first up against the wall: in which america lionizes a terrorist
Dear news blogosphere:
Joseph Andrew Stack III was not a madman. He was not a liberal. He was not a conservative. He was not a Marxist. He was not a teabagger. He was, if his suicide note is any indication, a sane, rational, educated human being, disillusioned with the left and the right and everyone in between, who burned down his own home after an altercation with his wife and daughter and then crashed a light aircraft into an IRS building, injuring thirteen more innocent people, with the intent to kill many more.
If that last sentence sounds like a contradiction to you, then, bless you, you do not truly comprehend the nature of evil. That you claim not to condone his actions in one breath and assign blame to your political adversary of choice in the next demonstrates it. The only difference between a murderer and a non-murderer is that a non-murderer hasn't killed anyone yet.
Inside, in our blog posts and our YouTube comments, in our protests and in our documentaries, we are all Joe Stack. I get the feeling that much of the anger I am seeing out there is from people jealous that they were beaten to it.
Calls to arms on the Huffington Post. The typical convoluted attempts to pin this on the Obama administration from the Fox News. People emptily prefacing every comment with "I don't condone violence, but," as if doing so negates the fact that their following opinion inevitably advocates violence.
Do you understand now? You throw up your hands and roll your eyes when I tell you that you ARE the system, that when you say you'll have the government's head on a pike the heads you impale will be those of your daughters and brothers and boyfriends and grandparents, you chide me for believing the lie that the people are the ones truly in power. You say the gap between power and the people is so wide, that the Big Guys at the top are so monolithic, that everything you know and love is utterly alien to the fruits of government. Joe Stack said it too. He insisted it. He went as far as to do something about it; it was the entire reason why he did what he did. And now there are thirteen innocent office workers, ordinary middle-class people, people who could have had the same ethical compunctions about their jobs and the welfare of the American economy, people who might have had the power and the incentive to change the system, people like you, whose families might never see them come home, just because some asshole wanted to get the Man's attention. Doesn't seem like such a myth now, does it.
I am seeing lots of people abuse that Thomas Jefferson quote, "The tree of liberty must be, from time to time, watered with the blood of patriots." Really. You honestly believe Jefferson's ideology was aligned with your madness, even though he also said, "The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the only legitimate object of good government." Forgetting, of course, that he meant it both times.
So you want a revolution. Really. You honestly think the majority of Americans are quietly aligned with your cause and all it's gonna take is a little hell-raisin' to get the fire started. Well, here's a little mental exercise to get you ready: Take your entire family into the living room. Your friends, too, your neighbors, children, relatives, mentors, anyone close to you. Discuss politics with them until they begin to disagree with you.
Then brandish a gun and kill them all, one by one. Yourself.
Tell yourself it's because of principle. Tell yourself, as you kick your own mother's spine against the floor, this woman who raised you from infancy and held you when you were sad, as you point your M4 against her betrayed, terrified face, ready to spray her brains out through hole the size of a fist in the back of her head, that you are doing this for freedom from government intervention. Tear a child from its mother and bash its crying, confused, screaming head against a concrete wall, over and over, in front of its parents, until it stops, so that one day it may grow up and know tax relief, health care, and social justice. Go outside, line up the postman who waves at you when he delivers his mail, the cop who orders breakfast every day at the same Dunkin' Donuts as you, the construction worker who you're always talking to about this revolution thing over Friday poker. Do the same. Go against every last inch of human decency you may have in you and slaughter them all, slowly, brutally, painfully.
Can't do it, can you. Can't even imagine it. It's unconscionable. Morally objectionable. Offensive to you that I would even begin to compare your ideology with such a thing. You can't begin to see what this has to do with storming the White House to drive out Obama or tarring and feathering Glenn Beck, or marching across the White House lawn in solidarity with your common man to drive out the Wall Street funded fat cat corrupt politicians and replacing them with REAL Americans!!1 How is this thought experiment even remotely relevant?
Bub. Seriously. Did you pay attention in high school when they taught you about the French Revolution? Or the American Civil War? Or Germany during the Second World War? Have you read about Russia, Vietnam, China, Cambodia? Have you taken a close look at the aftermath of the revolutions of Leonidas, Che Guevara, Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong? Or even our own American Revolution, which you so starry-eyedly turn to as a model?
The worst thing about this thought experiment? It isn't a thought experiment. What the goddamn fuck do you think a revolution is.
Brother against brother, father against child. That's what a house divided truly is. No one ever permanently unseated a government from power just by murdering a king.
