OK, the truth about Angry White Men

[cnelsen]

The plastic remote on my Sunbeam Electric Heated Fleece Blanket went haywire last night and made me oversleep, so I spent the day in my spaghetti-strap T-shirt and my favorite pair of wind pants from the Adidas outlet store out on Interstate 95 binge-watching the Death Wish series because I couldn’t remember which movie had the scene where Charles Bronson blows away Laurence Fishburne with a perfect American Sniper-style long-distance kill shot that goes through the giant boom box Laurence is holding on his shoulder and into the lowlife gangbanger’s skull.

It turned out to be in Death Wish II, but by the time I found it I was in the grip of Angry White Man Syndrome and so I had to watch all the way through to the vastly underrated Death Wish V: The Face of Death because I had fond memories of the cyanide-laced-cannoli scene.

That’s what we Angry White Men do.

When we’re not beating up our wives and girlfriends or killing Meskin illegals with our concealed-carry Glocks purchased at the Tactical Knife and Gun Wholesale Megamarket in Lumberton, North Carolina, we’re pretty much leading normal lives hanging around the Waffle House so the process server can’t find us and extradite us to southern Alabama to face charges on the 47 months of back child-support payments we never paid because we “just forgot, Your Honor.”

I actually didn’t realize I was an Angry White Man until I finished reading the 397 articles written since the election that start out, “Donald Trump is the product of hatred, misogyny, nativism, bigotry, and resentment emanating from angry white men lamenting the loss of their factory jobs to China.”

The only factory I ever worked at was Phil Hargett’s bus-bench factory in Tullahoma, Tennessee, but I always thought the reason they went out of business was that Phil sold ads on the back of the benches to the Mons Venus All Nude Strip Club in Tampa, causing the Tampa City Council to cancel his contract. Knowing that China stole the municipal-bus-bench business from us makes me even more angry, since it probly makes me ineligible for unemployment checks.

The Angry White Man theory is based on the fact that “whites without a college degree”—apparently this is something that pollsters keep track of—voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 39 percent. This one statistic has been repeated over and over to bolster the phrase “angry white men,” first used by Bill Clinton as a way of explaining the 1994 midterm elections—and used again this year to explain his wife’s loss, indicating Bill really is stuck in the past.

If you knew about the Angry White Men in 1994, Bill, why didn’t you warn Hillary?

But more to the point, if you keep calling people like me Angry White Men, we eventually become…Angry Goldurn White Men!

So let’s get etymological on this puppy:

Numero Uno: What media Sanhedrin decided that “absence of a college degree” equals bigotry, anger, hatred, misogyny, blah blah blah? In a world full of worthless college degrees that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, why is the decision not to seek a degree placed in a category indicating “Uh-oh, Neanderthal ahead!”? I can think of any number of reasons people would not seek a college degree, including (a) they’ve already got the job they want (Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates), (b) they want to be an entrepreneur (Steve Jobs), (c) they need to get started in their field while they’re young (Oprah Winfrey), (d) they’re talented but don’t do well in an academic setting (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Al Pacino), (e) they got expelled from school for reasons that have nothing to do with their potential (Ted Turner, John Lennon), (f) they want to do humanitarian things that are more important than school (Walt Disney, Abraham Lincoln), or (g) they are self-educated in the fields they consider important (Richard Branson, Michael Dell).

Numero Two-o: Who said the “whites without a college degree” are all male? Why is it always Angry White Men and never Angry White Women, when, in fact, a majority of white women voted for Trump? My theory is that it’s harder to make an Angry White Woman into a prehistoric reptile fighting its way back from near-extinction. It’s much easier to summon up the image of Kathy Bates’ husband in Dolores Claiborne—a bitter drunk child-molesting wife beater who (remember this part?) hates his job on a fishing boat—instead of using, say, Charlize Theron in Monster, a white woman who executes white men for a living. For that matter, when Madonna stops in the middle of a concert to talk about the Angry White Men who voted for Trump as a way of “getting rid of female empowerment,” why doesn’t the next day’s headline read “Angry White Woman Rails Against Angry White Men Who Robbed Her of…uh…Never Mind”?

Numero Three-o: Why is anger as a voting incentive limited to white males? Don’t black men get angry? When Louis Farrakhan holds a rally, why doesn’t Yahoo News say “Angry Black Men Gather in Chicago”? Why aren’t there any Angry Latino Men or Angry Chinese Men?

Numero Four-o: More specifically, how do you explain the fact that the Angry White Men who voted for Trump in 2016 are the same white men who voted for Obama in 2008? When they vote for Obama they’re not angry, but when they vote for Trump it can only be because they’re enraged hicks? Gogebic County in Michigan is 92 percent white and hadn’t voted for a Republican since 1972—until this election. The counties in southwestern Wisconsin, all heavily Democratic, went for Trump after a strong Obama vote in 2008 and 2012. Eastern Iowa, Democratic since 1988, went for Trump. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which is frequently used as the very definition of “working-class,” went for Republicans for the first time since 1988. Why are all these people classified as “angry” now, but in 2008, when they were angry at George Bush, they were just “voting for change”? Could it be, just perhaps, maybe, they feel betrayed by the Democratic Party? If we’re gonna call them angry, let’s define what they’re angry about.

