You deserve some credit for my first book.
Hi, Rushton.
We don’t know each other. And never will. I heard about your cancer news and don’t care. No. That’s not quite right. It’s more like a few good people in my life have died of lung cancer and I would gladly trade you and some of your white supremacist listeners if it brought them back.
When it comes to you and your habitual smoking, publicity pics of you holding cigars always made me think of this George Carlin bit. Fast forward the clock and now you’re dying from lung cancer…I dunno.
These days, so many other issues seem more worthy of my attention. And you did go out of your way to disparage cancer doctors and discredit statistics about smoking.
So…I dunno. You’re dying. People have died before and people will die in the future. I will die one day. Life on Spaceship Earth just rolls like that.
After you are gone from this planet, Rush, people will not look back at your life positively. History books will say that Big Don gave you that Presidential Medal of Freedom just because he thought that it would own the libs. They’ll compare your “achievements” to other MoF recipients’ actual achievements and they will be honest about the differences between their merits and your privilege. Your white supremacy won’t be airbrushed out of the picture of your life. On a bigger level, Right wing chickenhawkery will be blamed on those Baby Boomers who dodged the Vietnam Draft, even though they personally supported the war effort. Osama bin Laden attacked us because of men like you, Donald Trump, Dick Cheney, Ted Nugent, and John Bolton. He knew that you all would respond the way that you did, advocating for the U.S. to react in ham-handed, self-serving ways which in turn would recruit new generations of Islamic fighters to die for the cause. Sadly, when thinking about the Middle East and Central Asia today, it appears that you all surpassed even bin Laden’s expectations.
I don’t know if you comprehend any of what I just said, because when things get tense, whites get dense, but I am right when it comes to your “legacy”. (Quotes intentional.)
While I don’t like your toxic mix of racism, authoritarianism, and sexism, I do owe you one, Rush. In this roundabout kind of way, I owe you one.
If you never verbally attacked a law student named Sandra Fluke, there is an okay chance that I might have walked away from releasing my first book, Fearkiller (Volume 1).
My dark comedy begins with an upper-income white guy (the angry type who would be a fan of yours) getting beaten to death with a hammer. Afterward, the murderer decides to save the ailing U.S. economy as an act of penance. It’s set during the Great Recession and the precarious employment picture plays a key part in the story.
As the book goes on, other moments in history get referenced and the disgusting moments, like Wall Street causing the Great Recession, get verbally rendered in the ways that they deserve. Though the book also does touch on other surreal, not-as-vile moments from the 2000s; its subject matter isn’t 100% putrid.
The Kirkus Review expands on my story and its themes. There are reviews on the Amazon page as well. So I won’t go into further detail.
As I was writing this first book, I damn well knew that there were topics that we Americans do not talk about. So…I set out to talk about those taboos. The systemic advantages that America grants to straight, white males like you and me—I wanted my first book to examine those advantages and why we think they are so important.
Also, it seemed fun to write a story where the character who should be the victimizer was instead the one who gets victimized. Why not create a character based off of the well-off, Fox News-watching chickenhawk—the fella who bursts with impotent rage and a twisted sense of Darwinism—then end that character’s life in ways that the real-life guy fantasizes about when it’s a person of color or a woman?
It’s just fiction. Art. Why not?
As the book got closer to completion, I shared it with some trusted friends. Their comments pretty much said that people should not be writing stories where white American guys on the upper end of the income ladder get dehumanized. In America, we don’t write stories where well-off white guys get dehumanized. Nope. We Americans love kitschy, ironic, dark stories about other groups getting demeaned and humiliated before finally being killed. But we aren’t comfortable with kitschy, ironic, dark stories where men who call themselves “job creators” get demeaned and humiliated before finally being killed.
That’s what I learned from the feedback. It made me think a lot.
And as all this was happening, Rushton, you got this bright idea inside your soda-cracker-white brain to criticize a law student for wanting birth control just because it would be the most chuckle-body, golly-shucks, caucasian-prick maneuver. As a white male, you felt that Sandra Fluke spoke out-of-turn. So you decided to humiliate her on-air because it would titillate your audience of angry racists, hearing their white supremacist idol say inappropriate things about an educated woman.
Since you thought it was perfectly okay to say the things you did about this person—even though not one bit of her actions posed any sort of threat to you—I figured it would be okay to self-publish a dark comedy where a made-up character gets beaten to death with a hammer and the narrative doesn’t make any effort to humanize the character. You showed extreme insensitivity towards another living person. Releasing my book only made sense.
Every person who has released a book knows that terrifying, vulnerable feeling one gets when it gets closer to launching that story out into the world. Maybe due to my storyline, I had another layer of apprehension.
But, then you decided to flaunt your privilege towards a person who did not deserve your attempts at shame—just because you could.
Which made me want to get my story out there even more.
So for that, I say thank you, Rush. Thank you for being you. For being racist, Nazi-wannabe, pent-up-raging chickenhawk, woman-hating, insecure, overprivileged, willfully-ignorant, paranoid you.
I hope they bury you in your finest white hood and sheet.
#sci-fi fan? Check out my other story series.
Chris Maley 
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