We keep hearing a lot these days about something called “populist outrage”.  It’s supposed to be sweeping the country.  Even Mr. O the Unflappable is said to be running scared.  People everywhere are overwhelmed by this sense of populist outrage.  They’re calling their congressmen!  They’re writing letters to editors!!  They’re actually putting rude things on their blogs!!!  The country must surely be on the brink of revolution.

As a lifelong Populist, let me tell you what a bunch of crap this is.  Folk who talk about populist outrage wouldn’t know it if it bit them in the ass.  Think storming the Bastille, guillotining the aristos—now THAT’S populist outrage!

America wasn’t always this way.  Time was, we were thought to be all but ungovernable.  Where miscreants went unpunished, we would take the law into our own hands.  We would riot at the drop of an injustice.  And didn’t I read somewhere that we were the first country to throw off the European colonial yoke?  But over the twentieth century, all that gradually changed.  Communal reactions grew fewer and fewer.  Outrage was privatized.   As me-first came first, as the extended family contracted, as people lost any sense of place and became mere mobile units, powerless pawns in some vast economic chess-game, outrage turned inwards.  People didn’t take to the streets any more.  They let the inrage build and build.  When it built too high they succumbed to chronic depression, mental illness, suicide—anything, so long as it didn’t rock the social boat.  And if the inrage still couldn’t be borne, they went postal, columbined their school, ran amok and spree-killed total strangers--anyone with the bad luck to be around.

Look for more of that as the Second Great Depression bottoms out.  But revolt, even riot, let alone revolution?  Not a chance.  Check out the Cow Jones if you don’t believe me.

The Cow Jones index (“the Cow” to us initiates) measures the extent to which Jones (your stereotypical Average American) is cowed (by government, “law” enforcement, political correctness, fear of losing jobs, homelessness, you name it).   The Cow, low after WWII, rose sharply during the McCarthy years, fell during the Vietnam war, and rose gradually but steadily until after 9/11 when it soared to unprecedented heights.  It’s still way up there.  And the Cow and inrage are, naturally, closely linked.  You could even say that it’s the rising Cow that made inrage out of outrage.

So, don’t worry about “populist outrage”.  It’s going nowhere.  The Cow will see to that.