It goes like this: the more ridiculous, tiny, arcane or completely irrational the object of your outrage is, the more you know you have attained ultimate freedom. You are living the real American Dream, hereby defined as being endlessly upset and miserable about totally meaningless bulls--t for no valid reason whatsoever because you have everything you could ever want or need in this life, ever.
It all adds up to one conclusion: We are so wildly, stupidly free, it's rather hilarious. And savagely ironic. Because you can also say it culminates in perhaps the ultimate expression of Outrage USA, the single place where all such screeching congeals in a shrill, silly little group, signifying nothing.
It's called the Tea Party, that gaggle of terrified, white, middle-aged men whose actual slogan is "mad as hell." What are they mad about, exactly? They have no idea. What do they want to do to change it? No clue. From whence does their timorous fear and dread come? They can't quite say. Perfect.
This is aimless, abortive outrage in its purest form, just infantile rage aimed straight into the Void, like a baby that has every comfort and hug and blankie imaginable but still screams like a banshee, wailing and squirming at the sheer terror of ... well, of merely existing. Of being alive. Inhaling and exhaling, over and over again, trying to make sense of it all, somehow, even just a tiny little bit, in a glorious neverending tinkling hellride of pure existential terror, until you die.
Wonderful.
BTW, I've been on "tinkling hellrides". When the bike's pistons and/or con rods start going 'tinkletankletunk' in the hot lane at rush hour, by the time the rapidly slowing 'hellride' to the right shoulder is done, some other 'tinkling' has occurred as well.
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