The Growing Restlessness of White Male Assholes

Details in the Milwaukee slaughter are still unsettled.  The suspected killer Wade Micheal Page, is unavailable for questioning on account of being dead.  So it will be that much harder for authorities to figure out if he was acting alone or as part of some larger White Supremacist plot, if he knew exactly who he was killing or if he had confused his Sikh victims for Muslims.  (There was a good deal of this going around in the harassments that immediately followed 9/11.  Leaders in politics and media worked gamely and admirably to inform people that Muslims are not the only people on earth to wear turbans. No more so than my personal admiration for boss fedoras makes me Jewish.  And in truth they did seem to mostly settle this matter pretty quickly.  Still there are a few diehards committed to the idea that White American men can never be mistaken or wrong.)

Still it isn't all that terribly important if Page knew precisely who he was murdering.  Six of our compatriots are dead for exercising their freedom of worship and assembly.  The man who did it is a traitor, a traitor who it can may be safely assumed was acting out of rage of not having a rarefied social status bequeathed to him for simply being a White man.  His act was simply the logical extreme of the contemporary far-right (and increasingly mainstream right) narrative which holds that 'Real Americans' are by nature invulnerable, omnipotent, Heroic and always triumphant soldiers against cosmic evil, and above all else always in perfect absolute control over ourselves, our families, and 'Our' society.  This narrative further explains that our degradation to the state of mere mortals must only be the result of some unnatural, outside corruption, that we are only one Great Triumph away from defeating this corruption and regaining our rightful glory if only we vote GOP, assert Christian dominance of the public square, always keep a fatherly eye out for the commies and the queers and the Muslims under the bed, always carry our divinely-endowed firearms wherever we go so that we may battle against deviance wherever it may arise. 

One sees this mindset quite clearly in Russell Pearce's (Nazi chowderhead from Arizona, well one of them.) response to the Aurora massacre, lamenting that there wasn't at least one other armed Great American Individual  in the theater who would have been able to take Holmes out.  Never mind the logistics of picking out the right bad guy in a dark and panicked theater and then aiming correctly.  True Americans are supposed to believe that we are all instinctively heroes, endowed by fate to fight evil and win.  This childish claptrap is very upfront and obvious in American gun culture, and as is the case with Pearce  there are strong and numerous links between gun culture, white supremicism, anti (ILLEGAL!!!!) immigrant hysteria, or just dull contempt for the "dirtiness" of our multi-ethnic big cities.   Certainly this valuing of the second amendment as far more important than freedom of speech, thought, association, action is a product of history.  Not the history of one true 'original' meaning to the Constitution, but rather centuries of history in which White Americans were taught to equate liberty with the social power and exceptional status among men that we have been led to believe is ours by birthright.  We may no longer be explicitly taught that we are entitled to this power for being White, but we certainly are encouraged to beleive that we have been savagely wronged if we don't have it.  Buying a gun or ten and putting oneself at permanent war against criminals terrorists or whatever polluters of our essence one is able to dream of is a means of giving oneself license to assert this power.  For the greater good.  So Our Children Can Be Safe.  Naturally. 

In other news, someone in Missouri set a Mosque on fire.  Again.   Those of us who are proud to be children of a mongrel nation have some work to do.  Those of us who love the United States for what it is (instead of the horseshit John Wayne jerkoff fantasy of tiny little blockheads) are probably going to have to make ourselves ready to kick an ass or three.  So be it.  These clowns only think that they're tough; and the last time they tried to seriously act upon their insistence of being tougher than us.....