Dick Cavett - Column in New York Times

Anger Mismanagement

I just watched the two candidates at the Al Smith dinner on YouTube.

What a strange and disorienting experience it is to see the bitter rivals laughin’ and scratchin’ and gigglin’. Both had good gags, good writers and, for non-comics, good delivery. Both brought down the house; or in this case, the hotel.

It’s fun to watch the two men joking. Maybe the whole campaign should be done in jesters’ caps and bells, eliminating those possibly life-threatening rises in our blood pressure from yelling in rage at the TV screen. For a brief interval you can say to yourself that maybe this isn’t so serious after all.

If only that were true. The laughter will be quickly forgotten, and sniping resumed.

Nothing could have convinced me a few days ago that I could find myself laughing at (and with) and liking John McCain. For moments on end. The distance between the Al Smith/Letterman McCain and the debates McCain is, to me, both vast and puzzling. And two people.

In the same way a badly adjusted set of binoculars gives you two overlapping images, the two McCains don’t come together for me. It must be frustrating for his handlers to be unable — due to some internal blockage in the candidate — to get the amiable self onstage instead of the less palatable one who shows up for debates and now-hollered speeches.

Because the one is affable, funny, and handles himself skillfully before an audience.
The once seemingly genial John has appeared less frequently of late. John Number Two is a remnant; the snappish, scowling sour husk of the man I could once see myself voting for. (But as Hamlet put it, “And now, how abhorred in my imagination it is.”)

Now someone has actually tallied Sen. John’s eye blinks in that last debate, coming up with a total that runs into four figures beyond normal. Sometimes they come in rapid flurries, leading to the thought that between his blinks and her winks he may never have seen Sarah Palin.

Laughs aside, unfortunately, I realized during the last debate that watching the two of them together on the screen I would think anyone, even a non-lip-reading, non-English-speaking viewer with the sound off, could see at a glance which man is presidential.

Partly because the word “angry” is so often applied to McCain these days, I decided to read up a bit on anger. And it made me mad.

At myself, I mean. Because I have a goodly portion of it in me, and reading about it has shown me how dangerous it can be. Over the years I’ve seen articles with titles like “Getting Angry Can Kill You,” and sick-making cute titles like “Your Ticker Wants You to Be Glad, Not Mad.” I have now read one too many.

It comes as a sort of relief that, according to the experts on anger, we can often blame this, too, on our parents.

One authority, a Ph.D. professor with the fun-to-say title of — hold onto your hats — “behavioral epidemiologist” (would the old “What’s My Line?” panel have ever gotten that one?) says that “children who are angry often come from families where there is a lot of punitive blaming, a lot of high emotion and anger expressed.” This, he says, happens when adults take things personally rather than simply recognizing that the kid is just being a pain in the posterior nether regions. (Not the prof’s exact words.)

The scarier stuff on anger is the evidence of what it can do to your vitals. I know full well that I am laying down deadly plaques in my arteries when enraged: as when you’re late and the cab driver lets other cars in ahead of you — causing you the acute pain of sitting through a green light while the cars he let in glide into the distance — all the while murmuring and nattering into his cell phone in no known language.

Similarly, although I like most women, I can momentarily loathe them all. Irrationally, of course. As when I, late for something, am hurrying along the sidewalk and one gets in front of me with a hairdo too wide for peripheral vision.

As I try to pass, she diabolically wanders left and right, blocking me on both sides, over and over. Defeated by her coif, I even get mad fantasies involving a pair of hedge shears. (Harpo would produce them from his coat and make short work of those hirsute blinders.)

Unpleasant reading on the subject of anger tells us that there’s not really anything wrong with it. In limited amounts. It can even be a good thing. A pressure valve. Then, just as we angerable folks sigh with relief in reading this, there comes a vivid technical description of how our major snits can lead to heart disease, diabetes and “other major health problems.”

Like, perhaps, the irritating one of getting smashed in the face with a Coke bottle by the object of your anger?

A cause of anger you, reader, might identify with could be people who promise something in their column that they fail to deliver.

Remember that test a good ways back that was said to show how ill-informed and poorly educated America’s young folk are? (Perhaps, like me, you have small reason to dispute this. A youthful graduate of the esteemed Bowdoin College recently asked a friend of mine who wondered how he’d liked “The Iliad,” “Is that the one about ancient Rome?”) A natural philosopher of my acquaintance, Charles Roos — a computer expert by trade — supplied me with the following. The funny thing: this smugly erudite test makes a mistake. It claims Ralph Ellison wrote “The Invisible Man.” Ahem. Ralph Ellison did indeed write “Invisible Man,” but “The Invisible Man” was H.G. Wells.

I have a long list of things that make me mad. Maybe if you send me some of yours, we can have some fun, laugh and save our hearts, if not minds. And I promise to never once use that mimsey little junior high newspaper interviewer’s inevitable phrase: “pet peeve.” I flustered one once by telling her my pet peeve was nuclear war.

I have room for a few more of mine:

Paper cuts.

Weathermen who can’t pronounce “meteorologist” and say “meter-ologist.” These same ones have never noticed that the word “Arctic” has two c’s and so should their “Ant-ART-ic.”

Oldsters who still say “President ROOZA-velt.” (Why? No more excuse than for saying “Lyndon JENson.”)

The waiter who, when you are late and want the check, vanishes to another country.

This one deserves caps: “AOL HAS UNEXPECTEDLY QUIT.” (Remove the “Un” and you have the galling truth.)

Men’s shirts without a pocket.

The President.