Business Mirror

SHERMAN OAKS, California—In the angry life of Maryscott O’Connor, the rage begins as soon as she opens her eyes and realizes that her President is still George W. Bush. The sun has yet to rise and her family is asleep, but no matter; as soon as the realization kicks in, O’Connor, 37, is out of bed and heading toward her computer.
       Out there, awaiting her building fury: the Angry Left, where O’Connor’s reputation is as one of the angriest of all. “One long, sustained scream” is how she describes the writing she does for various Web logs, as she wonders what she should scream about this day.
       She smokes a cigarette. Should it be about Bush, whom she considers “malevolent,” a “sociopath” and “the Antichrist”? She smokes another cigarette. Should it be about Vice President Cheney, whom she thinks of as “Satan,” or about Karl Rove, “the devil”? Should it be about the “evil” Republican Party, or the “weaselly, capitulating, self-aggrandizing, self-serving” Democrats, or the Catholic Church, for which she says “I have a special place in my heart. . .a burning, sizzling, putrescent place where the guilty suffer the tortures of the damned”?
       Darfur, she finally decides. She will write about Darfur. The shame of it. The culpability of all Americans, including herself, for doing nothing. She will write something so filled with outrage that it will accomplish the one thing above all she wants from her anger: to have an effect.
       “Darfur is not hopeless,” she begins typing, and pauses.
       “Ugh,” she says.
       “You are not helpless,” she continues typing, and pauses again.
       “Weak.”
       She deletes everything and starts over.
       “WAKE THE [expletive] UP,” she writes next, and this time, instead of pausing, she keeps going, typing harder and harder on a keyboard that is surrounded by a pack of cigarettes, a dirty ashtray, a can of nonalcoholic beer, an album with photos of her dead father and a taped-up note—staring at her—on which she has scrawled “Why am I/you here?”

These are mean times.
“I just want to see these [expletive] swinging from their heels in the public square,” reads a recent comment from someone named Dave in a discussion about the Bush administration on a web site called Eschaton.
       Loud, crass and instantaneous.
       “I feel like I’m being molested everytime I hear his voice,” one person writes on the Daily Kos web site while watching a Bush news conference.
       What’s notable about this isn’t only the level of anger but the direction from which it is coming. Not that long ago, it was the Right that was angry and the Left that was, at least comparatively, polite. But after years of being the targets of inflammatory rhetoric, not only from fringe groups but also from such mainstream conservative politicians as Newt Gingrich, the Left has gone on the attack. And with Republicans in control of Washington, they have much more to be angry about.
       “Powerlessness” is O’Connor’s explanation. “This is born of powerlessness.”
       To what, effect, though? Do the hundreds of thousands of daily visitors to Daily Kos, who sign their comments with phrases such as “Anger is energy,” accomplish anything other than talking among themselves? The founder of Daily Kos, Markos Moulitsas, may have a wide enough reputation at this point to consult regularly with Democrats on Capitol Hill, but what about the heart and soul of Daily Kos, the other visitors, whose presence extends no further than what they read and write on the site?
       How about the 125,000 or so daily visitors to Eschaton? Or the thousands who visit Rude Pundit, the Smirking Chimp or My Left Wing, which is O’Connor’s web site?
       Put another way, can one person sitting alone in a living room, typing her fingertips numb on a keyboard, make a difference?
       “Rage, rage against the Lying of the Right” is the subtitle of O’Connor’s web site.
       “If I can’t rant, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” is how she signs her comments, in the place other people might write “Sincerely.”
       “I was not like this before,” she says. “I was riddled with empathy for everyone suffering in the world. Classic bleeding-heart liberal.”
       Before: She signed petitions. She boycotted veal. She canvassed for Greenpeace. She donated to Planned Parenthood. She read the Nation, the New Yorker, the Utne Reader and Mother Jones. She agonized over low wages for overseas workers every time she bought a $40 leather purse.
       Then George W. Bush was elected. Then came 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the Patriot Act, secret prisons, domestic eavesdropping, the revamping of the Supreme Court, and the thought “It has come to the point where the worst people on Earth are running the Earth.” And now, “I have become one of those people with all the bumper stickers on their car,” she says. “I am this close to being one of those muttering people pushing a cart.
       “I’m insane with rage and grief.
       “But I also feel more connected than I ever have.”

As the responses near 100, O’Connor has a cigarette.
       Now, as they head toward 200, she picks up the album about her father, where there’s a letter from him to his wife, written three days before he died, that ends, “I love you and the baby more than I ever knew a person could love.”
       The baby.
       He never knew her name, or that she was a girl, or that his wife weighed less on the day their daughter was born than when she was conceived. “Catatonic” is how O’Connor describes what her mother became for a while, and then the mother got better, and then the daughter got worse, and then the daughter got better by becoming angry rather than silent about a new war, so angry she began wishing her President would go to hell.
       “I’ve got to stop looking at this,” she says, putting the album away and turning back to the screen.
       Meanwhile, over on Eschaton, Dave is writing, “As a matter of fact—I do hate Bush!”
       On Rude Pundit: “George W. Bush is the anti-Midas. Everything he touches turns to [expletive].”
       On the Smirking Chimp: “I. Despise. These. [Expletive]!”
       And on Daily Kos and My Left Wing, the responses keep rolling in.
       “Thank you, Maryscott.”
       “Thank you for the kick in the [expletive].”
       “I wrote to my [expletive] so-called representatives.”
       “I also wrote to my [expletive] congressman to get off his [expletive] [expletive] and do the right [expletive] thing.”
       “You know what?” O’Connor says. “I did a good thing today.” And for a moment, anyway, she isn’t angry at all.