Under standard American business ethics, and most state laws if I'm not mistaken, such a request from a person with control over your job is an abuse of power a

Under standard American business ethics, and most state laws if I'm not mistaken, such a request from a person with control over your job is an abuse of power and automatically over the harassment line. (This is probably true everywhere in the world but perhaps not recognized as such.) Any American manager would know this and would have no excuse. You don't wave a gun around at work because you're having "a bad day" and you don't write stuff like this. At a company with any ethical backbone, he'd have been pushed out the door so fast they might have forgotten to open it first.