Numero Five-o: Why is it assumed that being opposed to the current immigration policy equals (a) hatred of foreigners, and (b) fear of multiculturalism? Southern white men don’t care that there are Italian neighborhoods in New York, Polish neighborhoods in Chicago, West African neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., or Turkish neighborhoods in Los Angeles. They get the whole melting-pot thing, which is about 180 years old at this point. If they’re angry, it’s because they believe that people like Hillary Clinton exclude them from the melting pot by constantly talking about aggrieved blacks, aspirational Latinos, and overlooked Asians, but if they celebrate their Scots-Irish heritage at the Jerry Lawler rassling match at Mid-South Coliseum or evangelical rallies at Thomas Road Baptist Church, then they’re not regarded as part of the multicultural tossed salad, they’re just pale-skinned yahoos who are probably racists, if not white supremacists.

Numero Six-o: Why are the Angry White Men classified as reactionary when the small towns of the South and Midwest have been shown to be overwhelmingly in favor of the two largest socialist programs in the history of the country—Social Security and Medicare? Their opinion of unemployment checks is mixed—they dislike the concept, but accept it in practice when their family members get laid off. Most of them are not crazy about the Tea Party or the more extreme wing of the evangelical movement, but they’re not bothered by it. Like climate change, it’s just not a priority. Obnoxious things that Donald Trump said in 2005 on a Hollywood movie set are not a priority. These people are neither Republicans nor Democrats, liberals nor conservatives—they’re “leave me alone and do your job” voters. A lot of times these people are demonized for just not caring about something you’re supposed to care about. It’s assumed they hate things that they just don’t ever allow into their family circles in the first place.

So if we’re gonna use the word “angry” as an epithet, let’s use it where it’s most appropriate. Let’s use it for the intelligentsia, the media pundits, the various movie stars who feel an urgent need to tweet their political opinions. I’ve previously talked about the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, who has apparently become so twisted with rage that he can’t write about anything except Trump. Recent columns include “No, Trump, We Can’t Just Get Along,” “Trump: Making America White Again,” “Trump’s Agents of Idiocracy,” “Patriotic Opposition to Donald Trump,” and “Trump: Madman of the Year.” The first few columns he wrote, back in May, were fairly cogent, but now the man is out of control. Charles’ friends need to do an intervention and suggest he do a column on, say, farm policy, lest his monomaniacal fixation lead to a clinical condition, the way guys who start a bodybuilding program get strung out on protein powder and PowerBars.

Charles is an Angry Black Man, but David Remnick, the very white editor of The New Yorker, also went berserk in print, calling the election a “sickening event” and a “tragedy for the American republic” that was caused by “xenophobia” and “white supremacy,” “a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.” Normally a master of the subtle nuance, Remnick went full-tilt apocalyptic with his postelection analysis, including the Angry White Men of Europe alongside the ones in this country. And he did it for a reason. “This is surely,” he said, “the way fascism can begin.”

For those of you who aren’t keeping up, The New Yorker was founded in the ’20s as a humor magazine but hasn’t said anything humorous for at least twenty years now. Still, even by its own standards of moral seriousness, the Remnick outburst was evidence of the angriest white man I’ve encountered in a while—and I’ve been in some Deep South dive bars.

Toni Morrison, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for her novels, went so far as to say that the election was motivated entirely by white men who are fearful of black people and immigrants, tying Trump voters directly to lynch mobs and psychotic racist terrorists. “On Election Day,” she wrote, “how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump.” In other words, they voted for Trump as a way to disguise their true motives—getting rid of minorities and foreigners.

And then there was Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s communications director, who used a meeting of campaign strategists from both camps at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to rail incoherently against the Trump campaign, going so far as to accuse her counterparts of directly going after the white-supremacist vote. She later doubled down on her accusations, essentially claiming that the Angry White Men—which, again, she should have known about because Bill invented the term—were summoned to a Klan rally by “dog whistles” in the subtext of Trump speeches.

So there you have it—an Angry Black Man, an Angry White Man, an Angry Black Woman, and an Angry White Woman—all convinced that Angry White Men in the swing states rose up like villagers with torches and lynched the rightful heir to the presidency. I could cite a hundred other examples, and they’re all angrier than the angry men they write about. They’re essentially saying that the 63 million people who voted for Trump are all misguided bigots, but especially the white males.

The only word to describe it is “entitlement.” They feel entitled by their college degree. Why do we even allow white males with no college degree to vote at all? They feel entitled by their superior sense of fairness. They don’t believe a car mechanic in Pascagoula, the hometown of Jennifer Palmieri, is equal to a Syrian refugee or a Mexican immigrant when it comes time to listen to needs and grievances. They’re disdainful of the Electoral College because it gives power to small states—just as the Founding Fathers intended, assuring Delaware and Rhode Island that they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the enormous populations of Virginia and New York. But mostly they’re convinced that they know the future of America, and they don’t think these insurance salesmen and Realtors in West Texas should be interfering with it. They are not democrats in any sense of the word. They are geniocrats. They believe the world should be run by intellectuals and artists. The fact that it’s not has made them tone-deaf, like Hillary, and very, very angry.

 

[JoeMoma]

I would have to be very angry ( and I am white) to write a post that long.

 

[MarathonMike]

Holy cow, the Charles Bronson marathon sure spun you up. I had to give you a winner for sheer effort. Nice writing too.

 

[fncceo]

Are you feeling better now?

 

[12icer]

What No liberal rebuttal or comments? I guess their limited intellectual power and reading ability garnered from their liberal schooling and PHD's failed them. How sad!!! I know they are probably well schooled in racial social ethics, white imperialist desecration, socially adjusted history, and of course voodoo economics. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

 

[mamooth]

What No liberal rebuttal or comments?

