A Murderous Smile: Mark Ames on American shoot-ups. posted by Richard Seymour

Someone in the comments boxes recommended Mark Ames' Going Postal shortly after the Virginia Tech massacre. You can read Ames' take on the Virginia Tech Massacre here, but do pick up the book if you see it. An aphotically witty and fact-heavy investigation such as this ought to be supplied to workers and students who want a preparatory course on the sources of these massacres. The heuristic is infallibly correct, which is remarkable since he starts with a hypothesis that the killings are in some senses 'justified'. That, I assume, has a few jaws dropping - but stick with this.

Little Doughboy's revenge
The title refers to the fact that these massacres began to occur in the 1980s in the US Postal Service (USPS) and expanded rapidly to various American workplaces, from Louisville to Honolulu, often destroying companies in the process. Hence, a workplace assassin has 'gone postal'. The turning point came when Joseph Wesbecker entered his workplace in September 1989, a printing press called Standard Gravura, and shot seven of his co-workers to death, causing twenty others devastating wounds. He then put a gun to his own face and pulled the trigger. Ames was able to interview one of the survivors, Michael Campbell, whose body is deformed by the impact of six bullets from Wesbecker's various munitions. Oh hell, Campbell has told Ames' contact, "everybody supported him, everybody saw where he was coming from. His only problem was that he shot the wrong people." He isn't alone. Another worker at the plant tells Ames that Wesbecker was "pressed into it" And if he'd only got "the right people", he would have "had a lot more sympathy. Still does, as it is!" Finding out what could induce workers at the plant to say that takes Ames on a scintillating journey through America's corporate landscape. The initial media reaction - indeed the stock reaction to these events - was to describe a 'flip-out'. For here was a man who had been a conscientious worker, working enormous amounts of overtime, taking on the onerous role of working a noisy and dangerous machine called 'the folder' (which, due to its fumes and emissions, is a dangerous device and can only be worked for half-hour stretches). He saves up, buys a nice car and a good house. He is ambitious, but always good-humoured. Ah, but - he has marital problems, and suspects (apparently with some reason) that his wife sleeps with his co-workers. He is mocked and derided by his co-workers. He is on anti-depressant drugs. One of his sons had been seriously ill, and another had been caught flashing. And perhaps, oweing to his nickname, 'Rocky', he was known for violent tendencies. That must explain the indiscriminate rampage, then. Except that the massacre wasn't indiscriminate at all - he specifically, despite media depictions, picked his victims off while leaving others unharmed, and there is a great deal more to the story. Firstly, 'Rocky's' first nickname was 'Little Doughboy' on account of him being overweight and soft - he acquired the sobriquet 'Rocky' after mouthing off to a woman in a bar for the benefit of his friends, who then kicked the shit out of him. Secondly, his marital difficulties and his general difficulties with women were not new, nor had they exactly stopped him from trying.

In 1978, however, after working for the firm for seven years, he started to experience a multitude of problems - this was when he divorced his wife, when he son became sick and his other son got busted. In 1980, naturally enough, the stress of the work he had devoted himself to became too much. He requested that he be taken off 'folder' duty, and claimed that it was harming his health - other workers say that the 'folder' is indeed damaging. But the company refused to do so, and continued to refuse his request for years: no other worker wanted to take over, and he - a sort of laughing stock with both management and staff - didn't have any leverage. The union's strength had been diminished by economic hard times, and a Reaganite anti-union drive was about to make it even weaker. The plants was exposed to severe job cuts and wage freezes, and the owners - the wealthy Bingham family - were secretly constructing a new plant in Tennessee to shift production. They told the union leadership, when it was discovered, that they had either to agree to austerity measures or face the plant's closure. The union caved. So, when Wesbecker is expected to continue in a role that could well be killing him for a company that doesn't appear to care about him and indeed seems intent either on getting rid of him or squeezing the last drop out of him, he looks for every means to escape. The union will do little, so a doctor writes a letter for him begging the company to take him off the 'folder', to no avail. He files a discrimination complaint against the company on the grounds that he is diagnosed as a manic depressive, a form of incapacitation, and the company has made allowances for incapacitation in the past. The company's 'Human Resources' department (how I hate those words, and those people) stonewalls, offering the county's Human Relations Commission, which supports Wesbecker's claim, an outlandish string of claims explaining why Wesbecker and only he must be available for the 'folder'. Eventually, Wesbecker has to drop the claim and take medical leave for psychological stress. When he returns, instead of compromising, they stick him on long-term disability and drastically reduce his pay. The company was planning to cut his disability pension to 60% of its previous value in October 1989 - Wesbecker got them before they got him. After his massacre, the company was destroyed and had to shut down: such was the aim. He wished to destroy both the specific agents he saw as responsible for his miserable condition and the company that encouraged the bullying and victimisation that he experienced.

