I would say that Ted Rall's latest book should come with a warning label, but the title — “The Anti-American Manifesto” (Seven Stories, 2010) — probably suffices. He says it's meant to be ironic, co-opting the epithet the right-wing media would assign to this call for a full-scale revolution by the American left if he didn't do it first.

It's likely going to make you mad if your politics lie anywhere on the red side of center. And if they lean blue, Rall would argue that it's going to stir up some seething rage you already had lying around and then give you a target. A big one.

“The story of the United States of America as we know it — not merely as the world's dominant superpower, but as a discrete political, economic, and geographic entity — is drawing to a close due to a convergence of emerging economic, environmental, and political crises.”

“We can wait for the system to collapse of its own accord, for the rage of the downtrodden and dispossessed to build, for chaos of some sort to expose and destroy it. But implosion might take a long time. And when it happens, we may find ourselves even more powerless than we are now."

“So let's do something. Let's seize power now, before it's too late."

“Why not us? Why shouldn't we free ourselves? Why shouldn't we seize the mansions and bank accounts of the rich/thieves? Why shouldn't we nationalize corporations? Why can't we take the CEOs who pay themselves millions while firing workers, put them on trial, and throw them in prison? Why shouldn't we bring home the foot soldiers of the military-industrial complex, close the bases overseas, end the wars, and use the resulting peace dividend to build schools and pay teachers decently and heal the sick?”

And that's all from Chapter 1.

Rall writes with a sweeping fury that makes it easy, sometimes even irresistible, to pause for a minute in busily producing the boot-strapping, can-do, everything's-gonna-be-all-right facade most of us have plastered over whatever disasters the Great Recession has brought us. If privation hasn't actually knocked on our door (or thrown us out on the street), chances are good we're so worn out from keeping it at bay that when the evening news reports record corporate profits in the same breath as record foreclosure rates, we don't have the energy to plumb the visceral twang of wrongness it provokes.

Finding himself among the nearly 4 million of us who lost our jobs in 2009, however, Rall did.

His skewering of “the American way of life” as it's currently practiced is exhaustive, from an eight-page listing of U.S. military interventions to descriptions of children's deaths by profit-maximizing environmental standards to a scalding characterization of the bipartisan collusion against taxpayers known as TARP.

Even worse, he contends, is what's poised to step in to fill the void once the system finally eats through its last supports: gangster capitalist plutocrats who control all the resources, supported by the thousands of militant right-wing citizens who have been arming themselves for years in preparation for just such a day (Michigan gets a couple of uncomfortable shout-outs by name on that front). It follows, he says, that the American left better mobilize — and fast.

Is your head spinning yet? Mine was. These are not ideas that are often heard in public. Rall's been on tour since late September with this book — what's he finding out there?

“I am getting huge crowds,” he answered by phone from his home in New York City. “This is my 16th book, and I never have crowds like this. My turnouts are three to four times higher than usual; the percentage of people who buy the book is much higher. The thing is, the enthusiasm and desperation of people is palpable. People are so sick of the Democrats and the Republicans and more so with the mainstream left, which they view as impotent and worthless, and they're looking for better options. The sense is that the anger is on the Tea Party's side, but the people on the left are just as mad about the bank bailouts and the wars. They're just mad about different things. … My instincts told me that by the time it was published, people would be ready to hear it, and I was right.

“We all know someone who's out of work. For the first time, we're really feeling the effects of global capitalism. Nothing brings it home like getting fired so your boss can give himself a raise. I think that's the point that's so pertinent. It's going to be an interesting couple of years. My theory is, this system is out of answers. They have them, but they just can't use them. The capitalist imperative is to steal and rape and pillage. They know when they should take a break, they really do, but they just can't.”

Even if you've been right with Rall until now, we just hit a snag. It seems pretty intuitive that even a whole horde of eco-friendly, anti-war, health-care-for-all types are likely to be no match for either pillaging imperialists or armed zealots. So what, exactly, is it that he'd like the members of the left to do? The specifics, he says in the book, are up to each individual. But one action that can't be ruled out is violence. In fact, it will probably be required.

He knows this is anathema to his target audience, going to far as to say that “pacifism has been the state religion of the official Left since the end of the Vietnam war.” But it doesn't change the assertion of this Columbia-educated Pulitzer Prize finalist and self-described “student of history” that no meaningful political change has ever come about without the use of force, or at least the credible threat of it.

“Of course the official left is unhappy about (the call to arms),” he said. “I was reading thousands of posts as a result of my Dylan Ratigan appearance and people are saying, 'But if the right was advocating violence' — which they do — 'the left would be yelling at them.' And I'm like 'Yeah, but not me.' ... The truth is that violence is always there, even if you swear that you will never act violently. If I were having a street demonstration and I went on TV and said, 'We promise not to be violent. No matter what happens, we won't be violent,' does that mean the mayor shouldn't send the police? No. They don't know you.

“I've seen a lot of violence, and I didn't like it. I've covered the war in Afghanistan, I've been to Kashmir, I was bullied as a kid, and I find it despicable. And one of the reasons I'm advocating overthrowing the system is because it's so (expletive) violent! It's massacring tens of thousands of Muslims! Tell me it's not violence when you can't afford to have your kids see a doctor and you have to watch them suffer. You don't think it's violence that Bill Gates has $53 billion but people in this country can't see a doctor? You don't think he's benefiting from a system that's sucking the blood out of millions of people?

"It should always be the last resort, because there's the danger that you will become what you despise. At the same time, when you're dealing with a colossus, you can't fight with one hand tied behind your back.”

For all of his righteous rancor, it's both jarring and a little poignant when Rall refers to Barack Obama as the smartest and most well-intentioned president we're likely to ever get. Rall wasn't always so radical — as recently has half a decade ago, he wrote a book advocating for more liberal power within the Democratic party in the same way that the far right has organized for influence within the Republican party. But there was one moment after the economic crisis, he said, in which everything changed.

“It was when Obama said he was going to continue the Bush bailouts of the banks. They're not going to work. They can't work. They're not a jobs program. … The system had broken beyond repair. We have this crazy situation with the real unemployment at 20 percent — even at the height of the Depression it was 25 percent — and neither party can do anything about it. Republicans are trying to fire more public workers (and add them to the unemployment rolls), and Democrats can't get anything done on jobs. You know this, you're in Michigan where it's been going on for decades. And nationally, the U.S. is becoming a giant Michigan and neither party can do anything. They view this as an opportunity to loot the system through the banks! They know this is increasing social and political instability and opening a gateway for people like me, but they can't help themselves.”

Did I say this book would probably make you mad? I forgot “exhausted” and “utterly despairing.” The facts and arguments in it are many, and some are remarkably convincing, but the vision of a confederation of Daily Show-watchers succeeding at a task more ambitious than the one the Rebel South failed at is pretty hard to conjure up.

No matter, writes Rall. Today's task isn't winning a war, although he's pretty insistent that the time for action is nigh. Instead, “the most important thing an American citizen can do today is realize that there is another way to live, that there are, in fact, an infinite number of other ways of life, governmental and economic systems that we should consider emulating, and brand-new ones no one has ever thought of before, waiting to be discovered.”

Ted Rall will read from and discuss "The Anti-American Manifesto" at Hatcher Graduate Library at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 2.

Leah DuMouchel is a freelance writer who covers books for AnnArbor.com.