And what can be made of the fact that the British version of "Survivor," the monster hit that lighted the raging fire of reality television in America, has turned out to be a colossal flop in Britain, where the trend began?
As negotiators in the debt-ceiling talks sputtered and raged, the chill reality of an imminent government default crept up Wednesday and made a mockery of their gamesmanship.
Each was most himself in the nineteen-twenties, when Picasso became a demiurgic Surrealist, re-creating reality to mirror his raging desires, and Matisse dawdled in Nice hotel rooms, dressing and undressing pretty models as harem girls.
And of course, this past year's record temperatures, raging wildfires, and extreme weather events have brought home the reality of global warming for far too many Americans.
Sinkholes are a small but impressive clue to the awe-inspiring reality that we are standing all the time atop a raging geological underworld.
But in reality, it rages gleefully and propulsively along.
This bigger- than- life- man did all the worrying and raging for both of us -- no need for me to feel my own terrifying reality and mortality.
The heat of the 2016 campaign derived from its civilizational intensity, from the conviction among conservatives that America was on a precipice and from liberals that America risked handing a nuclear arsenal, of almost infinite destructive capacity, to a rage-prone reality-television star with no ability to control his own impulses.
This rage to simulate reality comes, Mr. Powers suggests, from our desire to control our environment, somehow to subdue the random terrors of the world.
Discussing the American health crisis in the Washington Post, Pulitzer columnist Eugene Robinson titled his piece Behind the Rage, a Cold Reality (notice similarities in these titles?) : "The unvarnished truth is that services are ultimately going to have to be curtailed regardless of what happens with reform.
