Rage murders have affected every American. The words that come after mass-murders in schools and workplaces are often callow, made-for-television expressions of sympathy for the survivors, followed by a thorough demonizing of the killers and finally a short period of navel-gazing trying to explain how the school or work environment might’ve contributed to the outbreak of violence and then the story is dropped before any damaging conclusions can be reached and then intrepid reporters go chasing the latest missing blonde.
Mark Ames doesn’t look away in his new book, “Going Postal.” In the course of researching the book, Ames traveled around the country to examine the circumstances that lead to many school and workplace murders and their consequences. He doesn’t glamorize mass-murderers. He treats them as rational human beings who have been pushed to their limit by mad systems and casual cruelty – not as monsters, as they are often called. In many instances, even victims who were maimed during school and office shootings have a great deal of sympathy for the murderers – something nearly always left out of media accounts of rage killings.
Ames supports his case by looking at the public reaction to other isolated, “crazy,” murders in American history – he compares modern office and school shootings to slave rebellions and other uprisings. While this might seem sensationalistic, the charge is supported by thorough and intelligently presented research. The public reactions to disasters like Columbine are shown to eerily mirror those that occurred after Shays’s Rebellion or John Brown’s massacre. The lives of slaves in the Antebellum South are compared with the lives of modern office workers while maintaining sensitivity and proper context – never allowing his book to devolve into a dull repetition of the clich‚s favored by the political fringe of the left or the right.
Mark Ames isn’t looking to make a case for overthrowing capitalism or to immanentize the Eschaton. His argument doesn’t rely on ever-increasing body counts. Slave rebellions were notoriously infrequent; and few people would make the case that black slavery was less brutal than the American school system. The nature of the murders suggests that something is fundamentally rotten about the institutions that spawn them. “Going Postal” offers a fresh look at these crimes that will hopefully influence the debates that always appear after someone shoots up a school or a cubical farm.
The issue of rage murders tends to stay in the dark, only becoming a subject of debate when another person snaps. It’s a useless and voyeuristic cycle, and if the level of paranoia that permeates American society is to be reduced, this issue needs to be subjected to prolonged attention and debate – and the trite solutions like expelling children for obscene drawings or off-color jokes should be ignored and ridiculed.
Many students at the University will work in a corporation after graduation. The majority of these businesses are guided by similar management philosophies, and have similar office cultures. Most students have attended schools organized around the same basic principles. “Going Postal” discusses how these peculiar American institutions can break people by treating them like sub-humans.
This book is worth buying, even if you don’t generally have time to read or find books boring. Ames doesn’t moralize, doesn’t worry about offending people and is an unashamed lover of black humor. It’s a heartfelt attempt to comprehend the most divisive and anxiety-inducing crimes in the country – it deserves to be read.
John is a sophomore in Arts & Sciences.