Homo Iratus: The Perpetually Aggrieved Modern Male (PAMM)
What follows is a description of a nascent masculine type, a rough taxonomy of a digitally enhanced breed. This man’s primary habitat is social media; his main expression perpetual moral outrage and disbelief.
PAMM can’t stop talking. PAMM talks to anyone and everyone. He must express himself and where he stands on the important issues of the day. He wakes up and scours social media, our perpetual grievance machine, for fresh outrage; he sifts red-hot coals of confirmation carefully prepared for him by partisan news sources. For PAMM, now is a time never before experienced in human history, precarious in its fragility, the start of the end, the beginning of the real decline, the resurgence of the worst of mankind, an atavistic leap into barbarity. He feels alone, besieged, the sole bulwark against apocalypse.
For PAMM, all disagreements are fundamental. Outrage is the only currency with value anymore, the gold standard of belief. One’s convictions are in direct proportional to one’s outrage. PAMM shares it with other PAMM’s, orgiastic feedback loops in forums and private message.
He is emotionally crippled; empathy is weakness, compromise a form of surrender. PAMM stands his ground. PAMM must respond; he doesn’t care if you aren’t listening. PAMM expectorates into the digital void, froths and churns and posts and shares and comments and likes and loves and emojis and cruises the profiles of complete strangers to expose their hypocrisy, their moral failings, their stilted intellectual leanings. At his fingertips bristle images, memes, graphs, statistics culled from other PAMM’s--riposte to any challenge, tactical strikes launched to thwart buffoons, megatons of Truth to airburst the enemy into surrender.
The enemy is out there, operating in plain daylight. The enemy schemes and scams, plots and plans to strip PAMM of his inalienable rights. PAMM stands on the right side of history. The tide is rising; the temperature near unbearable; the clocks will not be reset. PAMM can hardly believe the stupidity of his fellow man. He thinks he may be the last reasonable man left, drowning in a sea of idiots, surrounded by groupthink and the naked hatreds of the ignorant horde.
He pines for a past he can only dimly remember. PAMM grew up playing outside, jumping bikes and exploding firecrackers and catching tadpoles, summers of bruised and scabbed knees, daredevil leaps, trees climbed and caves explored and dares taken. He scurried home when the streetlights flickered on, fearful of the discipline he endorses but never received.
PAMM is educated; the school of Hard Knocks or Ivy League and in between. PAMM is left; PAMM is right; Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter and union lives matter and coal miners lives matter and Tibetan lives matter and refugee lives matter and veterans lives matter and all lives matter and unborn babies matter and reproductive rights matter and the lives of cake bakers in Alabama matter and court clerks in Kentucky their lives matter and greenhouse gases matter and the sartorial choices of the First Lady matter.
He clicks “send” over and over, endlessly clicking in a relentless multiplication, launching screeds, sending pictures, posting screenshots, data upon data, gigabytes into terabytes into petabytes.
Man set free from the social constraints of personal interaction, baptized by his anonymity; he gesticulates alone on a vast dried plain, palavering, frothy curds of saliva in the corners of his mouth.