Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion by Mark Ames Soft Skull Press, 2005 360 pages, $15.95
In April 2007, when a Virginia Tech student killed 32, it was one of the worst ever, to coin a phrase, "social shootings." Earlier, in February, five were killed in a Salt Lake mall and then, in December, nine in an Omaha mall.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion by Mark Ames was published by Soft Skull Press back in 2005. But the continued popularity of school, mall, and workplace shootings as a practical solution for troubled souls obligates us to revisit this essential work.
When social shootings first burst upon the scene, they seared the national psyche like a wildfire. Though since overshadowed by 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina, the regularity with which they flare up keeps them from slipping off our radar.
In 1986 postal employee Patrick Sherrill couldn't have imagined the trend he sparked when he opened fire on the Edmond, Oklahoma post office. "Going postal" soon spread to the workplace at large. Few are aware of the numbers, but from 1998 to 2003 there were 164 shootings resulting in 290 dead and 161 wounded. In 2003 alone, 45 workplace massacres left 69 dead and 46 wounded.
The frequency of school shootings is just as mind-numbing. For example, bet you didn't know that two weeks before Virginia Tech, two were killed at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Afterwards, while the bodies are autopsied, the culture audits itself. In the case of school shootings, perennial culprits like the broken family, gun availability, and bipolar disorder inevitably boil down to, "the parents," as in "I blame the..." or "Where are the..."
Never mind that, according to Ames, love for their parents is expressed in the suicide notes of Klebold and Harris (who the adolescent Internet has canonized as Saints Dylan and Eric of the Columbine order).
Ames is a founder and the editor of the eXile, a Russian alternative weekly for the English-speaking that's so wild and wooly it forces us to confront the painful truth that there may now be more freedom of the press in Russia than in the US.
Ames, pugnacious by nature (at least in his writing) is battle-tested by a decade in post-perestroika Moscow. He's thus equipped to handle the accusation for which a superficial reading of Going Postal leaves him wide open -- that he's justifying the killings.
"Rather than looking outside of the office world for an explanation," Ames writes of workplace shootings, "why not consider the changes within America's corporate culture itself?"
Because it results in the death of innocents, a massacre by a heretofore unknown entity obscures what causes it. Difficulty identifying exactly who was targeted masks the motive. But Ames chronicles case after case of a worker who's singled out for scut work and judged by separate standards. Wilting under the pressure, he invites further abuse, before ultimately erupting in a random shooting.
Except, Ames maintains, there's nothing random about it. Besides hunting down a hated supervisor or executive, the killer also mows down co-workers. Why? Because he seeks to destroy the company as an entity. This is the stuff of which uprisings are made.
In fact, Ames devotes part two of Going Postal to building the case that today's workplace shootings are akin to slave rebellions. At the time, outbreaks like Nat Turner's were viewed as inchoate and devoid of political context by a public blissfully unaware that the victims of slavery might have a problem with the institution.
But institutions, like the state whose instrument they are, have a way of steamrolling the little guy. In fact, good old American bullying is at the heart of Going Postal. But, we remonstrate, hasn't bullying in the workplace and schools become a thing of the past since civil rights laws and an ambient political correctness?
Russ Wellen is the nuclear deproliferation editor for OpEdNews. He's also on the staffs of Freezerbox and Scholars & Rogues.
"It's hard to tell people not to smoke when you have a cigarette dangling from your mouth." -- Mohamed El Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency
are more susceptible to stress- related violence just because of their nature. Women can also do that but they can have other vents and in many cases they are psychologically more mature. As for the causes defined in the paper those are all true, sorry. The negative psychologicla wave is enormous and no Michelob can stop it. Russ citates another author and thus there was no much compassion stated but we all here surely feel compassion towards innocent victims. Meanwhile we also feel black rage towards those who not only ignore the negative psychology but even use it to promote wars, atrocities and mayhem directed towards others.
