"The Rank Stink of Anger"

Lileks tees off on the miasma of pessimism, the "rank stink of anger" that seems to pervade our public airways:

The formulation seems simple: The continued existence of problems at this late date in human history implies that we’re regressing. We’re screwing up, we’ve lost it, and we wander confused amongst the morass of the malaise and vice versa. Hard times, brother. Hard times.

He attributes to the "eternal adolescent strain in American culture."

to the adolescent, the cynic is the truth-teller. The optimists are the fools. (It takes an adolescent to think that people who believe in nothing are the best judges of those who believe in something.) It’s all a pose, for the most part, but after a while it feeds on itself. Pessimism produces its own coal, stokes its own furnaces. Optimism is harder. Optimism takes work. You have to roll your own.

Read the whole thing here:

This brings to mind a film on which I recently lectured and intend someday to review in this space, Nicholas Ray's 1955 classic "Rebel Without a Cause" [you know, the one that stars James Dean and Natalie Wood] in which the "message" of the film boiled down to the observation that adolescent enthusiasms and demands for moral clarity are inadequate tools with which to confront the complexities of adult existence, and that hypocrisy and moral ambiguity, so often denounced by the young, can be necessary and appropriate responses to complex situations.