As the writing process helps me to become somewhat more conscious of my anger, I notice that I am often angry with inanimate objects.

My cellphone is too slow. WTF!

I wash a cup and place it in the over-crowded dish-rack and cause dishes to fall. God damn it!

As I yell at these objects, I’m reminded of Ivan Illich’s point that only a slave-holding society would have thought to invent robots. Illich called modern gadgets “energy slaves.”

I mean that, at some deep level, my socialization into whiteness has made me prone to assuming that technology exists to serve me. I have an ingrained, entitled sense that my surroundings should automatically comply with my will. Or if not, they deserve my wrath.

I mean that there is something racist about me yelling at my cellphone, as if it were a non-human or sub-human energy slave.

A few years ago my sister called me, panicked, and she said that she was worried that her step-son might become a school-shooter.

At this time, my sister lived with her then-husband, my brother-in-law, who a large collection of guns, and who also had a serious drug problem.

Ian left rifles and pistols all around the house… on the kitchen table, on the couch… He even an AK-47 (which I shot one Christmas).

The step-son was getting into trouble at school, my sister said, and she had found him (12 years old) in bed with his younger cousin (8 years old).

I was frankly kind of confused by the subtext that my sister—who usually doesn’t call me out of the blue, or at all—had wanted my advice, it seemed, about the kids’ same-sex playing-doctor situation, I guess because I as the gay brother would have some insight?

The whole back story about my brother-in-law and his son needs to be explicated in another draft of this story. For years, I was led to believe that they were brothers. I’m still frankly not sure if my sister was fully aware of the truth. Also for what it’s worth Ian was one of the gang of guys, whom I had researched back when I was 16 doing my immersive journalistic project…

In any case, I think that the history of Latin America can help to make sense of the U.S. school-shooting phenomenon. In Mexico and in Argentina, several times, right-wing dictatorships have used paramilitary forces, trained by the CIA, to murder students. As Cavanaugh, Klein, and Falquet have argued separately, this has ideological benefits to right-wing regimes (atomizes the population, stifles dissent, firms up the state’s power).

The school-shooting is another thing. Not a directly organized conspiracy, by any means. But the logical and constant outcome of state policy. It’s like the free-market, invisible-hand, individualist version of murdering young people—and it serves the same ideological ends.

I grew up in a rural Appalachian town of less than 1000 ppl and one of my early writerly projects was, when I was 16, this group of redneck boys let me hang out with them, and we worked on a farm together, and I had promised to write a book about them (tentatively called Hicks).

A weird part of that story is how when I came out of the closet, my mother burnt my books—my whole adolescent library of hundreds of volumes mostly beatniks and romantics—along with all of my manuscripts and notes.

So I lost all of the notes I had taken about palling around with these roughneck guys, working on the farm all day and drinking beer by the campfire every night.

Most of the guys ended up being marines or cops or prison guards, though one of them killed his best friend in a drunken brawl, and a couple OD’d.

The thing to do would be to interview all the guys now—the ones who survived. But I swore to never set foot in that town again.

Recently it’s become common for commentators like David Brooks to suggest that the red/blue divide has to do with the gap between the college-educated and the non-college-educated, and to suggest that the Democratic party only appeals to people with B.A.s

One thing I think missing from this conversation is that rural white people often have, but eschew, the opportunity to go to college. For cultural, not for economic reasons.

In my own case, as a kid, I was constantly pressured not to study, not to go to college. I was bullied by my family and community to join the Army. (Recruiters came to the high-school cafeteria regularly during lunchtime.)

It was really quite bizarre to me at the time, since there were wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the idea of enlisting sounded like a death sentence. But my parents continually enjoined me: “Join the Army, they’ll make a man out of you.” Meanwhile they tried to thwart my academic opportunities.

In 2003, when I was 15, I won a full scholarship (with free tuition, room and board) to attend the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts. My parents refused to allow me to go, because they thought it was embarrassing for their son to study art.

(The argument turned into a physical fight, and my father nearly murdered me, but I jumped out a window and ran away through the woods to a friend’s house and finally ended up going to the school.)

In any case the point is that rural whites are deeply opposed to learning, deeply anti-intellectual. Their antipathy for universities and for the college-educated has to do with their prejudices, not their economic circumstances.

Sometimes in NYC among academic colleagues or fellow artists, I’ve mentioned my childhood in Appalachia; and unfortunately people’s only real frame of reference these days is J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. It seems that the experience of rural whites is under-represented in mainstream culture, and so distant from the lives of the folks derided as “New York City liberal elitists.” Maybe it is willful naivete but much of the country seems not to know, or not to want to know, what’s happening out in the sticks.

But as I brainstorm how to write about my upbringing in the middle of Pennsylvania, and think about how to describe the fascism of white rural culture, I think it might be useful for me to start keeping a running list of examples:

• For my eighth birthday, I received a gun. Learning to kill was part of the culture from a very young age. Side note: in sixth grade, one of my classmates killed his father in a hunting accident. Such incidents were quite common…
• My brother-in-law owns an AK-47.
• In the Boy Scouts, we burnt books. But this wasn’t exactly political. One of the Boy Scout leaders had found a stash of books at a yard sale and had brought them the Scout Hall to use as kindling in the woodstove that we used to heat the hall. Every week we burnt the books, I guess out of a sense that they just weren’t useful?
• Boy Scouts is obviously a proto-fascist organization and I experienced a lot of hazing and abuse. We were always having rock fights. Stick wars. Boys beating each other up and saying “don’t be gay.”
• My aunt lived in a town called Coatesville where Zachariah Walker was lynched in 1911 and one of my aunt’s neighbors still has one of Walker’s fingers.
• Where I grew up in Pennsylvania, in Columbia County, residents in 1864 voted 2-1 against the releection of Lincoln and huge portions of the population dodged the draft. Perhaps as many as 500 men organized an armed uprising against the Union. Union troops put down the so-called “Fishing Creek Confederacy” and arrested like 100 rebels.
• …

In trying to understand the appeal of Trump for rural white working-class voters, I want to draw upon studies of domestic abuse (Lundy, Why Does He Do That? and Jules Falquet, Pax Neoliberalia), and think about the rural white working-class culture as a culture of abuse both personal and political.

