Anger

I’m going to confess a guilty pleasure: Master Chef. I could prolong my confession with comments about the show’s excessive love of purées, its quirky editing, its endless repetition of dramatic moments, and the mystery boxes that are never mysteries since the viewers have already seen the hidden ingredients at least twice before the contestants do. But for the purpose of today’s post, I just want to make an observation about Gordon Ramsay’s anger. Clearly, yelling is as much a part of Gordon’s television brand as the sixteen Michelin stars he has received. And his blunt critiques bring many a contestant to tears. But when “one of America’s best home cooks” is eliminated (a few episodes into a season anyway, after which the judges supposedly have really come to know and care about the contestants), the Chef with the Coif asks for a hug, and (here’s the real point) the contestant always wants that hug. There’s a junior edition of the show, as well, and the kids adore Gordon Ramsay, even after he yells and (oh, so predictably) throws the raw meat they’re trying to serve to ranchers or truck drivers or firefighters. It seems that the contestants know that Gordon Ramsay’s anger is, well, perhaps mostly schtick, but is, in any case, always directed at the food and the performance, not at the person.

I don’t know if that analogy helps you. But I was thinking about it just two days ago and felt like tossing it in today like a Homerian simile.

    And as the Scot does cast his darkened brow
    And smold’ring eyes down on an errant chef,
    Trembling with diffidence about a faulty dish,
    And yet retains the love and honor due
    To him contestants dearly wish to please;

    So, too, the sixteenth President did find
    Himself in frequent states of passioned pique
    As office seekers begged and gen’rals balked,
    Although the people still deemed him their father.

OK, that was six-and-a-half times as good as I thought it would be when I started it and makes my main point so well I don’t have much else to say. But I should mention the book I really intended to talk about and make one other point.

Michael Burlingame’s The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln touches on many aspects of Lincoln’s psychology other than anger: his hatred of slavery, his diffidence with women, his ambition, and more. But the chapter on anger suddenly affected me more than the others before it. I had read several of the anecdotes before about Lincoln getting frustrated and scolding, to give just one of many kinds of examples, southern women asking for pardons for their sons, imprisoned for rebelling against the United States. But reading fifty pages of such stories, one after the other, presented a picture of Lincoln almost wholly new to me. Here was a man who didn’t just have occasional lapses from patience but who showed his frustration through displays of anger over and over again.

And yet. 

And yet, I remembered, the people who knew him best still revered him and thought of him as a father figure.

The same mitigating consideration didn't come to mind in the next chapter, though. It was surprising to have a sixty-page chapter on Mary Todd Lincoln’s personality in a book on the psychology of the more famous of this wedded pair, but it was far and away the most enlightening in the book. I knew she tried her husband’s patience, but, wow! On one occasion, Mary, angry that Abraham had not stoked the fire, hit him in the face with a piece of firewood and drew blood. On the way to Washington for the first inauguration, when agents learned of an assassination plot against the President-elect, Mary publicly announced their change of route; she eventually had to be locked in a room in order to keep her quiet and to preserve her husband’s safety. As first lady, she often accepted large gifts from men and then threw tantrums until the President gave them offices. After her husband’s death, Mary then extorted many of these same men, telling them she would announce the partial truth that they got their offices only because of her if they didn’t send her money. Yikes! She was so much worse than I knew.

After reading sixty pages of such stories, I began to see how the chapter on Mary did indeed speak to the “inner world of Abraham Lincoln.” The man who lost his temper so many times in speaking to others very rarely did so with his wife.