By Bob Moser, The Texas Observer
We’ll soon be hearing more than we ever needed to know about
Joseph Andrew Stack III, the man who burned up his house and flew a
suicide mission into an Austin IRS office this morning. We’ll no doubt
discover that neighbors and friends are shocked; that he was a quiet
fellow, kept to himself, nobody imagined … you know, the usual.
Meanwhile, folks in the left-wing and right-wing media will be furiously
spinning Stack and his six-page suicide note into an object lesson
about the dangerous tendencies of–take your pick–anti-government
tea-partyers or left-wingnuts in “socialist” enclaves like the Austin
area.
Stack’s
self-described suicide “rant,” discovered on his Web site before
the FBI shut it down, provides fodder for either side to pick up and run
with. If you want to lay his actions at the door of the radical
elements in the tea-party movement, you can pick out some of Stack’s
words–calling the U.S. government a “totalitarian regime,” for instance,
or sounding like a tea-party keynote speaker when he writes that “In a
government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as
their lies and their self-serving laws.”
But that could also be language from an anti-war rally. And while we
might yet find that he was a member of the Texas Nationalist Movement or
some such right-wing group, Stack hardly sounds like your typical John
Bircher. Along with his detailed litany of IRS woes, he complains about
“the joke we call the American medical system” and the failure to enact
health-care reform (“It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead
people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in”).
Hardly striking a white-supremacist note, he writes that “It has always
been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this
country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants.”
And there is a serious populist critique–one shared by many on the
left and right and in the middle–of the bank bailout as a symbol of
America’s having been sold to corporations and the wealthy. “I remember
reading about the stock market crash before the ‘great’ depression and
how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows
when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic
how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to
fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class
(who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their
asses and it’s ‘business-as-usual.’ “
And then there is Stack’s closing note:
“The communist creed: “From each according to his ability, to each
according to his need.
“The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to
each according to his greed.”
You could hardly get further from the tea-party right than this.
Hatred of government is a staple of the movement; a loathing of
capitalism is antithetical to it. For the tea-party rank-and-file,
capitalism–pure, unfettered, libertarian–is the panacea for all ills,
and government is the evil force that prevents free markets from
exercising their universal benevolence.
We might yet learn that there’s something deeply political or
ideological behind Stack’s apparent act of domestic terrorism. But his
own words of explanation don’t lend themselves to that kind of pat
assumption. Stack appears to have been a frustrated middle-American with
a tragic screw loose.
Maybe it’s true that the anti-government venom of the right helped
tip Stack over into violence. Then again, maybe it would have happened
anyway. And maybe, in the end, the scariest and saddest thing is that a
good deal of what this suicidal 54-year-old had to say was not mere
ideological jibberish: Stack’s words are those of an unhinged man who
felt caught up in a system that, while not as hopeless as he’d
concluded, is undoubtedly deeply unjust. And his death, no matter his
twisted intentions, won’t change it one whit.
Bob Moser is editor of the award-winning Texas weekly, The Texas Observer, where he writes the Purple Texas column.