Last thursday a man flew his plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas and the worst part about it is that it didn’t come as a surprise or shock. I’ve been expecting something like this to happen for some years now and my first thought was that this is what you get when you have an rightwing Democrat in the White House more interested in buying off bankers than getting health care for ordinary Americans and an opposition movement driven by emotion and barely sublimated racial hatred. That the first target would be an IRS building is not surprising either — few people like a visit from the taxman and taxation has been a bugbear of wingnuts as long as the US has existed. It seemed likely this was some raged-up teabagger made mad by repeated exposure to Glenn Beck
But it turned out Joe Stack was somebody much more dangerous. His suicide note was of course selfserving, but far from loony. His lifestory as presented there could be the story of millions of struggling middleclass people, grown up with the belief that hard work and smarts would make him rich, only to be knocked down time and again by circumstances outside his control, as well as the simple fact that he wasn’t as smart or crafty as he thought he was. He saw how the big boys behaved and thought he could do the same, only to be smacked down because he couldn’t. His was the rage of the little man, the one who can never catch a break, always gets caught when he tries to cut a corner yet sees others get away with murder.
The resentment he felt is on clear display in passages like this “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“. The sheer dichotomy between his own experiences and what he sees on the news each evening is what fuelled his rage, something surely we’ve all shared at one point or another. I certainly have. In Stack’s case, this rage finally metamorphosed into action. Sadly, if fittingly, this action was against the wrong target killing the wrong people. He gets angry at multibillionaires and ends up murdering the same people as him just because they work for the IRS.
Joe Stack won’t be the last angry middleclass white dude going for a spot of self destructive terrorism. The economic crisis and the blatant way in which the system is being gamed will see to that. Wall Street may think the recession is over or almost over, but for millions of middle class families barely holding on it is just beginning. They are the ones who have the most to lose from it, they are the ones whose anger and rage will stoke more of these atrocities, is stoking the teabagger movement and which will make sure shit will be burned down if better alternatives will not emerge.