Outrageous
While watching the Today show a little while back I was caught by a phrase from Salman Rushdie during an interview with Matt Lauer. In the interview (you can see it here ), Rushdie opines that we are living in an age of outrage and that "people seem to define themselves by their outrage." Incidentally, he also describes the internet movie at the center of this controversy in an almost lyrical way as "an outrageous, disgraceful, little malevolent thing." Poetry. The legitimacy of this outrage on the part of Muslim residents of North Africa and the Middle East is not the discussion I wish to engage here. How we, as privileged westerners, tend to define ourselves by outrage is the discussion I'd like to take a stab at. Some will object to my use of privileged but only the narrowest of viewpoints will support any other assessment of middle-class citizens of the USA. People who do not worry about the existence or timing of their next meal and have a dry, tem