Lundy offers a way to critique what I am starting to describe as the “apologetics discourse” that makes excuses and tries to rationalize white rural fascism. That is, there is a persistent tendency to explain why white rural people are drawn to a reactionary politics, by suggesting that they have some legit grievance (see previous post citing Baldwin, Obama, Brooks, etc.).

Lundy was a therapist who worked in court-ordered group counseling for abusive men, and one of the most damning insights in Why Does He Do That? is the suggestion that domestic abusers have been persistently able to justify themselves with myths (e.g. that they cannot contain their anger, or have been abused themselves, or suffer from alcohol or drug dependency, or in other words have some reason to abuse). But as Lundy uncovers from working with many abusers, these men simply enjoy abusing people and feel that they have a right to abuse.

What Falquet has to say is also crucial for understanding domestic abuse as a political culture. Falquet, writing about Mexico & Central Am, shows that domestic abuse is typically practices by men who belong in some way to the power structure (cops, soldiers), and whose abuse has a political-economic function. Abuse, Falquet argues, is a form of right-wing paramilitary violence that men use strategically in order to extract wealth and labor from subordinated women and children.

I think that one could establish how the main institutions of rural white life—the family, the school, the church, the Boy Scouts, the factory—are all sites of incredible interpersonal violence which acculturates people into accepting and perpetuating abuse as a right-wing political formation.

One of the implications would be that people identify with Trump precisely because he is known to abuse women and subordinates. (Put Bill Clinton into the mix, why not? Part of his charm, in a perverse way, is that he is a womanizing creep often accused of sexual harassment and violation). Or in other words the trashy white culture, which thrives on domestic abuse, cathects people to such men and even in its intimate settings already has a right-wing political function…

AI is stealing our jobs?

In Energy and Equity, Ivan Illich suggested that the desire to build robots is the reflex of a society built on slavery…

And is there not then a racial subtext to the discourse which claims that robots “steal jobs?”

As I’m trying to fry some eggs over-easy, a yolk breaks, and I yell: GODDAMNIT.

Anger of this sort—seemingly out of proportion to the situation—is a habitual affect of my own daily life, embedded in my body since childhood, growing up in a working-class rural white family where violent outbursts were constant…

There is already a certain literature which establishes how lower-class whites have a tendency to be “ornery” and thin-skinned…

I wonder how much of this kind of anger comes from my sense of entitlement—from a racist or sexist belief that eggs should be served to me perfectly, without any effort on my part, that the breaking of a yolk represents a slight against my status?

From a young age—I think like 8 or 10?—it fell to do me to do most of the cooking and cleaning for my parents and little sister. Usually I came home from school to find a list of instructions (fry this hamburger in a pan, boil water in this pot). When my parents came home from work, later, I set the table and served them. During dinner usually there were wild screaming matches and bizarre fights… total chaos and fear… I cleaned the table and washed the dishes… while my father continued to eat and eat and meanwhile to make cruel remarks about how I was a “sissy” and was “doing the women’s work.”

Actually tho one of my happier memories is my grandmother teaching me to crack eggs, and on my first try, an egg broke onto the floor… She smiled and found a towel and said that’s ok, honey, and handed me another egg to try again…

But I think what I mean to say is that somehow projected onto me and ingrained into me was a conflict around doing these chores, a sense that they are shameful for white men to do… a sense that rage always accompanied cooking and eating…

It could be that this morning I had intended to only cook some scrambled eggs but then my sweetheart requested eggs over-easy and it was to me somewhat stressful to cook two dishes and I do not feel confident with my eggs over-easy… I remember my mother often screaming that she was not a short-order cook and that she did not take any special requests… But if she happened to break an egg yolk, she always served that to herself, this was also a rule… that the cook would have to eat whatever was not prepared perfectly, that the perfectly prepared food was reserved for the man of the house…

I could see a chapter developing around this that folds in, for example, how in our town many people (e.g. my father) did not eat onions, garlic, peppers, because they considered this ethnic food, not suitable for white men, who ate (they said) “meat and potatoes.”

Larry Kramer’s famous anger…

Sarah Schulman’s discussion of white privilege’s complicated role in the work of ACT UP…

One of the things I’m curious about is WHITE RAGE APOLOGETICS…

Or, the cultural work that is done in order to justify away working-class white resentment…

Examples like

• David Brooks recently blaming higher-ed & deindustrialization…
• Bernie Sanders, from another vantage, claiming that the Democratic party doesn’t support working people and has driven working-class whites into Trump’s hands
• or Obama famously saying:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

• James Baldwin in “Nothing Personal” making the (positively awful) claim that “The poor white was enslaved almost from the instant he arrived on these shores, and he is still enslaved by a brutal and cynical oligarchy.”

In other words, this persistent cultural tendency to suggest that white resentment is a RATIONAL psychological response to objectively difficult socio-economic conditions…

I think it is a legitimately interesting question, Why is white affect so resentful, why are whites so prone to rage and bitterness? But this approach—blaming it on a legit grievance—seems to me not to really address the pathological and fascist dimensions of white bitterness…