News blogosphere, Joe Stack had the same ideology as many of you. Not merely similar. The same. His manifesto echoed the same tripe I've been seeing from YouTube, news blog comment boards, and newspaper editorials for years--not to mention random passersby every time I go to Burger King or do my laundry. The outpouring of sympathy I'm seeing out there, the sheer number of times I've seen the phrase "I don't condone what he did but he had a point," doesn't free you from judgment, it elevates him to fucking martyrdom. The main difference between Joe Stack and you is not that Joe Stack murdered innocent people, the difference is that Joe Stack understood that unseating power by force is murdering innocent people, and he was somehow okay with it. Even if he wasn't really clear on which innocent people he needed to murder to get his point across. (Any innocent people will suffice, it seems, if the amount of sympathy I am seeing for this guy is any indication. I wonder which of the next of you politico blog fucks is already thinking about employing the same strategy because you think it's the only way the mainstream media will listen.) You talk of framing a conflict between 51% of America against the other 49%, but let's be honest here. Do you honestly believe that everyone, hell, even a majority of people you know and love and care about is going to be on your side? Even the ones who say they would?
People like you, news blogosphere, you Greek chorus to the tragedy of politics, are the reason why the Second Amendment makes any sense. Not because the Founding Fathers ever intended that a disorganized lynch mob should (or could) effectively be a check against the military, but because how the fuck am I going to defend myself when one of you takes a potshot at a senator or CEO and the slug pegs me instead.
And if you truly believe that you could do it--if you truly believe that the only way forward to the kind of America you could live in is to slaughter the American people on their behalf, that a little collateral damage is the price America must pay to stay free--then you have forfeited your freedom. You need to be locked up. Not for the government's sake. For the people's. The Man isn't keeping you down to silence the voice of the people, it's keeping you down to protect them from you. Timothy McVeigh was no John Brown and neither is some washed-out software engineer from Pennsylvania who campaigned for tax relief on a platform of attempted mass murder.
I'm sure there are people out there who would read this and roll their eyes, and think, "Wow. How could anyone be so brainwashed as to equate common people with the government? 'The king is his people only if the people are a desert,' and all that." Dude, I went to high school in a country just barely recovering from the immediate legacy of fascism. I don't trust the American government, or any government, is always going to be acting in my best interest either. But I trust heartless pseudo-nationalist militants even less.
Not in my name, Joe Stacks of the blogosphere. Not. In. My. Fucking. Name.
Joseph Andrew Stack III was not a madman. He was not a liberal. He was not a conservative. He was not a Marxist. He was not a teabagger. He was, if his suicide note is any indication, a sane, rational, educated human being, disillusioned with the left and the right and everyone in between, who burned down his own home after an altercation with his wife and daughter and then crashed a light aircraft into an IRS building, injuring thirteen more innocent people, with the intent to kill many more.
If that last sentence sounds like a contradiction to you, then, bless you, you do not truly comprehend the nature of evil. That you claim not to condone his actions in one breath and assign blame to your political adversary of choice in the next demonstrates it. The only difference between a murderer and a non-murderer is that a non-murderer hasn't killed anyone yet.
Inside, in our blog posts and our YouTube comments, in our protests and in our documentaries, we are all Joe Stack. I get the feeling that much of the anger I am seeing out there is from people jealous that they were beaten to it.
Calls to arms on the Huffington Post. The typical convoluted attempts to pin this on the Obama administration from the Fox News. People emptily prefacing every comment with "I don't condone violence, but," as if doing so negates the fact that their following opinion inevitably advocates violence.
Do you understand now? You throw up your hands and roll your eyes when I tell you that you ARE the system, that when you say you'll have the government's head on a pike the heads you impale will be those of your daughters and brothers and boyfriends and grandparents, you chide me for believing the lie that the people are the ones truly in power. You say the gap between power and the people is so wide, that the Big Guys at the top are so monolithic, that everything you know and love is utterly alien to the fruits of government. Joe Stack said it too. He insisted it. He went as far as to do something about it; it was the entire reason why he did what he did. And now there are thirteen innocent office workers, ordinary middle-class people, people who could have had the same ethical compunctions about their jobs and the welfare of the American economy, people who might have had the power and the incentive to change the system, people like you, whose families might never see them come home, just because some asshole wanted to get the Man's attention. Doesn't seem like such a myth now, does it.
I am seeing lots of people abuse that Thomas Jefferson quote, "The tree of liberty must be, from time to time, watered with the blood of patriots." Really. You honestly believe Jefferson's ideology was aligned with your madness, even though he also said, "The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the only legitimate object of good government." Forgetting, of course, that he meant it both times.