Slave rebellions and the capitalist road to serfdom
Wesbecker was not to be a one-off, and the circumstances tended to be similar: it was not a social type that could be identified so much as a set of conditions. The infamous postal massacres had always involved an element of workplace bullying and victimisation by management. The USPS, regarded somewhat benignly by most, was an arena of cruelty and suspicion between management and workers. And since the Nixon administration had forced the postal service for the first time in 140 years to subsist on its own profits, with competitors like Federal Express introduced later on, the workers were being squeezed to the last pip to get those profits in, with weekly workloads extending to 70 or 80 hours, and an increasing of terror and intimidation on the shop floor. It was Wesbecker who introduced the office massacre to the corporate mainstream, and in short order 'white collar' workplaces were being shot up all over America. Repeatedly, the killer is perceived as mild-mannered, pleasant, the last person to flip out. Repeatedly, it is discovered that the killer is experiencing either direct victimisation or serious distress as the corporate culture undermines basic conviviality. Repeatedly, the victims were picked off and others deliberately left to survive, with the supervisor being a primary target (often lucky enough to be out of the office, however). This is not random mayhem: it is insurgent rage.

Ames compares the office shoot-ups to the antebellum slave revolts, often involving doom-laden, violent outbursts, inspired by 'visions' or a sense of religious purpose. These modern Nat Turners are seen as incomprehensible lunatics, ingrates, precisely as the slave rebels were. To be clear, since some people have a knack for misunderstanding, Ames isn't saying that the condition of 'postindustrial' American workers is equivalent to that of slaves. But he notes that there were few such revolts, and suggests that the slaves adapted to their fate for a number of reasons: it was routinised, and became over the long-term a 'normal' state of affairs, such that resistance was often incomprehensible; another is the endless multidimensional PR efforts to get slaves to accept their position, usually led by the Church; another is the overwhelming militarisation of America before and after the Revolution, and the ability and willingness of the local ruling class to viciously suppress any manifestation of revolt; most important, in his view, is the willingness and ability of human beings to adapt to a great variety of oppressive or difficult situations. While we now regard the abolitionist position to be obvious and its challengers absurd and despicable, the situation in the early 1800s was quite the reverse. Even when abolitionism came to be an acceptable political platform, the 'moderate' or 'realistic' abolitionism was preferred to the 'radical' version. And so, we might discover with a shift of perspective that these massacres are comprehensible as a revolt against intolerable, desperate conditions, a result of a sustained blitz on workers' security and income.

Well, there is plenty of evidence for the latter, and you wouldn't have to read Ames' book to find that out. The statistics on wage growth, inequality and workplace safety tell their own tale, as does the almost psychopathic denial that is issued by corporate spokespeople every time a similar 'tragegy' occurs. But Ames discusses the full range of the attacks on workers since 1980. This includes not only the atrocious ways in which wealth has been transferred to the rich, while ever-expanding numbers of American workers have to put up with no health insurance, lousy wages, diminishing benefits, eroding pension schemes, and longer hours, but also the much-celebrated drives by people like Al 'Chainsaw' Dunlap and General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who insisted that workers have 'unlimited juice to squeeze', and that fear in the workplace was an invaluable tool of business. Indeed, the assumption of the right of capitalist firms to terrorise their staff is so ingrained that Ames has no difficulty turning up editorials and statements from successful CEOs on the topic, as well as some detail on the practise. One document, an internal memo from the CEO of the Cernel Corporation, is sickening and vile in its attempt to bully the middle managers into bullying the staff more effectively. The car parks aren't full at 8am, the boss whines, people are being allowed to come in late, and leave early. The managers are told that if they don't make sure that everyone is at work, arriving half an hour early and leaving half an hour late, they will be fired: and this is to be achieved by out-of-hours emergency meetings with staff in which they are threatened with the boot. Staff numbers are cut, facilities are cut, benefits are frozen, etc etc. There ought, says the boss, to be pizza men arriving at 7.30pm to feed starving workers. And there is no shortage of official corporate ideology legitimising this. Welch explains, for instance, that fear is "healthy, like pain is healthy" because it "gets you out of that comfortable equilibrium". It destroys "comfortable equilibrium" alright - sanity, marriages, families, livelihoods, communities...

