During and immediately after the 1988 Presidential election between Republican George H.W. Bush ("Bush the Elder") and Democrat Michael Dukakis, much of Bush's sweeping victory was attributed, at the time, to the rise of a "new" voting bloc: The Angry White Male Vote. Campaign pollsters and campaign strategists running focus groups had determined that there was one political issue on the minds of an awful lot of independent, or swing voters, nearly half of them, that was a "hidden" issue in the sense that neither campaign was actually campaigning on it, although it did come up on talk radio intermittently. Democrats were identified as the pro-feminism party, and there was this sudden and detectable surge in the number of men who were, at the time, blaming feminism for all of their problems. And so Susan Faludi, one of the best feminist writers alive, was tasked by her equally feminist editor, to go out and write the definitive book on The Angry White Male voting bloc.

She and her editor began in total agreement as to what the book would be like. Since every good feminist knows that men, and especially white men, control everything, own everything, and get their way on every political issue, white men have no legitimate reasons for anger. It was obvious to both of them that what was going on was that Angry White Men were reacting violently to the mere request that they share wealth, authority, and power more evenly with women and minorities. So to research the book, Faludi simply went to where her feminist friends were telling her were the most toxic cesspools of White Male Rage to interview the guys, intending to record their complaints about the non-existent ways in which feminism had hurt them, and compile them into yet another dismissive and insulting feminist book about what's wrong with men. But as she began to spend time with the men, she started to get a sense that no, wait, maybe white men do have a problem, whether they're lashing out at the right people or not, with the way the world has turned out. But then something happened that shocked her into unexpected empathy, and that's why her 2000 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, went in directions even she couldn't begin to have anticipated when she first set out to research it, why I recommend it to everybody.

What was that first accidental discovery that so shocked her conscience that she had to re-think all of her preconceptions? The first actual complaint she bumped into where men could show that they had actually been hurt, and hurt badly, by something that even she couldn't deny had been a feminist cause in the 1960s and 1970s: no-fault divorce laws. You see, by the time she was doing her research, mass layoffs were hitting the defense industry, the result of a bipartisan consensus that now that the Cold War was over, we no longer needed to be spending quite so much on deterring Soviet militarism; all that remained to be argued over was whether to cut taxes, or use the savings to pay down some of the national debt. Some of Faludi's friends had told her that she really needed to go talk to the men who were being laid off at the end of the Cold War, because they had a reputation as being the most viciously sexist guys on the planet. And what she found, as she listened to them long enough to get them willing to tell her their own real life stories, is that without exception, every single one of their wives left them with at most three months of being laid off. Because defense industry jobs had paid well, nearly all of them had supported stay-at-home wives for years, most a decade or more. Now there were literally tens of thousands of them unemployed at once in the LA market, far more than there were job openings that were even willing to take an "over-qualified" middle-aged man for even the most menial of jobs. Their wives, having no such resumés to defend, found it much easier to find entry-level work. But all of the examples she could find that didn't, instead did something honestly reprehensible: went out and found some guy who still had a job, cheated on their husbands (in one benchmark example she gives, openly, in front of him) to wheedle that guy for money. Either way, once they had the prospect of any kind of income, they divorced their husbands.

The men were bitterly angry about this. They and their wives had gone to the sacred altar of God and mutually sworn to stick together "for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, so long as you both shall live" -- only for the men to find out that nearly every woman in America was lying through her teeth about the "for richer or for poorer" part. And thanks to no-fault divorce laws and the end of spousal support laws and the return of women to the workforce, all feminist issues, the men who still loved their wives, the men who wanted them to stay together through however many years it was going to take the economy to recover even if it meant they got a lot poorer together for a while, had lost all emotional, and societal, and legal leverage to persuade their wives to honor their sacred promise to God himself and stay. And the ex-wives that Faludi was able to interview were uncomfortable, when asked this, but the truth remains: heterosexual women only marry men, and a "man" without a job "isn't really a man."

