Book Review: Going Postal by Mark Ames
Published 18 years ago, Going Postal, subtitled Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond, remains visceral, unflinching, and essential in 2023.
Though the particulars and stated motivations of mass shooters may have changed somewhat in the ensuing years to reflect more sophisticated and pervasive right-wing propaganda, Mark Ames’ exhaustive dissection of the phenomenon of school and workplace rage murders which accelerated in the eviscerated landscape of post-Reagan America is essential reading for leftists looking to understand why so much destruction is focused within the classes rather than targeted at the influential politicians and corporate leaders who created this breeding ground of rage. Ames takes an exhaustive survey of the perpetrators of these mass murders and attempts to understand their life situations and motivations for the killings, finding that the media’s tendency to brush them off with pat rationalizations misses much in the way of commonality and even empathy-inducing suffering which informed their actions. The increase in such rage-motivated violence tracks neatly with the dissolution of social safety nets, cuts in government funding, deregulation and corporate restructuring, and targeted propaganda that has shaped the landscape of the last 50 years of American life. Rather than cast them as “evil” or just insane killers, these murderers are thoroughly rational, expressing a dissatisfaction through the only means they feel they have left to them, and their misery is not retroactively justified or dismissible simply because it led to their horrific actions.
Ames is careful not to lionize or apologize for the mass murderers, but instead to explain their motivations without falling into the usual media trap of demonizing and misattributing their motivations to some ethereal concept of evil or media programming (violent video games, music and movies, for example), rightly pointing out that the scattered and typically lazy explanations offered by contemporary analysis dangerously misses the point these killers are trying to make (a point which is often stated explicitly by the killers themselves). Economic inequality, bullying, a lack of opportunities and job security, the dissolution of the safety net and workers’ rights, stress from overwork, and general malaise brought about by the looming, ongoing destruction of the natural world are all more accurate, but more difficult to rationalize, explanations for both workplace and school shootings. Ames is not arguing that the shootings are deserved or in some way justified by the shooters’ (often horrifying itself) mistreatment, but rather that they are the inevitable result of late stage capitalism and its programs of deregulation, real wage stagnation, and alienation, as well as the inability to express this anger toward the individuals more responsible for their predicament. Addressing these problems is a rational concern independent of the existence of consequential mass shootings; lowering the deadly level of wealth inequality which exists in 2023 is not a concession to tyrannical murderers (“surrendering to the terrorists,” we might have said in Bush’s America) but a good in and of itself. That nationalization and reregulation, leading eventually to a form of ecological socialism, would save lives both directly and indirectly is an argument in favor of leftist ideals, not against them, despite these programs also helping would-be mass shooters. As Ames is careful to note, this could be anyone.
Instead of fixing the issues which are undeniably fueling this desperate alienation, the right wing has seen fit to both exacerbate and utilize this murderous impulse to their advantage, diverting a real and justified rage which would naturally be directed toward the rich deregulators and their pliant allies in the media, toward easy targets in the form of their fellow students and coworkers, and more recently, gender nonconformists and transpeople. These targets are both defenseless, harmless, and not responsible for the rage which compels (mostly) young men to commit such acts. The latest unfortunate scapegoat has been transpeople, who are variously (and falsely) portrayed as nefarious “groomers” of children and mentally ill victims of “woke ideology” who should be shunned and denied sought after treatment for their own good. This particular scapegoating has already resulted in many mass shootings and murders, most recently that of Brianna Ghey. In response to growing criticism of their violent tactics, the purveyors of hate have enlisted anti-trans groups who would otherwise appear to be allies of transpeople, such as the LGB Alliance (anti-trans lesbians, gays, and bisexuals) and the TERFs, Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, as well as ratcheting up the violent rhetoric these new, seemingly more respectable, allies permit them:
The use of these otherwise putatively leftist groups to lend their economically predatory hatred a respectable sheen is similar to right-wingers’ scapegoating of vulnerable demographics; one is a useful idiot tricked into thinking they are now privileged in some way, while the other is used as little more than human shield to be thrown in front of ire that would otherwise be properly directed at them. Great replacement propaganda focuses the hatred toward other races while transphobia and “gay panic” moralizing focus it on those who are otherwise nonconforming, but these are two sides of the same transparently cynical coin:
And this propaganda is effective. See the baffling recent case of former Virginia Tech football player Isimemen Etute, who was found not guilty of murder in Virginia for the deadly beating of a transvestite he had previously had sex with:
At the time of his arrest last year, Isimemen Etute, 19, who was 18 at the time of the incident, told police he acted in self-defense after learning that victim Jerry Paul Smith, 40, tricked him into thinking he was a woman when he allowed Smith to perform oral sex on him at Smith’s Blacksburg, Va., apartment on April 10, 2021.
