The League of Angry Men

“I was sat opposite him on the tube, he was reading the Daily Mail and turned to an article about Greta Thunberg and climate change – that’s when it happened! He started shaking, turned puce the let out a scream of rage before his head exploded!” says twenty nine year old Londoner Brian Torque, describing the moment that an angry commuter exploded in front of him. “It was horrible – there bits of skull and brains flying everywhere! The whole carriage was covered in blood! People were screaming and shouting – at first we thought it was some kind of terror attack! A bizarre new kind of suicide bomber!” The suicide bomber theory was quickly dispelled when witnesses recalled that the exploding head man had been white, middle aged and wearing a pin stripe suit. “Obviously, you’d expect a suicide bomber be dressed in that crazy Muslim gear and shouting stuff in Arabic before they blew themselves up,” muses Torque. “But this guy was clearly some kind of respectable businessman or City type.” The man has subsequently been identified by police as fifty eight year old banker Tobias Clutch of Surbiton and is just the latest of a series of similarly apparently respectable men whose heads have exploded in public places.

“In common with the other victims, Mr Clutch had no record of radicalism,” explained a spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police. “The only threads linking them are the fact that they were all white, middle class, middle aged men from relatively privileged backgrounds whose heads apparently spontaneously exploded while reading newspaper stories about environmentalism, human rights issues or immigrants. The whole thing is a mystery.” While the police might be baffled, apparently believing the incidents to be the result of some sort of natural phenomena, at least one academic suspects that the exploding men might actually be suicide bombers of a sort, acting as the vanguard of a shadowy organisation known as The League of Angry Men. “These are dangerous men, dedicated to claiming back anger for the male of the species,” opines Dr Henry Bowser, Senior Lecturer in Woke Studies at the Dorchester Institute of Cheese Making. “Their manifesto is based on the idea that, in this present age of ‘wokeness’ there is increasing pressure upon men, especially young men, to be ‘in touch with their feelings’, or their ‘feminine side’ and to be generally reasonable and calm. The onus is now on being conciliatory, seeing both sides of the argument and avoiding conflict.” According to Bowser, The League of Angry Men believe that this has left modern men effectively emasculated, turned into weak and ineffective nebbishes, incapable of asserting themselves, or making firm decisions.

“Not so long ago we had various right wing knee jerk reactionaries telling us – via the tabloids – that what the youth of today needed to sort themselves out was a bloody good war,” recalls The academic. “Participating in World War Two, Korea, the Malayan crisis or Aden, they’d tell us, had done them no harm at all. In fact, it had made ‘men’ out of them.” But the present generation of pundits, Bowser believes, are far too young to have fought in any of those conflicts and unlikely to have served in the Falklands, Gulf wars or Afghanistan. Instead, he contends, their memories of conflict probably lie with clashing with the Anti-Nazi League while on National Front marches. “Their idea of having ‘seen action’ is throwing bricks through the windows of Asian-owned shops and their idea of an inspirational war leader would be Enoch Powell,” he says. “So their advice to the woke youth of today would be that they need more hate and anger in their lives.” But some have gone beyond simply giving advice and instead formed The League of Angry Men, an underground organisation dedicated to stoking up and celebrating anger, in the hope of inspiring modern male youth to get furious and thereby reclaim their manhood.

Despite their secretive nature, The Sleaze has managed to contact an individual who claims to be a member of The League of Angry Men for comment. “Up yours and eat shit! That’s right, I’m angry! About what? Well, does it matter? I’m just bloody angry! And you know what? It makes me feel bloody good!” the individual, who wishes to keep their identity secret, shouted down the phone at us. “You see, there’s this orthodoxy floating around ‘polite’ society these days which says that anger (or, indeed, any kind of emotional response to a difficult situation), is bad. Very bad, apparently. Instead, we should all try to be reasonable and attempt more constructive responses. Like sitting down and discussing it all over a nice cup of tea. Utter bollocks!” He went on to assert that anger was actually good. “There is a legitimate reason why this emotion exists – it galvanises us into action, gives us the drive and determination we need to take a bad situation by the scruff of the neck and resolve it effectively and decisively,” he bellowed. “Don’t listen to all this ‘reasonable’ crap – it’s just more politically correct woke shite!” Warming to his theme, The League’s representative offered us an historical perspective. “Believe me, General George S Patton didn’t get the Third Army halfway across Europe and into Berlin by being reasonable – he got very, very angry!” he declared. “Let’s not forget that Neville Chamberlain tried being ‘reasonable’ with that chap Hitler – look where that got us!” With that, he slammed down the phone.

The exchange has left Dr Bowser more convinced than ever that The League of Angry Men is behind the general rise in hate seen on social media in recent times, not to mention the increasingly intemperate nature of political discourse. “It is clearly all part of a plot on their part to raise male anger levels,” he says. “How else to explain Brexit? After all, nobody rational would surely have promoted committing economic suicide by leaving the EU, unless it was actually part of a larger project to promote anger. Which it has.” He also believes that even the Daily Mail and the other right wing tabloids make sense in this context – their ludicrous ‘journalism’, forever scapegoating minorities and stoking up hate is designed purely to promote anger. “As for the pin striped men with exploding heads, they are obvious the most fanatical wing of The League of Angry Men,” he speculates. “I mean, what other reason could there be for grown men to apparently feel so intimidated by a teenaged environmentalist that they get angry to the point of their heads exploding, if it isn’t simply to set an example for younger men as to how to work oneself up into apoplexy over nothing?” So, is Bowser right, is there a cabal of sinister behind the scenes manipulators out there who believe that the only way to make ‘men’ out of modern male youth is to make them so angry over the most trivial issues that they turn puce, foam at the mouth and risk having a stroke? Or are the exploding heads merely an unexplained natural phenomena akin to spontaneous combustion?