The book goes on from there, as Faludi used her new-found empathy to actually listen to men, and ultimately concluded that no, really, men did have it genuinely awful in the 1980s and 1990s, they did have legitimate grounds for anger; that some few of their complaints about feminism have at least a grain of truth in them; but that if men would put that aside and talk with the remaining veterans of the 1950s and 1960s feminist Consciousness Raising Movement they might find an equally large grain of common cause, and more importantly find that those graying veterans of the feminist movement they're so angry at are the ones who could teach them the ways, are the ones uniquely suited to share with them the tools they need, to heal their hurts and to force society to address their problems. It's a great book; read it.

I mention this today for two reasons. For one, it's fresh in my mind; the mini "book and video club" that I have going with phierma and cos_x just went through chapter 2 of Stiffed last Thursday night, so it's fresh in my mind. But wow, did I pick an odd week to have just read that, because by coincidence? The year Faludi's book came out, 2000, also turns out to be the year that Knoxville church shooter David Adkisson's fourth and final ex-wife left him, at the urging of her feminist and generally liberal church, Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. And since then, Adkisson has constructed a narrative in his mind by which those particular liberals were only the most personal and vivid example of a class of Christian anti-war and pro-civil-rights feminists who had made his life a living hell ever since he returned from service with the 101st Airborne Rangers in Vietnam; everything bad that has happened to him in his life, all the way back to the 1970s but especially since they persuaded his wife to leave him in 2000, was the fault of an organized campaign by liberals to ruin the lives of guys like him for, so far as he could tell, no good reason.

Ever have that conversation that goes, "Suppose you knew you only had a week to live -- who would you kill?" Heinlein made it a major plot point in one of his novels, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. Set in a repressive alternate-history America dominated by the all-controlling Church Of Your Choice, a small conspiracy of people facing the death penalty and/or about to die of some disease have formed the too-cutely-named "Committee for Aesthetic Deletion," to help each other plan their final suicide attacks on whoever it is they blame for America's decline. I've been in or around that conversation not a few times, myself; I'm pretty sure it's a common-enough experience. Nobody I've ever been around has shown any sign of taking it literally. It's an outlet for anger, and even more than that, it's a mechanism for human groups to bond together by expressing shared outrage, to reassure each other that they do consider the same or similar people to be irredeemable sinners. But then, not all of us used to remorsely murder civilians, in the free-fire zone in Vietnam, on the taxpayer dime, on orders that (as the Toledo Blade won the Pulitzer for documenting, not all that long ago) came all the way down from the White House. So when out of work David Adkisson lost his food stamps last week, and faced the realization that a 58 year old really is too old and weak to be living under an overpass like so many American homeless combat veterans have to, when he decided that he had very little time left to live -- I'm sure he felt fewer compunctions about murdering those responsible than the rest of us would.

And, as freelance journalist and author David Neiwert has been warning us for almost two years now, once again his orders came almost all the way down from the top of the Republican Party. Go to his blog post about the TVUUC church shootings, "In Tennessee, eliminationism is no longer 'just a joke'" (dneiwert.blogspot.com, 7/28/08), and read his unpublished book on the subject, Eliminationism in America, via the links in the sidebar. In ten short chapters and an afterword, he has been warning us since December of '06 that the level of rhetoric on the part of right-wing spokespeople like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, and dozens of their small-time imitators changed, and changed very explicitly, in the last ten years or so. Each and every one of them has started urging their listeners that it is pointless to argue with liberals, and not enough to organize against them politically: liberals must be murdered, en masse.

When challenged on this, each of those commentators has said that their murderous rhetoric is something that any reasonable person would know isn't meant to be taken literally. It's the same as all those late-night conversations we've nearly all had over pizza and drinks over who would we kill if we had no time left to live, like I alluded to above. They keep insisting that it cannot possibly be their fault, even though with the exception of one or two attacks on fundamentalist organizations by disgruntled ex-members, almost every single church that has been burned in America, or shot up in America, in the last two decades, has been a liberal church, burned down or shot up by someone who listened to their radio shows, read their books, watched their TV shows and appearances, and credited them for having given the order to do so. So no, we shouldn't be at all surprised that even though his grudge against Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church was personal even more than it was political, the talking points of David Adkisson's 4-page suicide note came out of all of those same right wing commentators' books and shows, and when police searched Adkisson's home, they found an entire library of the stuff. His original grudge may have started out personal, but it was a political party that gave him the permission to murder those he had a grudge against.

