Review: Going Postal

Ragenomics.



Disgruntled with your job? Don't join a union – shoot your boss, your colleagues and your friends. According to Mark Ames, author of Going Postal, the extreme occurrence of the workplace and school-yard rage-killing has become increasingly common in the United States since the 1980s.

When these tragedies occur, blame is appointed wherever it can be. Conservatives, with the news media in tow, typically view the killings through the prism of supposed degradation of traditional values as manifested in "goth" music, violent films and computer games, making little attempt to understand what actually motivates people to kill their colleagues or classmates.

Conversely, liberals tend to blame the availability of guns, but that pat answer dodges the real issue. Countries with much stronger gun control than the United States of America have seen such seemingly random multiple murders. As unpalatable as it may be, the National Rifle Association's sound-bite, "guns don't kill people, people do," does indeed have a ring of truth about it.

Clearly, rage-killings are an occurrence that cannot be explained by simply pointing to firearms, dehumanising people who kill or apportioning blame to popular culture.

Ames points the finger of blame directly at hyper-capitalism, singling out Ronald Reagan in chapter two for using: "his bully pulpit to persuade middle America than unions were the cause of economic stagnation."

The book points out that the only serious attempt to confront such killing-sprees has been Michael Moore's documentary, Bowling for Columbine. However, the film failed to get its analysis across. Portrayed incorrectly as an anti-gun film by the right-wing press pabulum in America, its central message –  that the media exaggerate and distort murders – was lost. It was a cultural and economic analysis, as is Ames's, but unlike Moore, Ames attempt to explain why people "go postal" at all. Moreover, Moore's film – although excellent – is, in form, a slightly incoherent polemic. Going Postal takes a much more systematic approach to its subject matter.

Ames is himself an interesting character. Having spent the 1980s as a self-described reactionary and Reaganite, he grew to loathe mainstream America and left for Russia, where he founded the eXile, an alternative newspaper. Ames's dealings with the American corporate community in Russia, busily hiving off every former state industry they could get hold of while dismissing Russians as feckless and stupid, saw his world-view collapse.

For Ames, rage-killings are a modern equivalent of slave rebellions, brought on by the assault on standards of living since the 1980s.

His argument that rage-killings are a result of economic pressure and social alienation is entirely coherent and believable, however, the book goes much further. The central thesis is that the middle-class happily went along with Reagan's economic assault on the working-class, presuming that corporate America would never do the same to them. They were wrong.

Ames points to a causal relationship between economic sodomy and murder sprees, dubbing this "ragenomics."

"There is a socio-economic context for these shooting sprees. The rage murder is new. It appeared under Reagan, during his cultural economic revolution, and it expanded in his aftermath. [...] Under Reagan, corporations transformed from providers of stability for employees and their families to fear-juiced stress engines. [...] New corporate heroes like General Electric's Jack Welch spoke of "unlimited juice" to squeeze from his employees – and wring their rinds he did. While work became increasingly stressful and time consuming with fewer rewards for the majority, capital was sucked from the middle and lower classes of working America and deposited into the off-shore accounts of the very highest layer of the executive and shareholder class." [p. 87]

Rather than writing a tedious left-wing screed, Ames has succeeded, by looking behind the emotive headlines, gory photographs, body-counts and spurious theories associated with killing sprees, in compiling a book is probably too well-written, well-researched and likely true to ever garner much attention, even from the liberal end of the media spectrum.

The two most interesting aspects of his analysis of American corporate behaviour are, firstly, he acknowledges the existence of a lower or working class – something which the American left, indeed white America in general, never talk about – and secondly that he demonstrates just how complicit the American middle class has been in signing its own death warrant. "Craven CEO-worship," as Ames dubs the endless newspaper and magazine hagiographies of cut-price capitalists – something which has, hopefully, reached its zenith in the grisly spectacle of The Apprentice, a putative "reality" television show starring Donald Trump (and Alan Sugar in the UK version) as an blustering bully, deriving almost erotic pleasure from relieving lickspittles of their employment – in other words, as today's typical captain of industry.

If Ames is right then the "reality" on display in The Apprentice is not so much the mundane replaying of the contestants' struggles, but the fact that the likes of Trump and co. are now no longer satisfied with being fabulously wealthy plutocrats, but instead now seek worship and adulation from the public at large as avatars for success, a form of cultural infiltration that can only continue to reinforce the increasing privatisation, atomisation and alienation of social life.

Ames is better known as a humorist than as a writer of serious socio-political analyses. Indeed, according to the author, the book was originally intended to be a darkly humorous take on the phenomenon but this plan was discarded as the evidence piled up that rage killings were too serious a phenomenon to ignore. Where the left have criticised the book, it is for Ames's viewing the killings as rebellions – something that does not sit well with the traditional left-liberal view of how one should channel dissent, such as through a union or through even less effective consumption-based "activity": selective boycotts and the even more nebulous and bizarre notion of "ethical consumerism" – as if a lack of action can somehow be raised to the status of a political act.

