Joe Stack: The Rational and Insane

Read the following:

BBC report.

The Joe Stack Manifesto.

Finished? Good. You know what the real tragedy here is? I'll give you a hint. It isn't the suffering of this man, it isn't the suffering of those to whom he alludes, it isn't the destruction of property or lives, it isn't that the “left” or the “right” has allowed things to reach a point where this kind of reaction could be considered a rational response. It isn't any of that.

No, the tragedy is that this was futile.

Absolutely futile. An utter and total waste.

It's interesting to me that people can be so petty. They take what this man wrote and did and make it into a partisan issue. The left calls him a Tea Partier, the right calls him a socialist. The centrist elements of the media, not wishing to take sides, simply call him a criminal who wrote an “angry rant.” The funniest thing about it all is that elements of his writing might sound socialistic and elements might sound populist, but anger only appears sporadically. I get the sense that not one of the anchors speaking about him, not one of the journalists writing about him, actually took the time to skim the 3500 word document.

But what really strikes you when you read the Stack Manifesto isn't the bitterness (which is there) or even the anger (also there), but the dissatisfaction with the conclusion the author has reached and his distaste for resigning himself to it. And behind all that, even more significant, is the fact that the man is sane. He is rational. Strident? At times. He overstates his case in various points, and not merely for rhetorical emphasis. But disconnected from reality? I deny that.

Would an insane man write the following?

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers . . . I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood.

If I recall aright, de Tocqueville wrote of similar phenomena. He wrote that in republics, "the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved." And if you ask me, that's a fair assessment of American "culture" even now. And if in writing that I should invite condemnation, or in writing in hopes of an honest (rather than prejudicial) examination of a murderer I should invite condemnation, then so be it. I further contend that only someone who had no knowledge of history or, failing that, had never experienced life outside of a very confined and isolated geographic area or socio-economic strata within American jurisdiction could believe the United States is not characterized by profound injustices.

The mark of the deranged man is distortion, the mark of the conspiracy theorist circular reasoning. The mark of the rational one? Drawing conclusions based on observable evidence.

Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

But, you say, the man crashed a plane. He hurt people. Destroyed property. Yes, hypothetical straw people, he did that. He committed an act of terror (since that is essentially what it was – lone criminal or not, the intent was to be provocative). So did the men at the Boston Tea Party. And how many loyalists were tarred, feathered, hanged, drawn, and quartered? And that for a far less grievous set of offenses than those committed by the upper 1% of our society today. Great Britain imposed less taxes upon the American colonies than upon their own people. The British pointed out that not one Englishman in twenty thousand was represented in Parliament, and this note of realism about what a republic means has ever held true. The colonists revolted anyway.

Today, we have an unsustainable debt. We have just survived one near-fatal economic blow and are courting the next. We allow domestic spying. We torture. We topple governments in South America and the Middle East. Our Supreme Court has just handed the elected portion of our government over to the corporate powers that be entirely. These are nothing short of incontestable facts, and can be recognized as such by anyone not indoctrinated into one of the pop ideologies of the day. In the 70s, in the 80s even, these types things would have and did provoke riots. Today, we accept them. We yawn, turn over, shut off the alarm clock, and go to work (if, that is, we can find work).

So what, precisely, is the objection to Stack? That he was a criminal? So was Thoreau. That he is a right-wing nut? That he is a left-wing nut? But is he really a winged nut at all? That he is violent? Yes, he was. But in all honesty, pacifism is not a philosophically sound doctrine. Living persons have an interest in their own survival and well-being. If one strikes you, it is only expected that you might respond in kind. The principle of reciprocity applies. If you choose to take “the high road” that is your own affair, but there is no moral law that demands you must. If justice is fairness, then what one person is entitled to do, you are also entitled to do, provided you are truly an equal and therefore deserving of fair treatment.

And in a civil society, what else are we but equals? If we are not, I would at least appreciate it if someone would make an honest announcement to that effect. Because it seems to me that being told we are all equals is all that people want. All they need, in fact. If there was an admitted nobility, we might already have stormed the Bastille, so to speak. It might have happened on January 22^nd, 2010. But no. We wouldn't do that. We don't have an aristocracy. We don't have a plutocracy. Forget that the distribution of wealth in this country is the most grotesquely skewed of any outside certain third-world autocracies. Forget that a number of our senatorial posts are for all practical purposes hereditary. Forget that social mobility as a fact of life is dead. Forget all of that. We are equals.

So when Stack flew into that building, he was a terrorist. He was a white Osama bin Laden. It's easy enough to own up to that fact. It's the truth. Terrorism is terrorism. But if there was legitimate cause, and if Stack was not insane, then that ought to lead you to at least question your over-developed sense of security and stability. And I don't mean that in the sense of "oh my, something bad could happen to me." Let's cut through the bullshit once and for all: nothing changed on September the 11^th, 2001 – nothing changed. Americans are every bit as complacent and apathetic as ever. If we were not, would the military recruitment rate be so low? If we were not, would we have allowed the politicians to both execute an unjust war against Iraq and abuse our civil liberties in the bargain? No, all 9-11 did was create a heightened atmosphere of paranoia in which it became almost child's play for a corrupt, plutocratic ruling class to push its bloated, lethargic populace a few feet closer to the cliff. And the knowledge that that is true should be your source of discomfort.

Which makes Stack's cry -

I can only hope . . . that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are . . . but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.

- the call of a revolutionary, not a madman (even if you can argue that there is as much insanity in leaping to the radical solution as there is in “repeating the same process over and over” and expecting the outcome to be different).

So in sum, I am willing to grant Stack all his premises. I am willing to accept his view of the world as correct. I am even willing to say that he may have been justified in doing what he did, adding only the caveat that this is a mere preliminary opinion and not a final judgment on the matter. Provisionally, I grant it all.

And, with that said, we come to the one point where everything falls apart:

But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.

We are living in a country that is by no stretch totalitarian but is absolutely non-functional. And the thing is, no one really cares whether it is totalitarian or not or whether it is functional or not. No one cares. And because ours is the Age of Apathy, nothing will improve. It will only gradually decay as the various factions of the plutocracy and their appointed representatives fight it out on the floor of the capitol building. Mr. Stack did something - and I think the only thing that can finally be said of the matter is that, evil or virtuous, in a Kafkaesque nightmare such as our society has become, perhaps the only insane thing to do is nothing at all.

In any event, Mr. Stack will rally a few of the fringe loonies. His name will be thrown around in the media for a couple of months. And then the forgetful, bloated narcissists who fill every square inch of this nation will simply drop it from boredom and go onto the next popular buzz-debate. Maybe it will be something as profound as which week the fetus becomes a human being. Or maybe, and we can only hope, it will be how many inches of shoulder need to be covered on middle school girls to prevent their male classmates from being overcome with lust.

But fix any of our problems? No. The will to do it does not exist. Nor does the death of one man whom the media has so quickly and easily branded a wingnut lunatic (of one reductionist flavor or another) do anything to upset the balance that now exists. Say what you will about Stack, his actions were ultimately useless (maybe hysterical, but even hysteria can be an outcome of reason). The painful irony is that, if he was sane and rational, then acting on that rational analysis was the futile element in his life. It's an anticlimax. Which is how everything goes and how everything ends. There is nothing sublime or triumphant about it. It's all a let down. Let down and hanging around, as the song goes:

Crushed like a bug in the ground

Joe Stack – His life was futile, and he died the way he lived.