Etute told police he returned to Smith’s apartment in May of that year to determine whether Smith was a man or a woman, according to the Roanoke Times. The newspaper reports that Etute testified at his trial that a confrontation broke out inside Smith’s apartment after Etute saw that Smith was a man. He testified at his three-day trial last week that he began punching Smith after Smith appeared to be reaching for a weapon under the mattress of his bed, possibly a gun. [Etute never mentioned knowledge of a weapon in his initial interviews.]
Police discovered a knife under the mattress at the time they found Smith’s badly beaten body on the bedroom floor.
Prosecutors presented a witness from the county medical examiner’s office who testified that most of the bones in Smith’s face were broken, he had bleeding and swelling in his brain, and had multiple teeth knocked out.
The Associated Press reports that Assistant State’s Attorney Patrick Jensen argued at the trial that the injuries suffered by Smith indicated Etute acted with malice and Smith could not have posed a threat to him after he was initially punched by Etute.
“I felt violated,” Etute testified at the trial, according to the AP and the Roanoke Times “I was just in shock, in disbelief that someone tricked me and lied to me,” the Times quoted Etute as telling the judge and jury.
His attorney, Jimmy Turk, told the jury that Smith was a “deceitful and dishonest man” who “defrauded young men for his own sexual gratification,” the Roanoke Times reports. “Who is the real victim here?” the newspaper quoted Turk as telling the jury in his closing arguments. “This was a wicked sexual ruse.”
Prosecutor Jensen called on Circuit Court Judge Mike Fleenor to instruct the jury that the defense could not use a so-called “gay panic defense” on Etute’s behalf because the Virginia General Assembly last year passed a law outlawing the gay and transgender panic defense in criminal trials.
The law, similar to laws passed by other states, says juries cannot consider a violent act to be justified by someone who finds out someone else’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
According to the Roanoke Times, the judge said the law would have applied in this case, but it did not take effect until after the incident in which Etute assaulted Smith took place and so the law could not be applied retroactively.
Etute’s actions were no more permissible in light of “gay panic”-induced irrationality than those of any spree killer who methodically planned out their massacres in the comfort of their homes. Indeed, Ames repeatedly points out that these rage killers are not insane and did not “snap,” but rather calmly and methodically targeted the bullies and supervisors who more immediately made their lives miserable in most cases, often sparing others who had previously treated them with kindness and sympathy. The real authors of this malaise are effectively insulated from blowback for their destructive policies, so this rage is channeled elsewhere, to accessible targets demonized by the media. Because the shooters are propagandized sufficiently, they do not consider the middle managers and school bullies to be similarly victimized, cogs in the same deadly machine who are playing the parts demanded of them in the same way the victims of their mistreatment play the dutiful loser, the vast majority of whom never take such drastic measures to avenge their suffering. They may have an inkling that something very wrong is taking place in society, a wide-scale suffering which is obscured by mandated patriotism and culture war pageantry. To obscure their vulnerability and their real motivations alike, the bourgeois elites responsible for both small- and wide-scale devastation pick from a rotating cast of victims to stand trial in their stead. In the era of Going Postal’s publication, this took the form of dogwhistled racism and classism, pitting angry young cis white males against anyone who dares to agitate for rights and respect equal to their own, as well as the ill-defined and overwhelmingly innocent victims of the War on Terror, whose suffering was conveniently far off and stifled by the media. In short, this is a microcosm of capital’s central goal: to convince the many victims of its short-sighted avarice that their real enemies are one another. Rather than spend a penny alleviating the true causes of rage explosions, we allow those responsible for them to manufacture Satanic panics and scapegoats based on nascent but not inborn bigotry. To combat the obvious criticisms, human life is being devalued on an unprecedented scale, facilitated by the widely-tolerated abandonment of even minor inconveniences to protect against the spread of Covid in the US.