Nevertheless, that Ames has here written a serious book is not at all surprising. Not only has the eXile been home to plenty of searing critiques of Russian, American and international politics but the humour in the eXile, though often strongly-worded, was rarely gratuitous or lacking in focus. Humour as a weapon, rather than as an empty-headed vehicle for amortising, as the business press might say, the pain of life at the bottom.

Left behind in middle-America
Clearly Ames's status as an outsider to the American left – be that defined as the Democratic Party, the Green Party or the so-called "far-left" – has helped the author in producing a work which easily dispenses with the shibboleths of left and right alike, be they the ersatz "shareholder society" beloved of Clinton's "New" Democrats or the more traditional right-wing messages pouring forth from Bush supporting think-tanks on a daily basis.

"Incidentally, the shareholder class here refers not to the little old blue-haired lady who owns $42,194 in Fidelity funds, the focus of so much deceptively feel-good pro-capitalist propaganda in the eighties and nineties, but rather, to those shareholders who actually affect corporate policy and profit from its new priorities – what the press calls "major shareholders." [p. 89]

That rage-murder was virtually unknown until the last decades of the twentieth century is, for Ames, evidence of society's return to barbarism, not in the killings themselves, but in the economic policies of the 1980s – increased unpaid overtime, loss of benefits, management bullying, the threat of redundancy and deunionisation – all issued by corporate diktat from the top down with the support of the US government.

Furthermore, the book depicts school killings such as the 1999 attack on students and staff at Columbine High School by teenagers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as a violent response to a stifling culture of conformity and bullying, both peer-group and "management"-led, which acts as a junior training ground for the increasingly authoritarian workplaces of the adult world. According to Ames's profiles, the only group of children who are unlikely to give forth a murderer are the most popular set, who become an avatar for the shareholder cliqué in the adult world.

Interestingly, it is in a school-yard killing that Ames finds the sole significant example of pre-Reagan era killing sprees: on January 29, 1979, Brenda Ann Spencer, a bespectacled sixteen year-old girl, entered Cleveland Elementary School and began shooting. Spencer killed two adults, wounded eight children and one adult (a police officer). When later questioned by police as to her motive, Spencer replied: "I don't like Mondays [...] it was fun [...] this livens up the day," and explained that she had no particular targets.

As Ames explains, there are significant differences between Spencer and other, later, killers – in both intent and act. 

Firstly, Spencer did not kill because she was bullied or stifled in some way. She killed, at least according to her own admission, as a result of blankness, of tedium, of typical teenage boredom. Hers was not a crime borne of rage. Perhaps Spencer actually was the elusive "lone nut", perhaps not, but it is not only in intent that her killings differ from the likes of the 1999 Columbine massacre: the view of her killings as a crime of opportunity is reinforced by the fact that, unlike later incidents, Spencer did not target her own high school, instead choosing to fire inside the elementary school located opposite her father's apartment. 

However, San Diego has been home to several more killing sprees in the years since Spencer's:

On March 25, 1989 postal employee Don Mace committed suicide in front of his co-workers, shooting himself in the temple with a .38 calibre handgun. 

On August 10, 1989, postal employee John Taylor killed two colleagues before killing himself.

In April 1993, postal employee Mark Hillbun, for once a genuine lunatic, killed his mother's dog by slitting its throat, stabbed his mother to death at her home and drove to the post office where he killed his only friend by shooting him in the face before attempting, and failing, to shoot the postmaster. Hillbun, an enraged stalker, then proceeded to drive off in search of the object of his affection (and rage), fellow postal worker Sue Martin. Failing to find her, he instead attacked a middle-aged businesswoman, but only after she provoked him by catching him stealing magnetic plates from her car. Hillbun made the surprisingly lucid move of warning the woman not to follow him or else he would kill her. She ignored his advice and pursued him, receiving shots in the face, neck, arm and hand for her trouble. Later, Hillbun attempted to kill and rob a man at an ATM, but his gun failed to fire so he walked off. Hillbun attacked a couple at another ATM, shooting a woman in the head and seriously wounding the boyfriend. He then decamped to a bar where he was subsequently apprehended.

Lest anyone feel that postmen are the sole perpetrators of San Diego's killing sprees, 1992 saw Robert Mark open fire at, appropriately enough, armaments manufacturer General Dyanmics and Larry Hansel attack co-workers at the electronics firm Elgar Corporation.

In 1995 a former plumber, Shawn Timothy Nelson, hijacked an M-60 tank from the National Guard, stripped naked and then drove the tank on a rampage through central San Diego, leaving a trail of devastation before being shot by police.

On March 21, 2001, Andy Williams brought a .22 mm German pistol and a Beanie doll to school, Santana High, in Santee, San Diego. At 9.20 AM he loaded the gun in the male toilets, opened the cubicle door and shot and killed the first person he saw. He then opened fire on everyone else in the room, reloaded the gun and went into the corridor. By the time he was apprehended by police, offering the words, "It's only me," he had killed eleven students, two adults and wounded a total of thirteen people.

