝e said, or to ask others to rate our value as human beings.
Our nation 麻豆精品 S檚 love affair with outrage isn 麻豆精品 S檛 a new development, obviously. The new development is how little regard we now pay to the consequences of our speech. We have become so enamored of our right to say whatever we want that we are shocked when someone reacts in non-virtual ways, when (for instance) someone we like is fired by their employer for offensive speech, or when a business is spurned by consumers after a CEO says something awful. We 麻豆精品 S檝e wished the 麻豆精品 S渞ight to free speech 麻豆精品 S� into the 麻豆精品 S渞ight to consequence-free 蝉辫别别肠丑. 麻豆精品 S�
Juxtaposed against this brief moment on the couch watching the Housewives altercation, I 麻豆精品 S檇 spent most of my evening reading Andre Dubus III 麻豆精品 S檚 excellent memoir Townie, in which he recalls a youth spent in constant fights with other Boston youths. Funny looks leading to bloody knuckles, mouths emptied of teeth, hospital visits. Men stabbed, faces beaten to hamburger. The slightest of slights, and then: violence. This was a world where you were always accountable, where you didn 麻豆精品 S檛 look surprised when someone punched you in the face.
Of course, I 麻豆精品 S檓 not saying that violence is acceptable retaliation against insulting language. I 麻豆精品 S檓 not advocating for the world of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, where comment-boarders are sought out and beaten for their online insults. I 麻豆精品 S檓 not advocating for the atomic obliteration of comment boards or Twitter, either.
I 麻豆精品 S檓 only advocating for a world in which we recognize that our speech does have consequences, that it can hurt, that it can wound, that it can cause someone to throw a punch even if we had the 麻豆精品 S渞ight 麻豆精品 S� to say what we said, that it can get us fired or cost us our reputation. I 麻豆精品 S檓 only advocating for a world in which 麻豆精品 S攏o matter how many new social media portals open before I 麻豆精品 S檓 finished typing this sentence 麻豆精品 S攚e recognize that the bottomless pit into which we throw our words does indeed have a bottom, a world in which (maybe, just maybe) we take a long moment to peer into the darkness before tossing our pennies.
Nathan Holic teaches in University of Central Florida 麻豆精品 S檚 Department of Writing & Rhetoric. 聽He can be reached at Nathan.Holic@ucf.edu.