Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

On Grudges

The effects and consequences of people misinterpreting other people fascinate me. Effects that go well beyond a simple mishearing or a slipshod rejoinder that ensures a brisk stumble. I’m talking about all-out war. The combative cant, the bitter visages, the determination to despise over something that isn’t worth the trouble. The grudge gone awry.

Under normal circumstances, a misunderstanding can be cleared up with a fleeting tete-a-tete, or a phone call or an e-mail, or a thick skin or a sense of humor extant within one or both parties. In fact, there are any number of clarification methods lasting just under 30 seconds. But I've begun to notice that the default response, with increasing frequency, involves damning the other party, or one party going completely crazy over a comparatively trivial remark (weighed against, say, the disparity between the rich and the poor, the Bush Administration's assault on civil liberties, or the tearing down of yet another nifty art deco building to build another shitty mini-mall). Behavioral patterns, when adopting this limitless enmity over very silly and pedantic things, beget the grudge. The grudge calls out, “Hey! Adopt me! You’re going nowhere in life by your own assessment! And there’s never room for mellow!” Another mark on the Sam Browne belt. Another person to hate, another soul to rebuke.

Perhaps the sudden upsurge has something to do with the shortened days. Perhaps all it amounts to is etiolated folk jonesing for their precious Daylight Savings Time. Whatever the cause, the response I’ve observed generally involves the nastiest and ugliest of remarks. The only difference really between the deliberately odious tone behind a grudge and that of a schizophrenic vagrant, really, is that the vagrant is mentally troubled, tragically ignored by most people, and decidedly less coherent. 86 lists or blacklisting, whether deliberate or perceived, can be effected at the grudge’s worst level; other results include "flames" (in the online world), or threats of professional and/or financial ruin (if you're a hotheaded journalist du jour who simply can't let the work speak for itself).

One often sees the grudge develop when the human animal is placed in conditions of extreme boredom, or has something to prove, or is of a partially self-loathing nature, or simply perceives something he disagrees with. The grudge holder wants to take this dawning antipodal stature (nowhere nearly as dichotomous as the grudge holder believes), which in the afflicted person’s mind is tantamount to the offender pissing on his mother’s grave. In its most innocuous form, the words "Fuck you" (and sometimes "Fuck you, motherfucker") are the telling indicator. At first listen, these words are, of course, harmless -- probably an effort by the declarant (i.e., potential grudge holder) to let off some steam, or to admonish the individual he's addressing over some negative quality he can't voice gently or politely, or perhaps something completely different. (In fact, there are a sizable number of things that Americans simply will not mention in everyday discourse: an adjacent individual's body odor or banal cell phone patter, the bad combover, an African-American granted license to call his associates "niggas" while the Caucasian is declared racist for expressing the same loving tone, and all sorts of rudeness and unpleasant behavior that is ultimately subjective but which can be understood by parties possessing similar interests -- name your annoyance of choice. Often accord on these latter points is reached through events known as "bitchfests." The irony within these conversational taboos is that it is perfectly acceptable for Person A to mention Person B's negative qualities to Person C, provided that Person B is not around or unlikely to hear Person A's assessment. The relationship between Person A and Person B still holds, though often with Person B unaware of his own deficiencies.)

These extant factors almost assure that a remark will be misinterpreted, misperceived, dwelt upon too much, or concluded to be spawned from demon seed. It doesn't help that what people seem to remember most about Dirty Harry is Clint Eastwood's famous "The question is: Do you feel lucky?" speech, a monologue delivered just as Eastwood is about to carry out a representative form of revenge.

Now all of us carry a certain amount of rage and get fired up over particular issues. Within the context of a legitimate argument or an honest framing, there is nothing wrong with this. It is an all too human response to feel, and even the noblest rational-minded soul can be brought to tears by something. But when this feeling gets out of hand, when complete castigation is brought upon by flimsy pretext, when said target has not, let us say, murdered another individual, one wonders why the fuss existed.

There have been backlashes to being realistic about human emotions, namely through Julavits' anti-snark manifesto and all sorts of lingering touchy-feely ersatz influences (cf., Quirkyalone, New Age, Who Moved My Cheese?, Dr. Phil, et al.) – all of which show no sign of dying.

Posted by DrMabuse at February 4, 2004 10:48 AM | TrackBack