I thought we were being kind by ignoring it.

I know you Trump-snowflakes think your every utterance deserves praise for how speshul and wonderful it was, but we're not PC that way.

 

[I amso IR]

Ya gotta love it! Da trut, da whole trut, and nothing but da trut. Blessings upon you, my son.

 

[blastoff]

The plastic remote on my Sunbeam Electric Heated Fleece Blanket went haywire last night and made me oversleep, so I spent the day in my spaghetti-strap T-shirt and my favorite pair of wind pants from the Adidas outlet store out on Interstate 95 binge-watching the Death Wish series because I couldn’t remember which movie had the scene where Charles Bronson blows away Laurence Fishburne with a perfect American Sniper-style long-distance kill shot that goes through the giant boom box Laurence is holding on his shoulder and into the lowlife gangbanger’s skull.

It turned out to be in Death Wish II, but by the time I found it I was in the grip of Angry White Man Syndrome and so I had to watch all the way through to the vastly underrated Death Wish V: The Face of Death because I had fond memories of the cyanide-laced-cannoli scene.

That’s what we Angry White Men do.

When we’re not beating up our wives and girlfriends or killing Meskin illegals with our concealed-carry Glocks purchased at the Tactical Knife and Gun Wholesale Megamarket in Lumberton, North Carolina, we’re pretty much leading normal lives hanging around the Waffle House so the process server can’t find us and extradite us to southern Alabama to face charges on the 47 months of back child-support payments we never paid because we “just forgot, Your Honor.”

I actually didn’t realize I was an Angry White Man until I finished reading the 397 articles written since the election that start out, “Donald Trump is the product of hatred, misogyny, nativism, bigotry, and resentment emanating from angry white men lamenting the loss of their factory jobs to China.”

The only factory I ever worked at was Phil Hargett’s bus-bench factory in Tullahoma, Tennessee, but I always thought the reason they went out of business was that Phil sold ads on the back of the benches to the Mons Venus All Nude Strip Club in Tampa, causing the Tampa City Council to cancel his contract. Knowing that China stole the municipal-bus-bench business from us makes me even more angry, since it probly makes me ineligible for unemployment checks.

The Angry White Man theory is based on the fact that “whites without a college degree”—apparently this is something that pollsters keep track of—voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 39 percent. This one statistic has been repeated over and over to bolster the phrase “angry white men,” first used by Bill Clinton as a way of explaining the 1994 midterm elections—and used again this year to explain his wife’s loss, indicating Bill really is stuck in the past.

If you knew about the Angry White Men in 1994, Bill, why didn’t you warn Hillary?

But more to the point, if you keep calling people like me Angry White Men, we eventually become…Angry Goldurn White Men!

So let’s get etymological on this puppy:

Numero Uno: What media Sanhedrin decided that “absence of a college degree” equals bigotry, anger, hatred, misogyny, blah blah blah? In a world full of worthless college degrees that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, why is the decision not to seek a degree placed in a category indicating “Uh-oh, Neanderthal ahead!”? I can think of any number of reasons people would not seek a college degree, including (a) they’ve already got the job they want (Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates), (b) they want to be an entrepreneur (Steve Jobs), (c) they need to get started in their field while they’re young (Oprah Winfrey), (d) they’re talented but don’t do well in an academic setting (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Al Pacino), (e) they got expelled from school for reasons that have nothing to do with their potential (Ted Turner, John Lennon), (f) they want to do humanitarian things that are more important than school (Walt Disney, Abraham Lincoln), or (g) they are self-educated in the fields they consider important (Richard Branson, Michael Dell).

Numero Two-o: Who said the “whites without a college degree” are all male? Why is it always Angry White Men and never Angry White Women, when, in fact, a majority of white women voted for Trump? My theory is that it’s harder to make an Angry White Woman into a prehistoric reptile fighting its way back from near-extinction. It’s much easier to summon up the image of Kathy Bates’ husband in Dolores Claiborne—a bitter drunk child-molesting wife beater who (remember this part?) hates his job on a fishing boat—instead of using, say, Charlize Theron in Monster, a white woman who executes white men for a living. For that matter, when Madonna stops in the middle of a concert to talk about the Angry White Men who voted for Trump as a way of “getting rid of female empowerment,” why doesn’t the next day’s headline read “Angry White Woman Rails Against Angry White Men Who Robbed Her of…uh…Never Mind”?

Numero Three-o: Why is anger as a voting incentive limited to white males? Don’t black men get angry? When Louis Farrakhan holds a rally, why doesn’t Yahoo News say “Angry Black Men Gather in Chicago”? Why aren’t there any Angry Latino Men or Angry Chinese Men?

Numero Four-o: More specifically, how do you explain the fact that the Angry White Men who voted for Trump in 2016 are the same white men who voted for Obama in 2008? When they vote for Obama they’re not angry, but when they vote for Trump it can only be because they’re enraged hicks? Gogebic County in Michigan is 92 percent white and hadn’t voted for a Republican since 1972—until this election. The counties in southwestern Wisconsin, all heavily Democratic, went for Trump after a strong Obama vote in 2008 and 2012. Eastern Iowa, Democratic since 1988, went for Trump. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which is frequently used as the very definition of “working-class,” went for Republicans for the first time since 1988. Why are all these people classified as “angry” now, but in 2008, when they were angry at George Bush, they were just “voting for change”? Could it be, just perhaps, maybe, they feel betrayed by the Democratic Party? If we’re gonna call them angry, let’s define what they’re angry about.

