The carnage that angry white men leave in their wake

John List, who murdered his family in 1971 and then disappeared for eighteen years was just ahead of his time, it seems. An out-of-work accountant who couldn't hold down a job, he couched his slaughter in the terms of religion, as mercy killings to dispatch his family on the HOV lane to heaven before earthly temptations could ruin their chances.

Angry men resorting to murder when the things they have been led to believe about this country turn out not to be true in their own lives is nothing new, but male anger seems to be on the rise, fueled by the economic collapse and match-lit by right-wing hate talk radio. A friend of mine recently broke off a primarily e-mail and phone relationship of some 3-1/2 years after her beloved exploded at her over the telephone. They'd been discussing for a year finding a short-term rental together to see if their meat world relationship would be as successful as their virtual one had been, but the guy had always found a reason to wait. I found out about this in the context of the incident in Binghamton on Friday, in which a Vietnamese immigrant who felt "looked down on" shot thirteen people, and the one yesterday in which a dishonorably-charged Marine and wingnut who feared that Barack Obama would take away his guns (gee, I wonder where he got that idea?) killed three police officers in a domestic standoff.

My friend had always described her intended as a "manly man", who liked to hunt and build things. I'm quite certain that he is at least part of the reason she refused to talk about politics around the middle of last year and stopped even asking me if I believed that Barack Obama was sufficiently loyal to this country because of his background. This guy had recently suffered a number of health and financial setbacks that I won't detail here, and when you combine a tendency towards right-wing beliefs that include paranoia about Barack Obama, an affinity with guns, financial and health problems, and what was apparently otherwise a fairly even-tempered person exploding on a hair trigger over the telephone, I couldn't help but have the sense that my friend has perhaps literally and certainly figuratively dodged a bullet here, as heartbroken as she may be at the moment. Because we are in a recession, job opportunities are scarce, and the very white guys who sat silently while George W. Bush talked of preferring being a dictator, and swept up everyone's telephone and internet activity, and put protesters on no-fly lists, locked up Americans indefinitely without charges or trial, now suddenly have their panties in a twist because we have a black Democrat as President and Glenn Beck is telling them that said black Democrat will take their guns away.

I mean, after all, what kind of country is this, when an angry man can't blow away a few people in order to blow off some steam?

Richard Poplawski isn't the first nut who apparently got his marching orders from the bloviating of right wing talk radio hosts and nutcases like Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann. Let's not forget Jim Atkisson, whose talk radio-fueled hatred for liberals drove him to bust into a Unitarian Universalist church earlier this year and kill a bunch of people. (And while you're clicking on the above link, add Spocko's Brain to your bookmarks, because he's been on the hate radio case for a long time.)

Guys like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh make blood money. These are preposterously wealthy men -- as wealthy as many of the Wall Street types who are the popular villains du jour -- who earn their wealth whipping angry men like Richard Poplawski and Jim Atkisson into a frenzy, and then when men like this murder their families, or three police officers, or thirteen people trying to learn or teach English, take their words as marching orders, they wave their hands in front of themselves, shake their heads and say "But I'm just an entertainer!"

Of course there is a right to free speech in this country, but incitement to riot or violence has always fallen outside the purview of free speech rights under the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" notion. Perhaps Beck and Limbaugh and the even more extreme purveyors of right-wing hate radio do have the right to spill their bile over the public airwaves (though I would also argue that I am part of that public as well and fewer of MY side's voices are being heard over them), but when mainstream politicians from the Republican Party start using the same rhetoric, and accepting the leadership of these so-called "entertainers" as doctrine, their bile ceases to become "entertainment" and becomes marching orders.

We've already seen a rash of shootings such as those we've seen this weekend. Most weeks bring at least one report of a despondent man killing a few people. Usually it's his own family (and in fact there seems to be yet another one in the news, this time in Washington state).

This country is full of walking time bombs with guns, and we have now had three successive days in which they have used said guns to deal with their anger, an anger that has been building for over three decades, as Republicans gained political power by stoking the fires of fear and loathing and ignorance. It goes back as far as Richard Nixon with his enemies list and Spiro Agnew's dismissal of intelligent people as "effete snobs." It continued with Ronald Reagan's evocation of "welfare queens" to whip the right into a frenzy about undeserving black people getting their hard-earned tax dollars. It crescendoed with Willie Horton and the blatant appeal to racism of Jesse Helms' "white hands" ad. It continued during the Bush Administration with the fear that everyone brown of skin was a Muslim terrorist and with the scapegoating of undocumented immigrants as being the sole cause of our economic problems. And all that time, the hatemongers of the right, now aided and abetted by talk radio hosts who will say in print interviews that anyone who believes what they say is an idiot but who continue to spew their bile over the airwaves without such caveats, continue to whip these guys into a frenzy.

And as we hear more of these stories, more and more men who have been told by right-wing talk show "entertainers" and the politicians who love them that their world of privilege is being stolen out from under their noses, will deal with the fact that they've been lied to by taking a few lives.

(UPDATE: More from David Neiwert, who has also been covering the eliminationist rhetoric bandwagon for years and whose book on the subject is about to be released.)

UPDATE #2: What Blue Girl said.)