New medical disorder discovered!

Everyday anger gets a brand new name
MIKE ARGENTO

Jun 12, 2006 —

The question I get asked most often - usually by my wife with increasing frequency - is "What's wrong with you?"

For years, I had no idea.

Now I know.

I have IED.

Lot's of people have IED.

No, IED isn't short for the kinds of bombs insurgents are using in Iraq. It stands for Intermittent Explosive Disorder, the discovery of some researchers and psychiatrists and epidemiologists who studied why people swear at other people in traffic.

They took a look at it and concluded that it's a medical/psychiatric condition that afflicts probably just about every human being over the age of 16 who isn't a blithering idiot who always gets in front of me at traffic lights and sits there for half an hour carrying on what most certainly is a fascinating discussion on their cell phone - "I'm driving. What're you doing?" - while the light turns green and then red and then green again while I sit there trying to communicate the following thought, telepathically: Move, jerkface.

See, until these researchers uncovered IED, I had no idea. Like comic Lewis Black, I didn't think I had an anger problem, I had an idiot problem.

But now, I have a medical condition.

I wonder if I can park in handicapped spots now?

Just kidding. It's a joke. Before you get your bowels in an uproar and start suffering from your own outbreak of IED, just relax, OK?

Sometimes, I wonder whether I'm a carrier of IED.

Intermittent Explosive Disorder, one of the experts told ABC News, is worse than just having a bad temper, that it affects one in 20 people, that it sometimes results in screaming, shouting and breaking things.

All right, maybe I don't have IED because other than the yelling loud profanities in the car while trying to drive home from work while the rest of traffic clots our highway arteries so bad that it seems as if the whole country is having a stroke, I don't have many of the symptoms. Wait a minute. Those are the symptoms.

Let's go back a few weeks, when the street rods were in town. We all love the street rods. Everybody loves the street rods, and I mean no offense at all when I say that when they're in town, President Dubya should mobilize the National Guard to make sure they don't emigrate from the fairgrounds because on the Friday they were here, I had to drive my wife to work and it took me an hour and half and it was so aggravating and irritating and mind-meltingly annoying that I think I sprained my middle finger ... What was I saying?

That's right. I don't think I have IED because I don't get mad and throw things.

OK, I did throw "The Da Vinci Code" across the room because it was so incredibly stupid. But I think that was justified because it was so incredibly dumb that I could feel myself getting dumber as I read it.

The researchers didn't say so, but I think there's a genetic component to this. I learned to swear from watching my dad hang wallpaper. My younger sister, who lives in California, calls me routinely on Sunday mornings to yell at me about what those bozos in Washington are screwing up now. I grew up going to Sunday dinners at my grandma's house where everybody spent the afternoon around the table, in the spirit of familial bonding and camaraderie, yelling at each other. (We're Sicilian; that's how we communicate.)

Anyway, occasional outbursts of outrage at the poor behavior of your fellow human beings seems to be part of the human condition, as long as you do it in your car and don't cut me off in traffic and don't hurt anybody.

The medical researchers who coined IED are just part of an ongoing effort to catalog every aspect of human behavior and assign a medical-esque diagnosis to it.

And at the risk of sounding like some kind of old fart yelling at the neighbor kids to get off my yard, it makes you yearn for the old days when people who behaved like jerks were just jerks. Today, everything has to be labeled and cataloged. For instance, we don't call stupid people stupid anymore; we call them members of Congress.

On the other hand, now that these researchers have gotten to figuring out IED, maybe they'll move onto studying what's known as "Law & Order Syndrome."

You know that one. You're flipping through the channels and find a half-over episode of "Law & Order," and even though you've seen it 10 bazillion times, you sit and watch as McCoy bends the rules to get a conviction and Lenny cracks wise and the trial comes to a conclusion and you think that maybe, just maybe, this time, the bad guy's going to get off because his lawyer is an odious reptile who makes Ann Coulter appear to be vaguely human - what is her problem? - but no, every time ...

Sorry about that. The IED was acting up.

Mike Argento, whose column appears Mondays and Thursdays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints, can be reached at 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.Read more Argento columns at ydr.com/mike or at http://www.yorkblog.com - Argento's Front Stoop.