Middle managers are therefore expected to humiliate and abuse, because it creates the necessary atmosphere for the efficient accumulation of capital. And surprise - the massacres often attempt to target victimising supervisors, screaming middle-managers, puffed up little tyrants who like to spy on the staff or threaten them with disciplinary action on the slightest grounds. In the absence of collective action, Ames suggests, more and more workers are internalising these corporate norms, making their diminishing office space into their personal sitting room, unlearning the average forms of communication that one needs to get on with the family on the odd occassion one sees them, losing touch with leisure time which they are increasingly unable to enjoy. Indeed, such is their fear of the sack that a new phenomenon started to emerge in the 1980s known as 'presenteeism' - people coming to work even though they were too sick to do their duties properly. Without a general critique, a frame in which to perceive these issues correctly, people tend to internalise the torment. They see themselves as at fault for not being perfectly happy. They put about that bonhomie that puts others at ease and protects them from the suspicion that they are losers. They conceal their stress, their difficulties, their depression. They're often noted for precisely their mild-mannered and commodious disposition. But sometimes, especially if their long hours and commitment have been rewarded with singling out, bullying, degenerating conditions - well, then they might stalk from office to office, single-mindedly tearing up selected victims with a stash of guns in a gym sack. These slave revolts are therefore the isolated acts of those finally and permanently deranged by corporate culture. They take out their perceived enemies, often shouting some vengeful last words as they do, and then (usually) destroy themselves while still on top of matters.

But, why the schools?
Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are heroes to some. It wasn't long after their massacre before notes appeared on message boards or lists explaining that they did what many young people want to do. Tribute sites appeared, some offering advice on how you might complete your "mission" even more successfully than "St Eric" and "St Dylan". Subsequently, as we know, a bunch of 'copycats' were stopped in their tracks. Intelligent student misfits from two-parent loving families in 'Middle America' probably aren't the usual candidates for deification, but the act of mass murder has propelled them into many young hearts. They were not, as is usually claimed, Nazis, goths, gay, druggies or Marilyn Manson fans. Even so, as Ames points out, you don't go expressing sympathy for these people in public, otherwise you're off to boot camp, where you stand a chance of dying from wounds incurred there. You go online and chatter away to other assassinophiles, with a reasonable prospect of anonymity.

Well, before you get to the reason for this covert sympathy, you need to try and understand the nature of the crime. As has been repeatedly pointed out, no successful profile of a typical school shooter has yet been devised. Good students, bad students, wealthy ones, poor ones, ones from stable familes, others from broken homes... there's no archetype. This is because, as Ames puts it, "It isn't the office or schoolyard shooters who need to be profiled - they can't be. It is the workplaces and schools that need to be profiled". Now, this bit is rather crucial. I quote verbatim from his list of characteristics to watch for:

complaints about bullying go unpunished by an administration that supports the cruel social structure;

antiseptic corridors and overhead fluourescent lights reminiscent of a mid-sized airports;

rampant moral hypocrisy that promotes the most two-faced, mean, and shallow students to the top of the pecking order; and

maximally stressed parents push their kids to achieve higher and higher scores.

