Going Postal.

I recently came across this interview on Alternet (www.alternet.org/) which I found most intriguing. Mark Ames puts forward the idea, in his book Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (Soft Skull, 2005) that so-called spree killing are not random acts of violence at all – but part of slow motion rebellion against the ‘American Way’.

Here are some extracts from his interview with Jan Frel:

It's not easy to stare this country square in the face and bear witness to the pandemic of horror, misery and rape-the-fields viciousness that abounds. I can do it at the most for 10 minutes at a time... and then find myself drifting back to my Comfortable Place. It's far harder to sit down and write about what's really going on in America; there are entire publications -- like Newsweek or New York Magazine -- that give every sign of making it editorial policy to scour each article and delete any hint of reference to the scales on our dark underbelly. So it's a fairly powerful event to find a decent-sized book that does nothing but articulate a series of truths about the American Life you've hardly read about or spoken about, but just simply felt. Mark Ames' "Going Postal” is such a book. Ames takes a systematic look at the scores of rage killings in our public schools and workplaces that have taken place over the past 25 years. He claims that instead of being the work of psychopaths, they were carried out by ordinary people who had suffered repeated humiliation, bullying and inhumane conditions that find their origins in the "Reagan Revolution." Looking through a carefully researched historical lens, Ames recasts these rage killings as, essentially, failed slave rebellions.

JF: What got you interested in American rage murders? Did you have an inkling about what their underlying cause might be before you started piecing the articles and background information about them together in a systematic fashion?

MA: Columbine. I had just flown home from Moscow to visit a friend who was dying of cancer when Columbine happened, and my first, unmediated reaction to the news was something between sympathy and awe. Officially everyone was horrified, but a lot of friends I talked to, ranging from artists to yuppies, told me they had the same reaction, that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were like heroes, and we were all surprised it didn't happen sooner. So I started to ask myself why I had this sympathy, why it was so widespread (and sympathy for the killers is incredibly common, just highly censored), and that led me to look at the larger phenomenon of rage murders. On my next visit there was a massacre at Xerox in Honolulu. At the time I was trying to cover the start of the 2000 Democratic presidential nomination campaign, and I felt overwhelmed by the intolerable insanity of the culture, and that feeling of being crushed, and then I remembered, "This is why I left the US for Russia in the first place." That was when I finally linked the two, workplace and school rage murders. These weren't the works of psychopaths -- they were people fighting against something intolerable that many of us know is there, but hasn't been named yet. There isn't a Marx to give a name to post-Reagan middle-class pain. How do you fight against something horrible, oppressive, and debilitating before it even has a name? Especially when everyone, especially middle-class people, sneer at it and refuse to believe it's valid. When you're too deep in the culture, you start to think that the most horrible/mundane aspects are normal and just the way things are. When you're outside of it for awhile, it's a little easier to see the insanity and brutality for what it is.

JF: How much blame do you place on Reaganomics for the changes in the workplace that you argue lead to rage attacks?

MA: Put it this way: rage murders in the workplace never existed anywhere in history until Reagan came to power. Reagan made it respectable to be a mean, stupid bastard in this country. He is the patron saint of white suckers. He unleashed America's Heart of Vileness -- its penchant for hating people who didn't get rich, and worshipping people who despise them, and this is the essence of Reaganomics.

MA: As for the slave tendency in humanity, I think it's a lot stronger in America than in most other countries in part because no other country on earth has so successfully crushed every internal rebellion. Slaves in the Caribbean for example rebelled a lot more because their oppressors weren't as good at oppressing as Americans were. America has put down every rebellion, brutally, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Confederate Rebellion to the proletarian rebellions, Black Panthers, white militias... you name it. This creates a powerful slave mentality, a sense that it's pointless to rebel. And this in turn creates pointless rebellions like modern workplace and school rebellions, just like our early slave rebellions were carried out in totally pointless, seemingly random ways.

JF: You demonstrate that there is absolutely zero accuracy in the psychological profiles that "experts" have assembled to predict what kind of young student might start another Columbine, and you instead advocate profiling schools that could prompt a deadly massacre. What are some of the tell-tale signs to look for?

MA: White kids. Just look for white kids, and you'll have a potential Columbine. When I said that the school should be profiled rather than the kid (since the Secret Service and FBI have both concluded no profile of a Columbiner is possible), I meant something larger than just the school campus -- I meant the entire culture. Our culture today is completely insane, the disconnect between how our propaganda says our lives are, and how our lives actually are. And let's face it, white middle-class kids are far more deeply invested in the dominant cultural lies, and therefore more easily destroyed by the rupture when those lies become untenable, than minority urban kids are.

JF: You repeatedly cite how calm the attackers are while the killing is going on, how they consciously avoid the people who treated them nicely, and how many of the victims sympathize with the impulses of the rage killers. Were you surprised at how "rational" -- input leading to output -- these rage attacks look within their context?

MA: No. In fact, I have to admit it pleased me to learn this, because it proved that these people are not sick freaks like Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson. This is what makes rage massacres so threatening and unique. They appeared out of nowhere in the annals of crime, starting up in the mid-1980s, just as Reaganomics took hold. The rage murderers were often very well-liked at their offices or schools. They were often seen as harmless. They were middle-class, trying to get by. The fact that they were rational in their massacres proved that they weren't out to kill for pleasure, but rather they were striking against something larger than just human blood. They wanted to kill the Beast, and many employees or students represented a part of that Beast, while others clearly did not. That is to say, their rational behaviour during these massacres proved that they weren't sick -- quite the opposite, their problem is that they couldn't live by the Lie any longer.

I certainly find it a fascinating hypothesis. The idea of people just ‘losing it’ for no reason never really sat well with me and I think that Mark Ames might be on to something here. I have yet to read the book (the paperback isn’t due out here until March 2006) but it’s definitely on my ‘to buy’ list as I’d love to learn more about this interpretation.

So are these people just crazies with guns… Or is there something darker beating at the heart of American (or maybe even Western) Culture. Are spree-killings a result of full throttle free market Capitalism? It’s certainly a scary thought………..