Essay: Oh, Shut Up! The Uses of Ranting

"While in the parlors of indignation," Saul Bellow wrote, "the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil." Bellow's character Moses Herzog did that. Herzog wrote crank letters to ex-wives, to Dwight Eisenhower, to Adlai Stevenson, to Spinoza. "There is someone inside me. I am in his grip," Herzog confessed. It was as if his mind had been hijacked.

The little terrorist within the skull can overpower even the steadiest mind. Everyone rants now and then. More than occasionally, it happens behind the wheel of a car.

Sometimes one commits a rant to paper. That is almost always a mistake. A rant should be transient. It should blow away like sudden, violent weather.

The U.S. Supreme Court considered one kind of ranting not long ago in the case of a North Carolina man who wrote two colorful letters to the President urging him not to appoint a judge named David Smith as U.S. Attorney for North Carolina. Smith sued the man for libel. The letter writer said that the First Amendment surely protected a citizen's right to send an angry letter to Washington. The court said no, a nasty letter to the President or Congress, even if sent in exercise of the constitutional right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," is just as much open to a libel suit as, say, a newspaper editorial.

In a way, it seems a shame to inhibit a good ranter. But ranting is not always entertaining. Often it is embarrassing, even shaming. Sometimes, if it issues forth from a politician or religious zealot with ambitions, it becomes sinister. The U.S. has a fairly rich tradition of ranters, from Thomas Paine to Joseph McCarthy to Spiro Agnew (whose ranting was actually a satire on the form) to Louis Farrakhan. A citizen named Peter Muggins caught the essense of the rant in an intense if repetitious letter to Abraham Lincoln: "God damn your god damned old hellfired god damned soul to hell" and so on.

But ranting is a form of verbal fanaticism, and other cultures often do it better. The Middle East today is to ranting what Elizabethan England was to theater: the cradle of geniuses. Every faction and tribe has its Shakespeare of denunciation, from the Ayatullah on down. Communist bloc countries have bureaucratically institutionalized ranting. The East German government once issued a list of approved terms of abuse for speakers describing the British: "paralytic sycophants, effete betrayers of humanity, carrion-eating servile imitators ..."

Ranting has many styles, many purposes. Sometimes its only ambition is to vilify. Robert Burns once let fly at a critic in these terms: "Thou eunuch of language; thou butcher . . . thou arch-heretic in pronunciation, thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis . . . thou pimp of gender . . . thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax." On and on he went.