All of these cases, and dozens more across the US, are meticulously documented by Ames, who notes that: "If happiness cannot be found at the southwestern-most edge of America, the apogee of the American Dream, then rage has infected the very soul of the nation and nowhere is safe. If San Diego wasn't safe, the there was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run." [p. 157]

What Ames sees at work in Reagan and his followers, Bush Snr., Clinton and Bush Jnr., is a sea-change in economic policy. The Carter era is now viewed as a time of humiliation for America, a painful epoch of negative growth led by a pitiful bumbling idiot which Reagan ended by performing some deft surgery on the economy. (A similar re-writing of history can be seen in the assessment of the legacy of Margaret Thatcher and her destruction of the scant political collectivism that ever "flourished" in Britain.)

Going Postal's riposte is that viewing Reagan as the saviour of America is a form of false consciousness: "The problem with the 1970s wasn't that America was in decline, it was that the plutocracy felt itself declining. And in the plutocrats' eyes, their fortunes are synonymous with America's. The plutocrats felt they were in decline because they weren't living lavishly enough – they needed 531 times their average worker's salary, not 30 times. The people were getting far more than they deserved!" [p. 100]

The shocking statistic which Ames reveals is that under Carter, growth levels averaged at 2.8 per cent. Under Reagan, with the devastation that he wrought on industrial workers, growth averaged at 3.2 per cent – a mere 0.4 per cent higher than during the "malaise-stricken" Carter administration.

When you discover that this 0.4 per cent was made solely on the backs of workers who were forced to work harder and for longer, lost pensions and healthcare benefits, lost job stability and saw net pay actually decrease, the question is not so much, "Why do killing sprees happen?" as, "Why do killing sprees not happen every week?"

Ames's messages is not that of the environmentalists and pseudo-left who have abandoned progress and see growth as destructive in and of itself, rather that obtaining a tiny amount of growth by squeezing the very life out of the citizenry is not appropriate behaviour on the part of the government and employers, particularly in light of the fact that the bad times were not actually that bad at all.

Ex-post facto
That killing sprees are now associated with a specific public sector employer – the United States Postal Service (USPS), hence the term "going postal" – may seem like something of an anomaly.  Surely government employees lead sheltered lives in comparison to their private sector colleagues.

Indeed, it is the case that the USPS is now no more likely to be the location of a rage killing than a private sector workplace, however, it is undeniable that the neighbourhood post office has, on many occasions, been ground zero for multiple murders.

The explanation for this is that the post office is not a genuine public sector employer insofar as it is subject to enormous pressure, both internal and external, to be "competitive." As a result, many of the benefits traditionally associated with public sector employment have been done away with in the twin-track search for profits and streamlining.

However, according to Ames, things are even worse in the true private sector. Labour unions are now seen as not only fundamentally un-American, but also out of step with the so-called "New Economy." As Ames notes, a union drive at Amazon.com in Seattle resulted in the entire workforce being fired and the jobs moved elsewhere. As usual, the American middle class has accepted and even lauded these decisions: "The very idea of collectivising to protect their interests is anathema to white-collar, middle-class American professionals. That have always seen themselves as the class in adversarial relation to unions." [p. 119]

Nevertheless, Ames doesn't fully point to workplace murders as the incoherent and confused acts of alienated individuals that they are. Slave rebellions, apart from being rare as Ames notes, were not underpinned by any theoretical understanding other than the strong desire to be free – in this at least they were more coherent than today's killing-sprees, even if they are rebellions of a sort. This reviewer is not well placed to contemplate the slave rebellions due to lack of knowledge, so drawing a conclusion other than that there does, at least, seem to be a correlation between them and today's killing sprees is beyond my ability.

Somewhat beyond the scope of this review, the book is at its very strongest in its analysis of the media response to killing sprees, documenting how the news crews quickly circle the scene and immediately begin to pontificate and ramp up the emotional worth of each event. Even before the killings have fallen down to second or third place in the news agenda, the "analysis" will begin. Commentators are lined-up to offer specious correlations as evidence of causality and very quickly the ever-popular "lone nut" thesis takes hold – so goes the story of virtually every rage murder. Even when instances of workplace bullying, unmanageable stress and loss of job benefits do inadvertently arise in these reports, no systemic analysis is performed.

The book is largely even-tempered but, as it goes on, Ames's own rage with American economic policy comes to the fore, ending with: "This book is an attempt to dig up Reagan's remains, hang them upside down from the nearest palm tree, and subject him, at last, to a proper trial."

Ultimately, Going Postal succeeds in being both a serious academic study and work of the kind of journalism largely unseen in this day and age. 

[Jason Walsh]

[A shorter version of this review was published in Daily Ireland]

Buy this book>>

Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames
Soft Skull Press
294 Pages