True to this mission, accelerating alongside economic inequalities is the cutthroat competitive nature of modern careerism in the US, which as Ames writes now begins at birth. Schools are more difficult to get into than ever, more expensive than ever (even highly-rated public schools typically require living in prohibitively expensive neighborhoods), and the degrees offered are more of a questionable investment in purely economic terms than ever. Reacting to a scandal in which multiple top students were found to be cheating Ames, summarizes their growingly desperate perspective and the competition-driven abandonment of lower-class students on page 220: “You have to almost wonder why a middle or lower-middle-class kid would even bother trying. Or why a kid wouldn’t cheat.” If everyone around us is cheating and blaming others for their problems, what do any of us stand to gain by being honest and asking who is really responsible for our misery, or to continue playing by their (selectively enforced) rules? Why not cheat and “punch down” to those who are in an even more precarious position? This summarizes the modus operandi of capitalism: to varying degrees, it makes victims of virtually all of us, fighting for scraps while everything burns down around us, distracted by a particularly demented, demeaning, and deadly form of bread and circuses.
On page 149-150, Ames offers a salient analyses of this tendency to scapegoat because it is convenient and comforting:
The point is that the middle class persistently denies its own unique pathos, irrationally clinging to an irrational way of measuring it, perhaps because if they did validate their own pain and injustice, it would be too unsettling—it would throw the entire world order into doubt. It is more comforting to believe that they aren’t really suffering, to allocate all official pathos to the misery of other socioeconomic groups, and it’s more comforting to accuse those who disagree of being psychologically weak whiners. Despite its several hundred million strong demographic, the white bourgeoisie’s pain doesn’t officially count—it is too ashamed of itself to sympathize with its own suffering. And yet all the symptoms and causes remain and grow worse even as the denial becomes more fierce.
This impulse echoes the current approach to Covid, in which the elites who profit the most from abandoning protective measures release faulty studies purporting to show the ineffectiveness of masks and lending credence to absurd lab leak theories (in addition to the CDC previously redefining what level of transmission constitutes “high risk” to inaccurately recast more communities as low-risk) in order to avoid the minor inconvenience of attempting to prevent thousands of potentially deadly infections every week. It is cheaper to simply sweep Covid-related death and disability under the rug, just as it cheaper to privatize and deregulate industry despite this practice leading to similar outcomes on a daily basis:
Contaminated soil from the site around the East Palestine train wreck in Ohio is being sent to a nearby incinerator with a history of clean air violations, raising fears that the chemicals being removed from the ground will be redistributed across the region.
The new plan is “horrifying”, said Kyla Bennett, a former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official now with the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility non-profit. She is one among a number of public health advocates and local residents who have slammed Norfolk Southern and state and federal officials over the decision.
“Why on earth would you take this already dramatically overburdened community and ship this stuff a few miles away only to have it deposited right back where it came from?” Bennett asked…
Incinerating the soil is especially risky because some of the contaminants that residents and independent chemical experts fear is in the waste, like dioxins and PFAS, haven’t been tested for by the EPA, and they do not incinerate easily, or cannot be incinerated.
The incinerator, owned by Heritage Thermal Services, is already burning PFAS waste from the Department of Defense, which prompted a federal lawsuit from a coalition of local environmental groups. Heritage also faced an investigation and enforcement action from the EPA in 2015 after officials determined the facility had violated the Clean Air Act nearly 200 times between 2010 and 2014.
In leaked audio heard by the Guardian, a manager for one of the US’s largest rail companies can be heard explaining to a former carman that they should stop tagging railcars for broken bearings. The manager says doing so delays other cargo.
The disclosure comes as federal agencies investigate the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. A wheel-bearing failure was cited as the cause of the crash in a preliminary report released by the National Transportation Safety Board.
In late 2016, Stephanie Griffin, a former Union Pacific carman, went to her manager with concerns that she was getting pushback for tagging – or reporting for repair – railcars. Her manager told her it was OK to skip inspections.