Numero Five-o: Why is it assumed that being opposed to the current immigration policy equals (a) hatred of foreigners, and (b) fear of multiculturalism? Southern white men don’t care that there are Italian neighborhoods in New York, Polish neighborhoods in Chicago, West African neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., or Turkish neighborhoods in Los Angeles. They get the whole melting-pot thing, which is about 180 years old at this point. If they’re angry, it’s because they believe that people like Hillary Clinton exclude them from the melting pot by constantly talking about aggrieved blacks, aspirational Latinos, and overlooked Asians, but if they celebrate their Scots-Irish heritage at the Jerry Lawler rassling match at Mid-South Coliseum or evangelical rallies at Thomas Road Baptist Church, then they’re not regarded as part of the multicultural tossed salad, they’re just pale-skinned yahoos who are probably racists, if not white supremacists.

Numero Six-o: Why are the Angry White Men classified as reactionary when the small towns of the South and Midwest have been shown to be overwhelmingly in favor of the two largest socialist programs in the history of the country—Social Security and Medicare? Their opinion of unemployment checks is mixed—they dislike the concept, but accept it in practice when their family members get laid off. Most of them are not crazy about the Tea Party or the more extreme wing of the evangelical movement, but they’re not bothered by it. Like climate change, it’s just not a priority. Obnoxious things that Donald Trump said in 2005 on a Hollywood movie set are not a priority. These people are neither Republicans nor Democrats, liberals nor conservatives—they’re “leave me alone and do your job” voters. A lot of times these people are demonized for just not caring about something you’re supposed to care about. It’s assumed they hate things that they just don’t ever allow into their family circles in the first place.

So if we’re gonna use the word “angry” as an epithet, let’s use it where it’s most appropriate. Let’s use it for the intelligentsia, the media pundits, the various movie stars who feel an urgent need to tweet their political opinions. I’ve previously talked about the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, who has apparently become so twisted with rage that he can’t write about anything except Trump. Recent columns include “No, Trump, We Can’t Just Get Along,” “Trump: Making America White Again,” “Trump’s Agents of Idiocracy,” “Patriotic Opposition to Donald Trump,” and “Trump: Madman of the Year.” The first few columns he wrote, back in May, were fairly cogent, but now the man is out of control. Charles’ friends need to do an intervention and suggest he do a column on, say, farm policy, lest his monomaniacal fixation lead to a clinical condition, the way guys who start a bodybuilding program get strung out on protein powder and PowerBars.

Charles is an Angry Black Man, but David Remnick, the very white editor of The New Yorker, also went berserk in print, calling the election a “sickening event” and a “tragedy for the American republic” that was caused by “xenophobia” and “white supremacy,” “a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.” Normally a master of the subtle nuance, Remnick went full-tilt apocalyptic with his postelection analysis, including the Angry White Men of Europe alongside the ones in this country. And he did it for a reason. “This is surely,” he said, “the way fascism can begin.”

For those of you who aren’t keeping up, The New Yorker was founded in the ’20s as a humor magazine but hasn’t said anything humorous for at least twenty years now. Still, even by its own standards of moral seriousness, the Remnick outburst was evidence of the angriest white man I’ve encountered in a while—and I’ve been in some Deep South dive bars.

Toni Morrison, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for her novels, went so far as to say that the election was motivated entirely by white men who are fearful of black people and immigrants, tying Trump voters directly to lynch mobs and psychotic racist terrorists. “On Election Day,” she wrote, “how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump.” In other words, they voted for Trump as a way to disguise their true motives—getting rid of minorities and foreigners.

And then there was Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s communications director, who used a meeting of campaign strategists from both camps at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to rail incoherently against the Trump campaign, going so far as to accuse her counterparts of directly going after the white-supremacist vote. She later doubled down on her accusations, essentially claiming that the Angry White Men—which, again, she should have known about because Bill invented the term—were summoned to a Klan rally by “dog whistles” in the subtext of Trump speeches.

So there you have it—an Angry Black Man, an Angry White Man, an Angry Black Woman, and an Angry White Woman—all convinced that Angry White Men in the swing states rose up like villagers with torches and lynched the rightful heir to the presidency. I could cite a hundred other examples, and they’re all angrier than the angry men they write about. They’re essentially saying that the 63 million people who voted for Trump are all misguided bigots, but especially the white males.

The only word to describe it is “entitlement.” They feel entitled by their college degree. Why do we even allow white males with no college degree to vote at all? They feel entitled by their superior sense of fairness. They don’t believe a car mechanic in Pascagoula, the hometown of Jennifer Palmieri, is equal to a Syrian refugee or a Mexican immigrant when it comes time to listen to needs and grievances. They’re disdainful of the Electoral College because it gives power to small states—just as the Founding Fathers intended, assuring Delaware and Rhode Island that they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the enormous populations of Virginia and New York. But mostly they’re convinced that they know the future of America, and they don’t think these insurance salesmen and Realtors in West Texas should be interfering with it. They are not democrats in any sense of the word. They are geniocrats. They believe the world should be run by intellectuals and artists. The fact that it’s not has made them tone-deaf, like Hillary, and very, very angry.

Not a good post in the sense the lefty nitwits won't get it at all!

 

[Silent Warrior]

What No liberal rebuttal or comments?

I thought we were being kind by ignoring it.

I know you Trump-snowflakes think your every utterance deserves praise for how speshul and wonderful it was, but we're not PC that way.

Listen up mamooth, your mom's calling you upstairs for lunch.