The second point, to avoid misunderstanding, is serious. The dispiriting, uglified surroundings provide an important experiential backdrop for the bullying and hypocrisy and stress. But of course, the main points here are the competitive social structure and the parents' eagerness to ensure children succeed within it. The school is a training ground for the workplace, inculcating the kind of discipline and habits that one will be constant throughout one's life. Most waking hours, at least five days a week, will be spent in competition with one's peers, and the assholes will always rise to the top if they weren't there to begin with. Bullying will be overlooked or tacitly condoned by people who sympathise with the bullies and find it difficult to manage their subordinates without them. They call it 'hazing', apparently, and its often meted out in a formal fashion along socioeconomic lines, sometimes by sororities and fraternities. It's defended as a bit of fun, or as a means to inculcate respect: on the contrary, it is often quite serious and generates fear and mistrust. Aside from the formal 'hazing', there are asshole teachers who will emotionally humiliate students in the name of discipline, and the usual ritual drudgery and idiocy that goes on the minutiae. Many of the most miserable, demeaning things that can happen at work can happen at school, and anyone who remembers their school years knows that it seems to matter a great deal more at that age, and it seems to last forever, even if its only a few years.

That this is an experience with at least some widespread purchase is evident in the subterranean sympathy for the mass murderers. The support of some young people wasn't restricted to Klebold and Karris. When Andy Williams, a lower middle class student attending an upper class college in the fading Republican town of Santee, decided to wipe out many of his classmates, within weeks there were attempted and actual 'copycat' massacres. So far from the Pump Up the Volume fantasy, these kids don't solve all their problems by learning to express themselves through pirate radio stations, and sincerely talking through all of their problems. They implode or explode. The implication of the phrase 'copycat' is that people really want to be like the hick serial killers and destroy their own lives in the process, so that someone who doesn't matter will say they were cool. That's a cheap and lazy excuse for analysis. But, precisely as the slave revolts in the workplace often involve explicit or implicit reference to previous revolts, the example of others provides an interpretive framework, and a 'way forward'. And it might be added, as with those other slave revolts, the kids who do it are often (not always) the ones you'd least expect. So quiet, so diligent, and so pleasant.

Which brings me to the title of this post. The murderous smile in question is the quality of 'niceness' that one is supposed to evince in a company setting, the ability to smile and put others at ease. The killers so often have been among those who have taken the corporate 'Don't Worry Be Happy' bullshit as the normal response to wage-cuts, hateful competition, slashed benefits, longer hours and management terrorism, and have done their best to comport themselves in a fitting fashion. I suppose, in light of the Zombie Labour theme, you could call this 'playing dead'. So be wary of niceness. It's the last step before someone goes postal.

Labels: capitalism, massacre, postindustrial rebellion, ragenomics, school shootings, virginia tech

Capitalism, gun crime and ideology. posted by Richard Seymour

The Virginia Tech massacre continues to attract commentary, and some of it is indeed splendid, either because barking mad or because brilliantly splenetic. Fred Gardner's attack on 'Prozac Madness' is a heart-warming; Alex Cockburns call for transferring the means of violence from tyrannical fat-asses in the state to local democratic militias is funny, but in my view is mistaken, for reasons I'll come to, and contains an unfair attack on the 'anti-gun lobby'; Gerald Kaufman blaming it on the movies is stunningly inept; Henry Porter comparing the massacre to chlorine bombings in Iraq, and demanding that Islam 'damns' the use of such weapons is its usual trashy worst; Roy Greenslade commanding the moral high ground by pointing out how little attention is paid to the daily catastrophe in Iraq compared to thirty-two deaths in Virginia is to the point, to a point; and a poll finding that women and minorities are most likely to favour gun control probably reflects the distribution of victimhood.

Yet it seems unlikely at the very least that this one instance, treated as an anecdotal source for instapunditry, is likely to generate the kind of questions - let alone answers - that we really need. You cannot extricate the lone nut from the total prior circumstances, and those extend well beyond the availability of potentially damaging anti-depressants or even the availability of guns. Because any solution you attempt is going to impact on the entire criminal justice system, not to mention giving the state certain rights in respect of, say, controlling film production, or controlling student behaviour, that it might not otherwise have, or disbursing weaponry among authorities in schools who might be no better at handling them than SWAT teams. To evaluate these pleas properly, it is essential to have an evaluation of the society for which they are proposed: at any rate, such is my way of segueing to the topic I want to comment on, which I shall relate to Cockburn's article.