So you want a revolution. Really. You honestly think the majority of Americans are quietly aligned with your cause and all it's gonna take is a little hell-raisin' to get the fire started. Well, here's a little mental exercise to get you ready: Take your entire family into the living room. Your friends, too, your neighbors, children, relatives, mentors, anyone close to you. Discuss politics with them until they begin to disagree with you.
Then brandish a gun and kill them all, one by one. Yourself.
Tell yourself it's because of principle. Tell yourself, as you kick your own mother's spine against the floor, this woman who raised you from infancy and held you when you were sad, as you point your M4 against her betrayed, terrified face, ready to spray her brains out through hole the size of a fist in the back of her head, that you are doing this for freedom from government intervention. Tear a child from its mother and bash its crying, confused, screaming head against a concrete wall, over and over, in front of its parents, until it stops, so that one day it may grow up and know tax relief, health care, and social justice. Go outside, line up the postman who waves at you when he delivers his mail, the cop who orders breakfast every day at the same Dunkin' Donuts as you, the construction worker who you're always talking to about this revolution thing over Friday poker. Do the same. Go against every last inch of human decency you may have in you and slaughter them all, slowly, brutally, painfully.
Can't do it, can you. Can't even imagine it. It's unconscionable. Morally objectionable. Offensive to you that I would even begin to compare your ideology with such a thing. You can't begin to see what this has to do with storming the White House to drive out Obama or tarring and feathering Glenn Beck, or marching across the White House lawn in solidarity with your common man to drive out the Wall Street funded fat cat corrupt politicians and replacing them with REAL Americans!!1 How is this thought experiment even remotely relevant?
Bub. Seriously. Did you pay attention in high school when they taught you about the French Revolution? Or the American Civil War? Or Germany during the Second World War? Have you read about Russia, Vietnam, China, Cambodia? Have you taken a close look at the aftermath of the revolutions of Leonidas, Che Guevara, Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong? Or even our own American Revolution, which you so starry-eyedly turn to as a model?
The worst thing about this thought experiment? It isn't a thought experiment. What the goddamn fuck do you think a revolution is.
Brother against brother, father against child. That's what a house divided truly is. No one ever permanently unseated a government from power just by murdering a king.
News blogosphere, Joe Stack had the same ideology as many of you. Not merely similar. The same. His manifesto echoed the same tripe I've been seeing from YouTube, news blog comment boards, and newspaper editorials for years--not to mention random passersby every time I go to Burger King or do my laundry. The outpouring of sympathy I'm seeing out there, the sheer number of times I've seen the phrase "I don't condone what he did but he had a point," doesn't free you from judgment, it elevates him to fucking martyrdom. The main difference between Joe Stack and you is not that Joe Stack murdered innocent people, the difference is that Joe Stack understood that unseating power by force is murdering innocent people, and he was somehow okay with it. Even if he wasn't really clear on which innocent people he needed to murder to get his point across. (Any innocent people will suffice, it seems, if the amount of sympathy I am seeing for this guy is any indication. I wonder which of the next of you politico blog fucks is already thinking about employing the same strategy because you think it's the only way the mainstream media will listen.) You talk of framing a conflict between 51% of America against the other 49%, but let's be honest here. Do you honestly believe that everyone, hell, even a majority of people you know and love and care about is going to be on your side? Even the ones who say they would?
People like you, news blogosphere, you Greek chorus to the tragedy of politics, are the reason why the Second Amendment makes any sense. Not because the Founding Fathers ever intended that a disorganized lynch mob should (or could) effectively be a check against the military, but because how the fuck am I going to defend myself when one of you takes a potshot at a senator or CEO and the slug pegs me instead.
And if you truly believe that you could do it--if you truly believe that the only way forward to the kind of America you could live in is to slaughter the American people on their behalf, that a little collateral damage is the price America must pay to stay free--then you have forfeited your freedom. You need to be locked up. Not for the government's sake. For the people's. The Man isn't keeping you down to silence the voice of the people, it's keeping you down to protect them from you. Timothy McVeigh was no John Brown and neither is some washed-out software engineer from Pennsylvania who campaigned for tax relief on a platform of attempted mass murder.
I'm sure there are people out there who would read this and roll their eyes, and think, "Wow. How could anyone be so brainwashed as to equate common people with the government? 'The king is his people only if the people are a desert,' and all that." Dude, I went to high school in a country just barely recovering from the immediate legacy of fascism. I don't trust the American government, or any government, is always going to be acting in my best interest either. But I trust heartless pseudo-nationalist militants even less.
Not in my name, Joe Stacks of the blogosphere. Not. In. My. Fucking. Name.