 

[Wiskers Von Pussyboots]

The plastic remote on my Sunbeam Electric Heated Fleece Blanket went haywire last night and made me oversleep, so I spent the day in my spaghetti-strap T-shirt and my favorite pair of wind pants from the Adidas outlet store out on Interstate 95 binge-watching the Death Wish series because I couldn’t remember which movie had the scene where Charles Bronson blows away Laurence Fishburne with a perfect American Sniper-style long-distance kill shot that goes through the giant boom box Laurence is holding on his shoulder and into the lowlife gangbanger’s skull.

It turned out to be in Death Wish II, but by the time I found it I was in the grip of Angry White Man Syndrome and so I had to watch all the way through to the vastly underrated Death Wish V: The Face of Death because I had fond memories of the cyanide-laced-cannoli scene.

That’s what we Angry White Men do.

When we’re not beating up our wives and girlfriends or killing Meskin illegals with our concealed-carry Glocks purchased at the Tactical Knife and Gun Wholesale Megamarket in Lumberton, North Carolina, we’re pretty much leading normal lives hanging around the Waffle House so the process server can’t find us and extradite us to southern Alabama to face charges on the 47 months of back child-support payments we never paid because we “just forgot, Your Honor.”

I actually didn’t realize I was an Angry White Man until I finished reading the 397 articles written since the election that start out, “Donald Trump is the product of hatred, misogyny, nativism, bigotry, and resentment emanating from angry white men lamenting the loss of their factory jobs to China.”

The only factory I ever worked at was Phil Hargett’s bus-bench factory in Tullahoma, Tennessee, but I always thought the reason they went out of business was that Phil sold ads on the back of the benches to the Mons Venus All Nude Strip Club in Tampa, causing the Tampa City Council to cancel his contract. Knowing that China stole the municipal-bus-bench business from us makes me even more angry, since it probly makes me ineligible for unemployment checks.

The Angry White Man theory is based on the fact that “whites without a college degree”—apparently this is something that pollsters keep track of—voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 39 percent. This one statistic has been repeated over and over to bolster the phrase “angry white men,” first used by Bill Clinton as a way of explaining the 1994 midterm elections—and used again this year to explain his wife’s loss, indicating Bill really is stuck in the past.

If you knew about the Angry White Men in 1994, Bill, why didn’t you warn Hillary?

But more to the point, if you keep calling people like me Angry White Men, we eventually become…Angry Goldurn White Men!

So let’s get etymological on this puppy:

Numero Uno: What media Sanhedrin decided that “absence of a college degree” equals bigotry, anger, hatred, misogyny, blah blah blah? In a world full of worthless college degrees that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, why is the decision not to seek a degree placed in a category indicating “Uh-oh, Neanderthal ahead!”? I can think of any number of reasons people would not seek a college degree, including (a) they’ve already got the job they want (Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates), (b) they want to be an entrepreneur (Steve Jobs), (c) they need to get started in their field while they’re young (Oprah Winfrey), (d) they’re talented but don’t do well in an academic setting (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Al Pacino), (e) they got expelled from school for reasons that have nothing to do with their potential (Ted Turner, John Lennon), (f) they want to do humanitarian things that are more important than school (Walt Disney, Abraham Lincoln), or (g) they are self-educated in the fields they consider important (Richard Branson, Michael Dell).

Numero Two-o: Who said the “whites without a college degree” are all male? Why is it always Angry White Men and never Angry White Women, when, in fact, a majority of white women voted for Trump? My theory is that it’s harder to make an Angry White Woman into a prehistoric reptile fighting its way back from near-extinction. It’s much easier to summon up the image of Kathy Bates’ husband in Dolores Claiborne—a bitter drunk child-molesting wife beater who (remember this part?) hates his job on a fishing boat—instead of using, say, Charlize Theron in Monster, a white woman who executes white men for a living. For that matter, when Madonna stops in the middle of a concert to talk about the Angry White Men who voted for Trump as a way of “getting rid of female empowerment,” why doesn’t the next day’s headline read “Angry White Woman Rails Against Angry White Men Who Robbed Her of…uh…Never Mind”?

Numero Three-o: Why is anger as a voting incentive limited to white males? Don’t black men get angry? When Louis Farrakhan holds a rally, why doesn’t Yahoo News say “Angry Black Men Gather in Chicago”? Why aren’t there any Angry Latino Men or Angry Chinese Men?

Numero Four-o: More specifically, how do you explain the fact that the Angry White Men who voted for Trump in 2016 are the same white men who voted for Obama in 2008? When they vote for Obama they’re not angry, but when they vote for Trump it can only be because they’re enraged hicks? Gogebic County in Michigan is 92 percent white and hadn’t voted for a Republican since 1972—until this election. The counties in southwestern Wisconsin, all heavily Democratic, went for Trump after a strong Obama vote in 2008 and 2012. Eastern Iowa, Democratic since 1988, went for Trump. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which is frequently used as the very definition of “working-class,” went for Republicans for the first time since 1988. Why are all these people classified as “angry” now, but in 2008, when they were angry at George Bush, they were just “voting for change”? Could it be, just perhaps, maybe, they feel betrayed by the Democratic Party? If we’re gonna call them angry, let’s define what they’re angry about.

