Detour: Violent Fury
What turns anger into rage?
Back in the day, I was a frequent business traveler who lived for first-class upgrades. Half the time I flew, I would get upgraded. When I didn’t, it was frustrating, particularly if my name was the next one on the list.
Air travel delivers many indignities, but the most infuriating was the unexpected downgrade. Twice, after receiving an upgrade, I was moved back to economy just before boarding. In one case, the cause was an aircraft swap; in the other, it was the surprise arrival of a VIP passenger. I knew it was silly to be upset about flying in the cabin I had paid for, but it was still maddening. And, while my memory has erased my embarrassing reactions, I know I didn’t respond well.
I remember being furious. I had been rewarded for my frequent patronage, had the reward rescinded by surprise, and had to travel like almost everyone else. Oh, the horror!
Recently, chatting with friends, I mentioned that many of the perpetrators in my stories are angry white men with untreated mental health issues. Is that a problem, I asked?
I’ve written about a divorced man who murdered his ex-wife, a violent father who used his sons to rob a Las Vegas casino, a white supremacist who shot down a police helicopter in Death Valley, and — last week — a paranoid L.A. police chief. Of course, I’ve also written about women and people of color, both as perpetrators and victims.
But I keep coming back to these disgruntled white men who feel the world has cheated them. Somehow, their disappointment and sense of humiliation manifest as hate. Angry at the world, they permit themselves to abandon social norms, morality, and common decency. They seem to believe that laws are something others have created to keep them down and, therefore, can be disregarded.
In talking with my friends, we concluded that these angry white men — who seem to commit the bulk of the most violent crimes in America — deserve the attention I’m paying them.
One commonality of the white male perpetrators in my stories is their struggles with mental health. Treatment for such issues is hard to obtain under the best circumstances and even more difficult for sporadically employed people in rural areas who mistrust the government. Even some of the figures who weren’t violently angry — like the vagabond who fabricated a murder story or the newspaper publisher who burned down his own business — had obvious psychiatric issues that went untreated.
A common conclusion is that men like those I write about are upset that the birthright they expected from being white and male did not arrive. They experienced a status downgrade, like I had on airplanes.
But maybe this explanation of white male anger is only partially true. Many of the perpetrators in my stories grew up in poverty with low expectations. Perhaps the very slow decline of white patriarchy triggered them, but I’m not sure they saw the world that way. It’s more likely that, today, politicians and preachers channel the anger of these alienated men to oppose social progress. It’s not hard to redirect amorphous bitterness into political outrage.
Airlines are dishonesty machines. They lie about delays, mislead about prices, and postpone or minimize refunds. Flying on a good day is an ethereal experience; flying on a bad day is enough to make a sane person crazy. And I wonder if it might be the dishonesty of government institutions and corporate entities that angers certain white men to the point of violence. Perhaps that’s where entitlement plays a role: these people permit themselves to respond more violently than the rest of us would ever consider. It’s less anger that defines the men I write about than it is violence.
Perhaps there’s an analogue to air rage, where after suffering through one travel affront or another and consuming excessive amounts of alcohol, flyers behave in bizarrely disruptive ways. And that demographic is not just white men. The permission these drunk, angry travelers give themselves to assault flight crews is, I believe, related to the liberties taken by aggrieved men with guns on the ground.
Writing about crime can be disheartening. But I keep doing it because the transgressions open windows into humanity: the motivations behind bad choices, the justifications people invent, and the ways people respond to the consequences their actions bring. We all get angry and do things we regret from time to time. Looking at the extreme version of that response is — perhaps? — useful.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
