ManicDDaily

It’s very hard to know what to make of Joe Stack, the apparent pilot of the plane that crashed into an Austin, Texas IRS office today.

My first reaction was that this is what you (we) get when it becomes popular to demonize the U.S. tax system, to talk about revolution and seccession, and to push diabolical conspiracy theories.  But Stack doesn’t seem to exactly fit into a Tea Party profile (whatever that is.)   For one thing, he comes across as extremely anti-capitalist.  For another, though he specifically targets the IRS, his enemies are too diversified to represent a particular partisan viewpoint.

All that’s really clear from the internet letter Stack posted before his plane crash is that he was very very angry—angry that corrupt and self-defeating institutions (he names GM in particular) are bailed out while he seems to get financially hit again and again.  Angry that all kinds of people and things present obstacles to him and his retirement plan–GW Bush,  Arthur Andersen, Patrick Moynihan, sleazy accountants, tax lawyers, specific inequities in the tax code, the closing of bases in Southern California in the 1990’s, difficulties with air travel after 9/11, low pay rates in Texas, the FAA, drug companies and insurance companies, the Catholic Church, fat cats in general.

Because Stack’s’ attack was against the IRS, some people have already expressed sympathy for him (while acknowledging the horror perpetrated on his victims.)     He’s clearly someone that was pressed beyond his breaking point; reading about someone who is under such internal (and possibly external) pressure invokes a certain sympathy (in addition to a whole bunch of fear.)

But the sympathy (or at least any sympathy that I feel) ends with the bloodletting:  “violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer,” Stack writes.

Here’s where I question the influence of our culture.  The guy was clearly mad—and perhaps not just in the sense of angry.  But the fact is that we have a ‘tit-for-tat’ culture, a culture which seems to admire, or at least, accept, vigilantism.  It’s a culture that espouses hitting back, standing up for one’s self with a gun (or some kind of weapon); it is not a “turn-the-other-cheek” kind of culture, not even among much of the Christian right.

Stack complains about “taxation without representation,” but what this seems to refer to is not that he did not get a chance to voice his views, but that his views did not carry the day, that, in other words, he didn’t win.  (Does this sound familiar?)

I’ll stop right here.  Who knows yet what was really going on with the guy?   Craziness all around;  unhappiness all around.