Numero Five-o: Why is it assumed that being opposed to the current immigration policy equals (a) hatred of foreigners, and (b) fear of multiculturalism? Southern white men don’t care that there are Italian neighborhoods in New York, Polish neighborhoods in Chicago, West African neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., or Turkish neighborhoods in Los Angeles. They get the whole melting-pot thing, which is about 180 years old at this point. If they’re angry, it’s because they believe that people like Hillary Clinton exclude them from the melting pot by constantly talking about aggrieved blacks, aspirational Latinos, and overlooked Asians, but if they celebrate their Scots-Irish heritage at the Jerry Lawler rassling match at Mid-South Coliseum or evangelical rallies at Thomas Road Baptist Church, then they’re not regarded as part of the multicultural tossed salad, they’re just pale-skinned yahoos who are probably racists, if not white supremacists.

Numero Six-o: Why are the Angry White Men classified as reactionary when the small towns of the South and Midwest have been shown to be overwhelmingly in favor of the two largest socialist programs in the history of the country—Social Security and Medicare? Their opinion of unemployment checks is mixed—they dislike the concept, but accept it in practice when their family members get laid off. Most of them are not crazy about the Tea Party or the more extreme wing of the evangelical movement, but they’re not bothered by it. Like climate change, it’s just not a priority. Obnoxious things that Donald Trump said in 2005 on a Hollywood movie set are not a priority. These people are neither Republicans nor Democrats, liberals nor conservatives—they’re “leave me alone and do your job” voters. A lot of times these people are demonized for just not caring about something you’re supposed to care about. It’s assumed they hate things that they just don’t ever allow into their family circles in the first place.

So if we’re gonna use the word “angry” as an epithet, let’s use it where it’s most appropriate. Let’s use it for the intelligentsia, the media pundits, the various movie stars who feel an urgent need to tweet their political opinions. I’ve previously talked about the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, who has apparently become so twisted with rage that he can’t write about anything except Trump. Recent columns include “No, Trump, We Can’t Just Get Along,” “Trump: Making America White Again,” “Trump’s Agents of Idiocracy,” “Patriotic Opposition to Donald Trump,” and “Trump: Madman of the Year.” The first few columns he wrote, back in May, were fairly cogent, but now the man is out of control. Charles’ friends need to do an intervention and suggest he do a column on, say, farm policy, lest his monomaniacal fixation lead to a clinical condition, the way guys who start a bodybuilding program get strung out on protein powder and PowerBars.

Charles is an Angry Black Man, but David Remnick, the very white editor of The New Yorker, also went berserk in print, calling the election a “sickening event” and a “tragedy for the American republic” that was caused by “xenophobia” and “white supremacy,” “a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.” Normally a master of the subtle nuance, Remnick went full-tilt apocalyptic with his postelection analysis, including the Angry White Men of Europe alongside the ones in this country. And he did it for a reason. “This is surely,” he said, “the way fascism can begin.”

For those of you who aren’t keeping up, The New Yorker was founded in the ’20s as a humor magazine but hasn’t said anything humorous for at least twenty years now. Still, even by its own standards of moral seriousness, the Remnick outburst was evidence of the angriest white man I’ve encountered in a while—and I’ve been in some Deep South dive bars.

Toni Morrison, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for her novels, went so far as to say that the election was motivated entirely by white men who are fearful of black people and immigrants, tying Trump voters directly to lynch mobs and psychotic racist terrorists. “On Election Day,” she wrote, “how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump.” In other words, they voted for Trump as a way to disguise their true motives—getting rid of minorities and foreigners.

And then there was Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s communications director, who used a meeting of campaign strategists from both camps at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to rail incoherently against the Trump campaign, going so far as to accuse her counterparts of directly going after the white-supremacist vote. She later doubled down on her accusations, essentially claiming that the Angry White Men—which, again, she should have known about because Bill invented the term—were summoned to a Klan rally by “dog whistles” in the subtext of Trump speeches.

So there you have it—an Angry Black Man, an Angry White Man, an Angry Black Woman, and an Angry White Woman—all convinced that Angry White Men in the swing states rose up like villagers with torches and lynched the rightful heir to the presidency. I could cite a hundred other examples, and they’re all angrier than the angry men they write about. They’re essentially saying that the 63 million people who voted for Trump are all misguided bigots, but especially the white males.

The only word to describe it is “entitlement.” They feel entitled by their college degree. Why do we even allow white males with no college degree to vote at all? They feel entitled by their superior sense of fairness. They don’t believe a car mechanic in Pascagoula, the hometown of Jennifer Palmieri, is equal to a Syrian refugee or a Mexican immigrant when it comes time to listen to needs and grievances. They’re disdainful of the Electoral College because it gives power to small states—just as the Founding Fathers intended, assuring Delaware and Rhode Island that they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the enormous populations of Virginia and New York. But mostly they’re convinced that they know the future of America, and they don’t think these insurance salesmen and Realtors in West Texas should be interfering with it. They are not democrats in any sense of the word. They are geniocrats. They believe the world should be run by intellectuals and artists. The fact that it’s not has made them tone-deaf, like Hillary, and very, very angry.

This is not the statement of a mentally sound individual.

 

[Votto]

The plastic remote on my Sunbeam Electric Heated Fleece Blanket went haywire last night and made me oversleep, so I spent the day in my spaghetti-strap T-shirt and my favorite pair of wind pants from the Adidas outlet store out on Interstate 95 binge-watching the Death Wish series because I couldn’t remember which movie had the scene where Charles Bronson blows away Laurence Fishburne with a perfect American Sniper-style long-distance kill shot that goes through the giant boom box Laurence is holding on his shoulder and into the lowlife gangbanger’s skull.

