From Truth Out: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20211-united-states-is-faced-with-a-feverish-populism-of-anger-and-hatred
By Michael Kimmel
Sunday, 24 November 2013
Perhaps the biggest evolutionary change in contemporary social attitudes in the United States has been an increased embracing of people regardless of gender or gender preference. Needless to say there are many battles to be fought, but as Truthout has documented over the years much progress has occurred. Enormous challenges remain, but the overall arc of gender equality is bending in the direction of justice.
With the sharing of power and acceptance of “non-masculine” values, according to sociologist Michael Kimmel, also comes a backlash. The angry white male is a major force in the ferocious efforts to return the United States to a patriarchal society. Such is the topic of Kimmel’s latest book: Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era.
An excerpt from the Introduction to “Meet America’s Angry White Men”:
Rick is one of the men you will meet in this book, men who feel they have been screwed, betrayed by the country they love, discarded like trash on the side of the information superhighway. Theirs are the hands that built this country; theirs is the blood shed to defend it. And now, they feel, no one listens to them; they’ve been all but forgotten. In the great new multicultural American mosaic, they’re the bland white background that no one pays any attention to, the store-bought white bread in a culture of bagels, tortillas, wontons, and organic whole-grain designer scones. They’re downwardly mobile, contemptuously pushed aside by fast-talking, fast-driving fat cats and bureaucrats.
And they’re mad as hell.
You see them pretty much everywhere these days – yet they’re often invisible. They patrol America’s southern border, determined to keep out Mexican immigrants. They tune in to venomous talk-radio hosts who translate economic anguish, psychological distress, and political confusion into blind rage. They swarm into populist Tea Party rallies, hoping to find like-minded kinsmen willing to join with them to turn the country around. Some even take up arms against their own country, establishing semiautonomous enclaves and blowing up federal buildings. And, of course, when threatened by external forces, they muster up their coldest steel-eyed Dirty Harry imitation and say, “Make my day.”
Continue reading at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20211-united-states-is-faced-with-a-feverish-populism-of-anger-and-hatred
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