{"id":340896,"date":"2010-02-19T12:31:22","date_gmt":"2010-02-19T17:31:22","guid":{"rendered":"tag:www.southernstudies.org,2010:\/\/5.12149"},"modified":"2010-02-24T10:59:21","modified_gmt":"2010-02-24T15:59:21","slug":"voices-joe-the-texas-terrorist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/340896","title":{"rendered":"VOICES: Joe the Texas Terrorist"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

By Bob Moser, The Texas Observer<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

We’ll soon be hearing more than we ever needed to know about
\nJoseph Andrew Stack III, the man who burned up his house and flew a
\nsuicide mission into an Austin IRS office this morning. We’ll no doubt
\ndiscover that neighbors and friends are shocked; that he was a quiet
\nfellow, kept to himself, nobody imagined … you know, the usual. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, folks in the left-wing and right-wing media will be furiously
\n spinning Stack and his six-page suicide note into an object lesson
\nabout the dangerous tendencies of–take your pick–anti-government
\ntea-partyers or left-wingnuts in “socialist” enclaves like the Austin
\narea.<\/p>\n

Stack’s
\n self-described suicide “rant,”<\/a> discovered on his Web site before
\nthe FBI shut it down, provides fodder for either side to pick up and run
\n with. If you want to lay his actions at the door of the radical
\nelements in the tea-party movement, you can pick out some of Stack’s
\nwords–calling the U.S. government a “totalitarian regime,” for instance,
\n or sounding like a tea-party keynote speaker when he writes that “In a
\ngovernment full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as
\ntheir lies and their self-serving laws.”<\/p>\n

But that could also be language from an anti-war rally. And while we
\nmight yet find that he was a member of the Texas Nationalist Movement or
\n some such right-wing group, Stack hardly sounds like your typical John
\nBircher. Along with his detailed litany of IRS woes, he complains about
\n“the joke we call the American medical system” and the failure to enact
\nhealth-care reform (“It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead
\npeople don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in”).
\nHardly striking a white-supremacist note, he writes that “It has always
\nbeen a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this
\ncountry, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants.”<\/p>\n

And there is a serious populist critique–one shared by many on the
\nleft and right and in the middle–of the bank bailout as a symbol of
\nAmerica’s having been sold to corporations and the wealthy. “I remember
\nreading about the stock market crash before the ‘great’ depression and
\nhow there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows
\nwhen they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic
\nhow far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to
\n fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class
\n (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their
\nasses and it’s ‘business-as-usual.’ “<\/p>\n

And then there is Stack’s closing note:<\/p>\n

“The communist creed: “From each according to his ability, to each
\naccording to his need.<\/p>\n

“The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to
\neach according to his greed.”<\/p>\n

You could hardly get further from the tea-party right than this.
\nHatred of government is a staple of the movement; a loathing of
\ncapitalism is antithetical to it. For the tea-party rank-and-file,
\ncapitalism–pure, unfettered, libertarian–is the panacea for all ills,
\nand government is the evil force that prevents free markets from
\nexercising their universal benevolence.<\/p>\n

We might yet learn that there’s something deeply political or
\nideological behind Stack’s apparent act of domestic terrorism. But his
\nown words of explanation don’t lend themselves to that kind of pat
\nassumption. Stack appears to have been a frustrated middle-American with
\n a tragic screw loose.<\/p>\n

Maybe it’s true that the anti-government venom of the right helped
\ntip Stack over into violence. Then again, maybe it would have happened
\nanyway. And maybe, in the end, the scariest and saddest thing is that a
\ngood deal of what this suicidal 54-year-old had to say was not mere
\nideological jibberish: Stack’s words are those of an unhinged man who
\nfelt caught up in a system that, while not as hopeless as he’d
\nconcluded, is undoubtedly deeply unjust. And his death, no matter his
\ntwisted intentions, won’t change it one whit.<\/p>\n

Bob Moser is editor of the award-winning Texas weekly, The Texas Observer<\/a>, where he writes the Purple Texas column.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5839,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-340896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5839"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}