It turned out to be in Death Wish II, but by the time I found it I was in the grip of Angry White Man Syndrome and so I had to watch all the way through to the vastly underrated Death Wish V: The Face of Death because I had fond memories of the cyanide-laced-cannoli scene.

That’s what we Angry White Men do.

When we’re not beating up our wives and girlfriends or killing Meskin illegals with our concealed-carry Glocks purchased at the Tactical Knife and Gun Wholesale Megamarket in Lumberton, North Carolina, we’re pretty much leading normal lives hanging around the Waffle House so the process server can’t find us and extradite us to southern Alabama to face charges on the 47 months of back child-support payments we never paid because we “just forgot, Your Honor.”

I actually didn’t realize I was an Angry White Man until I finished reading the 397 articles written since the election that start out, “Donald Trump is the product of hatred, misogyny, nativism, bigotry, and resentment emanating from angry white men lamenting the loss of their factory jobs to China.”

The only factory I ever worked at was Phil Hargett’s bus-bench factory in Tullahoma, Tennessee, but I always thought the reason they went out of business was that Phil sold ads on the back of the benches to the Mons Venus All Nude Strip Club in Tampa, causing the Tampa City Council to cancel his contract. Knowing that China stole the municipal-bus-bench business from us makes me even more angry, since it probly makes me ineligible for unemployment checks.

The Angry White Man theory is based on the fact that “whites without a college degree”—apparently this is something that pollsters keep track of—voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 39 percent. This one statistic has been repeated over and over to bolster the phrase “angry white men,” first used by Bill Clinton as a way of explaining the 1994 midterm elections—and used again this year to explain his wife’s loss, indicating Bill really is stuck in the past.

If you knew about the Angry White Men in 1994, Bill, why didn’t you warn Hillary?

But more to the point, if you keep calling people like me Angry White Men, we eventually become…Angry Goldurn White Men!

So let’s get etymological on this puppy:

Numero Uno: What media Sanhedrin decided that “absence of a college degree” equals bigotry, anger, hatred, misogyny, blah blah blah? In a world full of worthless college degrees that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, why is the decision not to seek a degree placed in a category indicating “Uh-oh, Neanderthal ahead!”? I can think of any number of reasons people would not seek a college degree, including (a) they’ve already got the job they want (Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates), (b) they want to be an entrepreneur (Steve Jobs), (c) they need to get started in their field while they’re young (Oprah Winfrey), (d) they’re talented but don’t do well in an academic setting (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Al Pacino), (e) they got expelled from school for reasons that have nothing to do with their potential (Ted Turner, John Lennon), (f) they want to do humanitarian things that are more important than school (Walt Disney, Abraham Lincoln), or (g) they are self-educated in the fields they consider important (Richard Branson, Michael Dell).

Numero Two-o: Who said the “whites without a college degree” are all male? Why is it always Angry White Men and never Angry White Women, when, in fact, a majority of white women voted for Trump? My theory is that it’s harder to make an Angry White Woman into a prehistoric reptile fighting its way back from near-extinction. It’s much easier to summon up the image of Kathy Bates’ husband in Dolores Claiborne—a bitter drunk child-molesting wife beater who (remember this part?) hates his job on a fishing boat—instead of using, say, Charlize Theron in Monster, a white woman who executes white men for a living. For that matter, when Madonna stops in the middle of a concert to talk about the Angry White Men who voted for Trump as a way of “getting rid of female empowerment,” why doesn’t the next day’s headline read “Angry White Woman Rails Against Angry White Men Who Robbed Her of…uh…Never Mind”?

Numero Three-o: Why is anger as a voting incentive limited to white males? Don’t black men get angry? When Louis Farrakhan holds a rally, why doesn’t Yahoo News say “Angry Black Men Gather in Chicago”? Why aren’t there any Angry Latino Men or Angry Chinese Men?

Numero Four-o: More specifically, how do you explain the fact that the Angry White Men who voted for Trump in 2016 are the same white men who voted for Obama in 2008? When they vote for Obama they’re not angry, but when they vote for Trump it can only be because they’re enraged hicks? Gogebic County in Michigan is 92 percent white and hadn’t voted for a Republican since 1972—until this election. The counties in southwestern Wisconsin, all heavily Democratic, went for Trump after a strong Obama vote in 2008 and 2012. Eastern Iowa, Democratic since 1988, went for Trump. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which is frequently used as the very definition of “working-class,” went for Republicans for the first time since 1988. Why are all these people classified as “angry” now, but in 2008, when they were angry at George Bush, they were just “voting for change”? Could it be, just perhaps, maybe, they feel betrayed by the Democratic Party? If we’re gonna call them angry, let’s define what they’re angry about.

Numero Five-o: Why is it assumed that being opposed to the current immigration policy equals (a) hatred of foreigners, and (b) fear of multiculturalism? Southern white men don’t care that there are Italian neighborhoods in New York, Polish neighborhoods in Chicago, West African neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., or Turkish neighborhoods in Los Angeles. They get the whole melting-pot thing, which is about 180 years old at this point. If they’re angry, it’s because they believe that people like Hillary Clinton exclude them from the melting pot by constantly talking about aggrieved blacks, aspirational Latinos, and overlooked Asians, but if they celebrate their Scots-Irish heritage at the Jerry Lawler rassling match at Mid-South Coliseum or evangelical rallies at Thomas Road Baptist Church, then they’re not regarded as part of the multicultural tossed salad, they’re just pale-skinned yahoos who are probably racists, if not white supremacists.