Ironically, it is just exactly this kind of thing that's why Charlie Manson will spend the rest of his life rotting in jail. Nobody has ever even alleged that he was at the site of the murders that his cultists committed. Nor is there even any even halfway credible allegation that he gave a direct order, that night, to go out and kill those people. No, "all" that Charlie Manson did was recruit unhinged followers, and then feed them a steady diet of how certain people deserved to die, how great it would be if someone went out and butchered them. And when he couldn't believe that he was put on trial for the fact that his followers blamed him for their crimes, for having given them explicit permission to slaughter his political enemies, when he mocked the prosecution and the court for not having any evidence that he actually meant it or intended them to do so or gave any orders, this did him no good at all. Yet somehow, no matter what David Adkisson said in what he meant to be his suicide note, I'm not holding my breath waiting for Michael Savage, or Ann Coulter or any of the others, to be convicted for having given him the order to kill. Michael Savage, after all, is a rich Republican, not a dirt-poor hippy ex-convict.

Dave Neiwert, and I, aren't actually calling for the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O'Reillys and Sean Hannitys of America to go to jail for ordering the murder of two people, and the attempted murder of many more, at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, or the murder of so many other liberals by those commentators' depressed or enraged fans. Nor are we calling for such rantings to be made illegal; we're both First Amendment absolutists. No, what we're calling for is for Americans to wake up, and change their attitudes. We want to live in an America where when a prominent spokesperson for a political party "jokes" about sending their audience out to mass-murder their political opponents, it should and must shock our consciences. That person must become the kind of instant social pariah that people quite justly become when they make openly racist remarks. What you talk about in private, with people who know you're not serious, is one thing; what they broadcast or publish to an eager audience gets innocent people killed by the dozens, and if that doesn't bother them enough to stop them from continuing to do it, then there is just plain something that malevolently wrong with them, something just that deeply disgusting about them. And no matter what your politics are, if you aren't just plainly that disgusted about their ongoing eliminationist rhetoric, there's something wrong with you, too.

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Addendum: There is, happy to say, one bit of notable heroism that must, absolutely must, be called out here; hat-tip to Neiwert's blogging partner, the Campaign for America's Future's Sara Robinson, herself a Unitarian, for pointing it out in her blog post, "Of Madmen and Martyrs" (dneiewert.blogspot.com, 7/28/08).

The note left in his car makes it clear that, in addition to mass murder, David Adkisson planned to commit either suicide, or "suicide by cop." He walked into that liberal church during a children's-program musical with a 3-shot shotgun and 76 rounds of ammunition, enough to kill every adult in there. And from the history of mass shootings in America, he "knew" not to be worried about the fact that every 3 shots, he was going to have to reload. Adkisson "knew" that once a cold-blooded killer like him starts working a room, people cower under furniture. Some primitive "go to ground" reflex keeps them paralyzed and shivering, hoping that the predator won't notice them, hoping the predator will move on and kill someone else instead. And in the first few seconds of the shooting, many people did just that, so I'm sure he was confident that his plan was working, that he could indeed kill these religious liberals at his leisure, either saving the last bullet for himself or provoking the cops to kill him when the time came. But then he stopped to reload ... and those anti-war liberals did something a right-wing conservative must have found terribly shocking. They turned, and swarmed him. They broke his arm disarming him, and six of them pinned him to the floor. And then, rather than take any kind of revenge on a man who murdered people in front of a group of little children, they peacefully and quietly held him there until the cops came to take him off of their hands. And I can not tell you how proud I am of them as Americans for having done that.

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Newspaper sources, all from the Knoxville (Tennessee) News Sentinel:

• Bob Fowler et al, "Church shooting: 2nd victim dies; authorities search accused man's house," 7/27/08.
  
• Bob Fowler, "Accused church shooter threatened to kill wife, himself," 7/28/08.
  
• Hayes Hickman and Don Jacobs, "Suspect's note cites 'liberal movement' for church attack: More charges expected to be filed against Adkisson," 7/29/08.
  
• Hayes Hickman and Don Jacobs, "Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity on accused shooter's reading list: 4-page letter outlines frustration, hatred of 'liberal movement'," 7/29/08.