The simple fact is, as the criminologist Jeffrey Reiman has argued, the system - including not only the courts and police, but also the process of lawmaking - is designed to fail at reducing crime. This doesn't mean that politicians maliciously maintain high levels of crime, but that they refuse to undertake the kinds of measures that could reduce it substantially where it is reasonable to expect that they understand the consequences of their inaction; and at the same time, they have pursued a drastic expansion of the punishment system, creating new crimes, extending sentences, making nonviolent or even victimless activities (such as prostitution) imprisonable, with the predictable consequence that crime rates continue to rise, declining only where exogenous factors impact on it: such as a decrease in unemployment, or a stabilisation of the drugs trade. They have created a heavily privatised penal system, knowing that this gives an incentive to providers to ensure that they do not have any effect in reducing recidivism, since high crime equals high profits. On the one hand, this programme of drastic expansion of prisons, harsher punishments and the reintroduction of the death penalty, a process initiated in the late 1960s when it was feared that crime was getting out of control, has coincided with a dramatic increase in that makes certain parts of the society unbearable; on the other, it tears up poor neighbourhoods, especially black neighbourhoods, since the criminal justice system disproportionately locks up young black men. And here I'm not playing any games: it isn't only disproportionate to the actual black population, it's radically disproportionate to the incidence of crime among black people. Incidentally, repeated studies suggest that not only one's 'racial' background, but also affluence is a primary determinant of the likelihood of one's incarceration: for instance, Reiman cites a study of convicted youths in Philadelphia by Terence Thornberry, which discovered that the more privileged youths were less likely to be incarcerated, and far more likely to get probation. There are similar trends throughout the entire system. The system is designed to fail at the task of reducing crime, although it happens to be a highly apt form of repression in a polarised liberal democracy, in which the manifestations of social distress can be contained rather than seriously addressed (which would require a redistribution of class power and privilege).

For, more fundamentally, that system is integrated into a capitalist society in which the very definition of crime results from an ideology appropriate to claims of 'property rights'. In particular, large amounts of harmful activity, which involve intent (inasmuch as the agents of it, usually corporations, cannot reasonably be unaware of the harmful effects their conduct has), is not criminalised. What is called 'white collar crime' is not merely underpunished in comparison to ordinary crime: it is often not recognised as such either by the state or in official ideology. And while most crimes committed are property crimes, Reiman estimates that 'white collar crime' (which includes mostly property crime, but also serious physical harm to human beings) is immensely more costly than the forms of crime for which most people are convicted. The total cost of 'white collar crime' in 2000 was, according to Reiman, $404bn, mostly pertaining to corporate offenses (theft from consumers usually, but also environmental crimes etc). That only includes those forms of conduct actually defined as illegal, not those that legally kill American workers and consumers every year. The reality of incarceration of mostly young, mostly working class, mostly male, and disproportionately black, people in America is a result of a process of decision-making mediated by ideology, that runs the whole gamut of the system. It runs from the decision as to what constitutes a crime, inflected as it is by class power and the lobbies and basic assumptions that append to it; to the decision as to what sentences there should be, given a prevailing conservative consensus that we're too damned soft (which is obviously inflected with racism and class contempt); to the enforcement of cops, often racist ones, but less famously often hostile to the working class and poor; to the decisions of magistrates and parole boards, whose decisions reflect the same basic biases.

If the legal system is designed to fail at protecting human beings and maintaining basic minimums of civility and security, it is also unlikely to overcome problems that the government itself introduces, such as the addition of crack cocaine to American streets in order to fund the Contra army in Nicaragua, under circumstances in which the drug is controlled by violent gangs as an artefact of its illicit nature (actually, if it wasn't illicit, you couldn't fund secret wars from it). One of the main contributors to violent crime in the late 1980s and early 1990s was precisely the struggle for control of the distribution of that substance. Indeed, every time a new substance like that comes into the market, there is a similar struggle for control before it becomes routinised: this accounts for some of the acute increases in violent crime, while the routinised control by violent gangs and the necessity of paying for the stuff through robbery and so on accounts for a part of the ongoing high rates of crime. State planners must be perfectly aware of the effect that the criminalisation of drug users has on crime rates, but continue to pursue it relentlessly, even while state bodies surreptitiously bring the substance into communities. This isn't a policy designed to reduce the use of drugs or the incidences of crime associated with drug use. The solution would plainly be, as a first step, to make cheaper drugs available in legal ways.

