Flynn: Veruca Salt, Patron Saint of ‘Scream Helplessly at the Sky’

On November 8, tens of thousands of Americans gather in public parks to yell toward the heavens.

Participants wish to disabuse anyone of the notion that this activism signals an atavism. Screaming at the sky, far from a primitive gesture, stands as, if not quite as woke as kneeling for the national anthem, then certainly more progressive than the peace sign, that raised, clenched fist, the more genteel nodding, chin-scratcher, and other virtue signals and in-crowd gesticulations.

Proper Bostonians devised the high-decibel event, which, through social media rather than actual screaming, spread to other cities. Dubbed “Scream Helplessly at the Sky on the Anniversary of the Election,” the November 8 protest aims to let voices be heard. What, precisely, those guttural noises say depends more on the hearers than the howlers.

The elongated Two Minutes Hate marks the reductio ad absurdum of protest. Think of “Scream Helplessly at the Sky” as a naked demonstration of the nature of demonstrations. The admonition to “make a difference” through activism runs up into the hard reality that protests rarely do anything for anyone save for the protestors. A cognitive dissonance separates the beautiful aspirations to save the world from ugly reality of creating a nuisance for motorists and a ruckus for residents. Marches prove cathartic. They rarely change anything. So, an act dressed up as selfless concern for others works as a selfish instance of therapeutic politics.

Clear eyes see this clearly when the event in question involves thousands of people shrieking at the sun, the clouds, the birds, God, drones, angels, angelic drones, dronish angels, and other celestial beings and bodies. But what, really, stands as the difference between a demonstrative, look-at-me expurgation of bad feelings through loud shouts, on the one hand, and, on the other, the nursery-rhyme mantras, sandwich-board fashion, marching from here to there, and other behaviors and bizarreries that characterize more conventional protests?

If protest ushers in catharsis and not change, this particular demonstration resembles a specific type of protest, the tantrum. The scream-in takes not Martin Luther King as its model but Veruca Salt. And we all know what happened when that bad egg indulged the I-want-it-now impulse. One imagines a similar garbage-chute fate for any society that sees the primal scream become its preferred form of political rhetoric.

Veruca, patron saint of generation gimme-now-more, fits her followers most snugly not in the shrill brat fits but in the misunderstanding that the unfulfillment of every desire represents an instance of repression requiring immediate correction. On Boston Common and beyond, this common mindset regards the election of a politician other than the preferred candidate as cause for great angst and anger. How dare my fellow citizens choose someone else? I will yell until this wrong gets righted.

It is always the case that roughly half of the electorate goes to bed on Election Night disappointed. But it is not always the case that roughly half of the electorate wakes up the next day feeling themselves the victims of a terrible injustice. Those expressing their alienation in bombastic ways tend to alienate the citizens they wish to win over. So, cathartic events such as the November screamfest tend to backfire and unleash consequences at odds with intentions.

November 8, 2016? This is what democracy looks like. November 8, 2017? This is what a nuthouse sounds like.