Explaining America’s Reagan era ‘Going Postal’ curse
In light of the Going Postal episode in an Aurora movie theater (just a few miles from Columbine), I want to highlight the expose book by gonzo journalist Mark Ames (frequent guest on Dylan Ratigan’s show).
I know this will be a controversial thesis but to Ames of exiledonline.com these mass shooting “going postal” episodes in America (school, workplace, etc) as a result of the mental damage caused to society by the imposition of the Darwinian capitalist model after Reagan fired the Air Traffic controllers.
OK, I know as soon as you read that your first instinct is to become incredulous. I was too but I actually read the book and it is not as far fetched as it sounds.
Basically, Ames equates these going postal episodes to the slave revolts of the past. The slave revolts also were violent episodes that had no organization and resulted from slaves ‘snapping” as a result of their degraded condition.
Your thesis that these rage murders are effectively failed slave rebellions takes you back in your book to consider in some depth the circumstances of slave rebellions in the antebellum South. At what point did the parallels start to dawn on you?
I really started with the idea that in every age, there is some awful oppression that is not yet recognized and therefore doesn’t exist, but later seems horribly obvious. This became clear to me working in Moscow in the ’90s. No one in the “liberal” Western press corps, academia, world financial aid organizations or Clinton Administration had a shred of sympathy for the millions of Russians suffering from so-called “privatization” programs that we rammed down their throats. Literally millions of Russians went to their graves early in the ’90s, yet many respectable Westerners openly said that the old generation would “have to die off” before the proper mindset set in to allow full Westernization in Russia.
Those millions of deaths are still not seen as part of something larger and evil. Later I looked at the details of these American rage murders — they were all similar, mostly normal Middle Americans attacking seemingly “at random.” If they weren’t psychopaths, which they aren’t, then that meant their attacks were very deliberate, that they were attacking something as a response. That’s when I decided that it was the culture which was viewing the murders “at random,” the culture which refused to see the purpose.
I simply assumed, from experience in Russia, and from looking at modern rage rebellions, that early slave rebellions would be completely misunderstood in their day as random acts of crazed evil just as modern “rage rebellions” are, and from the evidence I uncovered, it seems they were.
How much blame do you place on Reaganomics for the changes in the workplace that you argue lead to rage attacks?
Put it this way: rage murders in the workplace never existed anywhere in history until Reagan came to power. Reagan made it respectable to be a mean, stupid bastard in this country. He is the patron saint of white suckers. He unleashed America’s Heart of Vileness — its penchant for hating people who didn’t get rich, and worshipping people who despise them, and this is the essence of Reaganomics.
I hate to sound like a Clintonite here, but let’s remember Hillary Clinton became the most hated human being alive because she tried to give most Americans the opportunity to lead longer, healthier lives, while these same Americans adored goons like Sam Walton, George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump — everyone who has dedicated their lives to transferring wealth, health and pleasure from the masses to a tiny elite. Liberals are hated in America precisely because they want to help people, which is seen as “patronizing.”
You can see how this kind of cultural insanity, unleashed by Reaganomics after decades of New Deal (relative) harmony, could make someone snap, when the cognitive dissonance suddenly strikes on a very personal level, and you realize that you’ve been screwed hard by your own dominant ideology.
The implication of your thesis, of course, is that millions of Americans are living lives in many respects no different from slaves — in some respects eagerly, and willfully. I suspect that’s a realization for many people out there that they just won’t be able to face, and you will no doubt draw some attention for saying so. You also argue that part of human nature — despite conventional precepts about a universal human desire for freedom — is our capacity and desire to be ruled, to obey, and to accept hierarchy, as well as adapt to almost any circumstance at all and eventually regard it as normal … until there’s a breaking point.
Why do you think we have all of these “wage slave” and “temp slave” T-shirts and e-jokes around? Americans like to turn everything painfully true into a little quip, as if by quippifying the painful truth, as if by becoming self-aware of one’s shameful and intolerable existence, one partially nullifies one’s pain. This is what you’d call “slave humor.” Slaves did the same thing, turning their pain into quips. And remember, there were almost no slave rebellions at all in America, less than a dozen.
As for the slave tendency in humanity, I think it’s a lot stronger in America than in most other countries in part because no other country on earth has so successfully crushed every internal rebellion. Slaves in the Caribbean for example rebelled a lot more because their oppressors weren’t as good at oppressing as Americans were. America has put down every rebellion, brutally, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Confederate Rebellion to the proletarian rebellions, Black Panthers, white militias… you name it. This creates a powerful slave mentality, a sense that it’s pointless to rebel.
And this in turn creates pointless rebellions like modern workplace and school rebellions, just like our early slave rebellions were carried out in totally pointless, seemingly random ways. Or it creates a mass of quipping slave-comedians, like we have today.
Read more. Link above.