Perhaps given the obvious deadliness of late-stage capitalist economic policies, a self-defense case could be made for the expression of discontent in a more useful and impactful manner to the real architects of our looming climate-related annihilation. In accepting and even encouraging mass shootings, let alone food insecurity, lack of access to housing and healthcare, and environment-and climate-related deaths including the millions who die each year to air pollution, the elites in control of policy have effectively declared war, with angry young men as their proxies, ensuring that the most vulnerable are kept in a state of fear and pliancy and that any talk of open rebellion is immediately compared to pathetic, misguided, easily-demonized Klebolds and Harrises. Even disregarding the occasional rage murder, these policies are known to be deadly to the underclass, yet are pursued regardless by the rich and their political allies who tell themselves that if they did not benefit from the destruction of others’ lives, someone else would (an argument for changing the system as much as it changing the names and faces). I wrote previously of this knowledge and what it means in terms of malice aforethought in a judicial and moral sense:
Bound and gagged, a young man has been left to starve in the basement of his kidnapper. Though weakened from a lack of food and water, he manages to untie himself, and, arming himself with a nearby plank of wood, he lies in wait. The kidnapper enters the basement and is ambushed, suffering a powerful blow to the head. The victim escapes with his life; paramedics are unable to resuscitate the kidnapper.
Across town lives a second captive of sorts: a homeless and destitute woman. She has thus far been able to survive by visiting soup kitchens and staying in shelters. However, recent economic downturns, combined with the reduction and removal of government safety net programs, has drastically reduced her options. Desperate, she begins to steal food, gradually becoming more comfortable with breaking the law. One night, after a series of failed shoplifting attempts, she sees a rich CEO drive into the neighborhood and begin talking to a prostitute. She accosts the man with a knife, but he fights back briefly and she stabs him before running off with his cash. The rich man does not survive the encounter, but luckily she escapes police detection and the second captive now has enough money to survive for several more months.
Virtually every human society incorporates some form of self-defense exceptions for violence in its law code, but in order to preserve the capitalist order, the delineation is placed at arbitrary points in the US. It should go without saying that most would consider the actions of the first captive self-defense, but few would say the same for the second.
Why is this? If it is considered self-defense to fight back against a kidnapper who is slowly starving an individual in his basement, why is it not self-defense to fight back against a group of kidnappers who are slowly starving an individual on the streets? More than 10% of Americans in 2020 struggled with food insecurity. Is the homeless woman not just as much a victim of the CEO as the hostage was to his kidnapper?True, the city is larger and more open than the basement, but in either case the alternatives to starvation are non-existent should the government remove what remains of the social safety net. This has happened before: Reagan turned out hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets, then callously rationalized his indifference by arguing that “the homeless…are homeless, you might say, by choice” and deriding the recipients of government programs as “welfare cheats.” Today, at least 12 million children in the U.S. live below the poverty line; tens of thousands of Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance; millions die due to exposure to pollution; opportunities for living, let alone comfortably, are rapidly evaporating and the likelihood of a political solution in the 2020s is vanishingly small—the putative political alternative to the kidnappers themselves (the Democratic Party) repeatedly show themselves to be just as vicious and uncaring.
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The immediate reply might be: I am dangerously advocating for political violence. However, those advocating for the maintenance of the status quo or even a more nuanced or incremental approach to reform are advocating for a far deadlier form of violence, against those who had relatively little to do with the maintenance of the system. The deaths of the victims of mass shooters do not serve the cause of revolutionizing that deadly system, but rather these deaths serve to reinforce and protect it from attack. For the same reason, the (actually quite rare) case of an economically disadvantaged young person enlisting in the military to escape hardship is not revolutionary: they are only helping themselves escape poverty by inflicting that suffering on others who are even more desperate. Violence is not always the same in character, and those who wish to muddy the waters are happy to have countless examples of dissatisfied rage murderers focusing it on the wrong targets, to tarnish the concept of force itself when it suits them, because they are well aware that sufficiently well-expressed force can oust even them from their ill-gotten positions of power. The choice is not between pacifism and violence, it is between two forms of violence, one reactive and defensive, and one reinforcing the deadly status quo. Until system-wide change occurs, more unfocused and unproductive violence will need to be explained away.