Numero Six-o: Why are the Angry White Men classified as reactionary when the small towns of the South and Midwest have been shown to be overwhelmingly in favor of the two largest socialist programs in the history of the country—Social Security and Medicare? Their opinion of unemployment checks is mixed—they dislike the concept, but accept it in practice when their family members get laid off. Most of them are not crazy about the Tea Party or the more extreme wing of the evangelical movement, but they’re not bothered by it. Like climate change, it’s just not a priority. Obnoxious things that Donald Trump said in 2005 on a Hollywood movie set are not a priority. These people are neither Republicans nor Democrats, liberals nor conservatives—they’re “leave me alone and do your job” voters. A lot of times these people are demonized for just not caring about something you’re supposed to care about. It’s assumed they hate things that they just don’t ever allow into their family circles in the first place.

So if we’re gonna use the word “angry” as an epithet, let’s use it where it’s most appropriate. Let’s use it for the intelligentsia, the media pundits, the various movie stars who feel an urgent need to tweet their political opinions. I’ve previously talked about the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, who has apparently become so twisted with rage that he can’t write about anything except Trump. Recent columns include “No, Trump, We Can’t Just Get Along,” “Trump: Making America White Again,” “Trump’s Agents of Idiocracy,” “Patriotic Opposition to Donald Trump,” and “Trump: Madman of the Year.” The first few columns he wrote, back in May, were fairly cogent, but now the man is out of control. Charles’ friends need to do an intervention and suggest he do a column on, say, farm policy, lest his monomaniacal fixation lead to a clinical condition, the way guys who start a bodybuilding program get strung out on protein powder and PowerBars.

Charles is an Angry Black Man, but David Remnick, the very white editor of The New Yorker, also went berserk in print, calling the election a “sickening event” and a “tragedy for the American republic” that was caused by “xenophobia” and “white supremacy,” “a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.” Normally a master of the subtle nuance, Remnick went full-tilt apocalyptic with his postelection analysis, including the Angry White Men of Europe alongside the ones in this country. And he did it for a reason. “This is surely,” he said, “the way fascism can begin.”

For those of you who aren’t keeping up, The New Yorker was founded in the ’20s as a humor magazine but hasn’t said anything humorous for at least twenty years now. Still, even by its own standards of moral seriousness, the Remnick outburst was evidence of the angriest white man I’ve encountered in a while—and I’ve been in some Deep South dive bars.

Toni Morrison, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for her novels, went so far as to say that the election was motivated entirely by white men who are fearful of black people and immigrants, tying Trump voters directly to lynch mobs and psychotic racist terrorists. “On Election Day,” she wrote, “how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump.” In other words, they voted for Trump as a way to disguise their true motives—getting rid of minorities and foreigners.

And then there was Jennifer Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s communications director, who used a meeting of campaign strategists from both camps at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to rail incoherently against the Trump campaign, going so far as to accuse her counterparts of directly going after the white-supremacist vote. She later doubled down on her accusations, essentially claiming that the Angry White Men—which, again, she should have known about because Bill invented the term—were summoned to a Klan rally by “dog whistles” in the subtext of Trump speeches.

So there you have it—an Angry Black Man, an Angry White Man, an Angry Black Woman, and an Angry White Woman—all convinced that Angry White Men in the swing states rose up like villagers with torches and lynched the rightful heir to the presidency. I could cite a hundred other examples, and they’re all angrier than the angry men they write about. They’re essentially saying that the 63 million people who voted for Trump are all misguided bigots, but especially the white males.

The only word to describe it is “entitlement.” They feel entitled by their college degree. Why do we even allow white males with no college degree to vote at all? They feel entitled by their superior sense of fairness. They don’t believe a car mechanic in Pascagoula, the hometown of Jennifer Palmieri, is equal to a Syrian refugee or a Mexican immigrant when it comes time to listen to needs and grievances. They’re disdainful of the Electoral College because it gives power to small states—just as the Founding Fathers intended, assuring Delaware and Rhode Island that they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the enormous populations of Virginia and New York. But mostly they’re convinced that they know the future of America, and they don’t think these insurance salesmen and Realtors in West Texas should be interfering with it. They are not democrats in any sense of the word. They are geniocrats. They believe the world should be run by intellectuals and artists. The fact that it’s not has made them tone-deaf, like Hillary, and very, very angry.

Awesome!

 

[Votto]

Are you feeling better now?

Yep, that's pretty much the attitude.

How's that work'in for ya?

 

[mamooth]

For an actual intelligent discussion of angry white males, I'd point everyone to this piece on cracked.com. "A satire website?", you say? Yep. These days, comedians are doing the best reporting out there.

Seriously, it's a really good piece, very even-handed, and worth reading.

How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
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"Nothing that happens outside the city matters!" they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you'd barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage.

But who cares about those people, right? What's newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. "Are you assholes listening now?"

....

Don't message me saying all those things I listed are wrong. I know they're wrong. Or rather, I think they're wrong, because I now live in a blue county and work for a blue industry. I know the Good Old Days of the past were built on slavery and segregation, I know that entire categories of humanity experienced religion only as a boot on their neck. I know that those "traditional families" involved millions of women trapped in kitchens and bad marriages. I know gays lived in fear and abortions were back-alley affairs.

I know the changes were for the best.

Try telling that to anybody who lives in Trump country.

They're getting the shit kicked out of them. I know, I was there. Step outside of the city, and the suicide rate among young people ******* doubles. The recession pounded rural communities, but all the recovery went to the cities. The rate of new businesses opening in rural areas has utterly collapsed.
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