I think, Mr. Ames is right. Thanks, Russ
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Mark Sashine (44 articles, 19 quicklinks, 228 diaries, 3254 comments)
on Monday, January 7, 2008 at 1:41:56 PM
Bullying is referenced here a couple times. It needs to be addressed at a foundation level. In the US workplace bullying is rampant. Studies indicate that workplace bullies are split 50/50 men and women. But workplace violence due to due to bullying is in one sense just the tip of the iceburg as the issue is so widespread and there is no recourse.
EEO protections in the US (gender, age, disability, religion, etc.) are very narrowly defined and must be related directly to the protected category. But a manager who happens to dislike people with brown eyes can make a brown-eyed person's life at work miserable with complete impunity.
Currently their are 13 states in the US with anti workplace bullying laws in various stages of the legislative process, but to date there is no law in place. Most other countries in the western industrialized world have legal recourse for for workplace bully vicitms.
Still workplace violence (probabably unlike school incidents), while too frequent, is an extreme exception as a reaction to bullying when one considers the incidence rate of bullying in the workplace in the US. Some studies indicate one in six workers have experienced this, but a recent Zogby poll stated as many as one in three have faced bullying indicating a systemic problem ( http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1353 ).
Other indicators point to a climate or business culture in which bully behaviors are accepted or encouraged. One report showed that in 50 percent of cases HR did nothing on behalf of a bully target, and that in more than 30 percent of cases HR supported or helped the bully. An unfortunate situation and cost to business as findings are that bully targets are usually the top performers. In the vast majority of cases conditions simply force vicitms to resign and go away. ( per Workplace Bully and Trauma institute http://bullyinginstitute.org/research/wbiresearch.html ).
But instead of going to the root of all of these measures by dealing with the bullies and protecting workers at that stage, the US corporate culture addresses security and protection from workplace violence. By then it's too late. 'Security' is a popular buzzword and fear sells it. But insuring dignity in the workplace is the only approach that will come close to preventing cases of bullying so severe that the victim turns to violence, usually toward themselves, sometimes toward others.
Well said. Bullying is abuse. There's child abuse and spousal/partner abuse and racism and hatred of gays/transgenders and on and on. When a society accepts abuse as a norm, it allows those without consciences and caring to wreak havoc and, often, to take power. America has more citizens per capita incarcerated, 2.2 million on any given day, with projections for this to rise. Of those imprisoned, corporations are getting virtual slave labor out of 1.7 million. A huge segment of our population rallies around capital punishment. A third of our population supports torture and unilateral aggression. Is this America the Beautiful? I think not. This is moral sickness. We've got some work to do.
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Pat Williams (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 82 comments)
on Tuesday, January 8, 2008 at 2:29:24 AM
IF YOU LOOK AT WHERE THESE CRIMES HAPPEN ALMOST ALL ARE UNDER GUN CONTROL. IN OTHER WORDS THE PEOPLE WHO DO THE SHOOTING PICK A PLACE WHERE THE OTHER PEOPLE DON'T HAVE GUNS. IT GO BACK TO GUNS DON'T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE KILL PEOPLE. THE MORE GUN CONTROL THE MORE KILLING.
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RICHARD SHADE (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 459 comments)
on Tuesday, January 8, 2008 at 2:37:55 AM
The problem is that workplace shooters aren't the bullied.
They're the bullies. They're the ones who everyone thinks is likely to do violence and who use that perception. Look at all their work records and you'll wonder why the thing that jumps out is the "sheer number of" infractions and disciplinary actions according to Gavin de Becker an author on the subject of violence. School shooters are not the bullied either, if they were you'd expect the poor and black to be overrepresented and they're not.
As for the idea that Reagan "America he was literally willing to kill us all [in plane crashes, presumably] if we didn't give in to his wealth-transfer plan" the planes got _safer_ NOT more dangerous.
In fact the whole questions a beat up, more people died of mistaken police shootings than from school or workplace shootings, but nobody was terrified of that. Well maybe the blacks but they don't count do they?
The shootings were nothing like slave rebellions. They were at worst "rebellions" of the privileged who didn't think they were privileged enough. The white, employed (or sons of employed) people basically whining about how tough they had it with firearms.
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Michael Price (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 34 comments)
on Friday, January 11, 2008 at 12:27:30 AM
