Date: April 20th 2007

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We've been struggling here these past few days with how to deal with the fact that:
A. 33 are dead in Virginia and
B. we publish a book, "Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion--From Reagan’s Workplaces to
Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond," that deals with why these things happen.

For the first few days (during which I was on London at the London Intl Book Fair), we decided to remain quiet. But when I got back from London Wednesday night, and started to hear the US media, rather than the UK media, I got progressively more furious, and decided this morning that, since this book is a necessary polemical and astringent corrective amidst the sanctimonious pabulum of what passes for analysis at the moment, we're going to try to draw your attention to the book, and damn the torpedoes.

Alternet just had the author in question, Mark Ames, do a piece on the shootings. An excerpt from that follows, with the link and more information on the book and the author right after that...The excerpt gives you a good sense of Mark's argument in the book...

Media: "Cho Seung-Hui did it because he was crazy and evil."
History: "Schoolyard massacres are rebellions against oppressive and bullying environments by students who can't take it anymore."

Another rampage massacre, this time the worst ever. Which means another fake attempt at trying to understand this uniquely American crime—these interminable rage killing sprees in our workplaces and our schoolyards.

What makes the Virginia Tech massacre more horrifying isn't just the body count but the reaction of the living: The official fake soul-searching is more idiotic than ever, revealing, if anything, a culture that is so insanely delusional and incapable of self-reflection that it almost makes these rampage massacres seem relatively natural.

The footage from Seung-Hui's "media manifesto" has played on cable news on an endless loop for days now, and no one has considered the merits of his grievances—except to cast them as proof positive that Cho Seung-Hui was one sick guy.

Of all the idiotic reactions, so far none tops an article posted on MSNBC.com, written by an "investigative reporter" with the ill-begotten name of "Bill Dedman." His investigation allegedly revealed that Cho Seung-Hui, the shooter, displayed alleged classic warning signs of a rampage shooting. Citing a landmark Secret Service study of schoolyard rampage massacre, Dedman observed, "In more than three out of four school shootings, the attacker had made no threat against the schoolteachers or students. But most attackers engaged in some behavior prior to the incident that caused others concern or indicated a need for help. The attackers posed a threat even though they hadn't made a threat."

In other words, if you think someone's weird, but he hasn't threatened anyone, he's a threat.

There are two very serious flaws in Dedman's investigation. First, if the profile of a schoolyard rampager is someone who doesn't threaten anyone but who raises suspicions, then America will have to open up a new GULAG archipelago to hold all of the millions of kids who fit this description. But the second flaw is even more serious: the Secret Service study Dedman cites draws exactly the opposite conclusion: There is no way to profile a potential schoolyard killer. That was what was so shocking about the report. Everyone who has studied these rage massacres knows it. Everyone but journalists like Dedman, that is.

What Dedman's article reveals isn't just the sloppy work of a typical mainstream hack but, rather, of a culture desperate for an easy explanation for the massacre—one that doesn't implicate it in the crime...

Click here to read the rest: http://www.alternet.org/story/50758/

Going Postal
Rage, Murder, and Rebellion:
From Reagan’s Workplaces to
Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond
Mark Ames

“Going Postal places office shootings in the context of a workforce that's faced massive, impersonal layoffs, and workers who find themselves just scraping by while their bosses live like kings…It’s a fascinating book…[Ames has a] clear and refreshing compassion for the people who head to work every day.”—Forbes.com

“[A] breezy, barroom Foucault...audacious, necessary reading.”—Eye Weekly

Unique amongst books on the topic of rage murder, Going Postal combines both the school and workplace as areas of analysis and proposes a provocative thesis: both phenomena are not only linked but are linked in their causes—the massacres are extreme responses to ever-increasing levels of stress and pressure at work and school brought upon by the post-Reagan loss of economic security.

Going Postal examines the school and workplace rage murders that shocked America in the early 1980's and have since grown yearly in body count and social significance. By looking at massacres in schools and offices as post-industrial rebellions, Ames juxtaposes the historical place of rage in America with the changes to the social climate that occurred after Reaganomics began to effect workers’ paychecks.

Ames examines the most fascinating and unexpected cases, crafting a convincing argument for workplace massacres as modern day slave rebellions. Like slave rebellions, rage massacres are doomed, gory, sometimes inadvertently comic, and grossly misunderstood.

Going Postal seeks to contextualize this violence in a world where working isn't what it used to be and doesn’t pay what it used to. Part social critique and part true crime page-turner, Going Postal answers the questions asked by commentators on the nightly news and films such as Bowling for Columbine.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Mark Ames is co-author of the book the eXile with Matt Taibbi, and author of V Rossiu s Lubovyu, a collection of translated columns published in Russia. He is a regular contributor to the New York Press and GQ (Russia), and has been published in The Nation, Playboy, the San Jose Mercury News, Metro Silicon Valley and several Russian newspapers including Kommersant and Limonka.

Born in Northern California, Ames left the United States 11 years ago and moved to Moscow, where he worked a series of bizarre and possibly illegal jobs before becoming founding editor of the eXile, a Moscow-based English-language newspaper and web magazine. the eXile became an outlet for political commentary—often in the form of political personal attacks, wildly executed cartoons, and a trail of pranks intended for the Russian population—all relayed in a bitingly satirical tone. It is now one of only three English language newspapers in Russia.


More Praise for Going Postal:

“A fascinating slice of cultural history that also offers up that rarest of things: an original idea.”—NYPress

“[W]ell-argued, intense and unique…”—Giant

“[I]t's a fairly powerful event to find a decent-sized book that does nothing but articulate a series of truths about the American Life you've hardly read about or spoken about, but just simply felt… Going Postal is such a book.”—AlterNet

“[A] startling analysis, fizzing with the caustic, no-prisoners rage Ames perfected as the editor of The exile… Ames' fury feels fresher and more morally authentic than the usual Subaru-bumper-sticker critique of the Wal-Mart Era.”—Willamette Week

“[Ames’s] conclusions are chilling….This is dark and serious stuff.”—Philadelphia Weekly

“[A] strikingly ambitious work”—Honolulu Weekly


1-932360-82-4
Trade Paper • $15.95 • Current Affairs/ Politics
280pp • 6 x 9

E-mail Kristin Pulkkinen <kristin@softskull.com>; for a review copy, or to contact the author.


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