Now add one more element: the guns. You have a society in which millions are intentionally, knowingly fucked over on a regular basis. Aside from being exploited and oppressed, their lack of control over the means of production, never mind the means of state rule, means that they are denied adequate healthcare, and often killed by the companies they pay to cure them; are often killed by their work, if they can find employment; are often killed by the food that they eat, especially if it happens to be low-cost food. They are criminalised, often for harmless behaviour, imprisoned, often for nonviolent offenses and petty crimes. Others are incorporated into illicit economies that operate through coercion. And you have this immense industry that thrives off social breakdown, whose impact on American society is almost uniformly negative: I speak of the weapons industry. When they're not producing the means by which Iraqis are gunned down in their cars or houses, they are encouraging homeowners and middle class suburb dwellers to fancy themselves either inheritors of the American Revolution, or hardass homesteaders, wild west heroes, war veterans or something else appropriately ridiculous. Grandad therefore has an arsenal which one can loot from to shoot up the local school. On top of that, you create a demand for property-driven criminal activity, create the supply of propertyless criminals to carry much of it out, and then you have an industry that is desperate to sell its product, with the reasonable expectation that they will be used in criminal transactions. In the United States, between 1965 and 2000, more than a million Americans were killed by firearm, and almost the entirety of increases in the murder rate in the early 1990s was provided by lethal semi-automatic weapons. Aside from that, many of the murders are committed within the household, and those households with at least one gun (over half of American households today) have been more likely to experience a homicide for that reason. The facts suggest that the circulation of firearms in America is far too free, but under the rubric of states rights, many states opt out of obligations proposed by, for instance, the Brady Bill, which simply proposed a five day waiting period, (and even that no longer obtains). If the system was designed to succeed in reducing especially violent crime, then a waiting period and a register of gun ownership would surely be a minimum expectation.

So, this is why Cockburn's contrarian swipe at the 'anti-gun lobby' comes rather cheaply. In a capitalist state there is always de facto gun control, since the state ensures that it has the biggest and baddest weapons. The current gun industry has nothing to do with ensuring the democratic right of citizens to resist an overly aggressive or tyrannical state, as per the libertarian fantasists. It is an industry that has killed more than enough Americans, usually poor Americans. The question is, what kind of gun control should be permitted and under what circumstances. On the other hand, Cockburn's call for the replacement of quasi-military and police rule by popular militia rule could in principle be a revolutionary demand. Duncan Hallas made a similar argument, much better put, in 1985. Standing armies are indeed inherently undemocratic and permit the state to wage aggressive wars; the current police and death penalty regimes are brutal and racist. To transfer control over the means of violence in this way would be a revolutionary change in itself: as such it could only occur as a result of, or in the process of, a serious social revolution. Yet, the context of Cockburn's argument is otherwise. Invoking the posse, or the popular militia, he actually calls for teachers and hall monitors to be armed as an alternative to cops on campus and SWAT teams. It is true that the campus cops did not evacuate the campus as they should have when the first two bodies were discovered, and that the SWAT teams did not intervene to stop the killings. It is also true that they are given to torturing students from time to time. Yet, hall monitors are as likely to plug an overactive student as a dangerous assassin. Teachers are as likely to shoot their own students as a mass killer on the loose. It's curious, since Cockburn is so dyspeptic about the absolute failure of the institution and its teaching staff to respond to the warning signs apparently so evident in Cho, that he thinks they can be trusted with brandishing pistols. This isn't a society on the brink of a democratic revolutionary upheaval. It is a society experiencing serious disintegration and polarisation, and it isn't sensible to proliferate weapons in the school system. The number of guns and access to them is contributing to widespread social misery - not originating it, but compounding it, and making its effects more deadly.

There is a lot of romanticism in the imagery of Black Panthers holding guns outside police stations, thus symbolising the defense of black communities against state repression. I don't propose that their right to do so should have been abolished, nor should it be today. But what did that achieve in itself, and since when has the strategy of armed combat with the police been effective? Since when have people not been easily outgunned by the cops? And such is the ideology of crime in a capitalist society that even armed self-defense against criminal agents of the state, or even against the wrong kind of civilian, will invariably be treated and prosecuted as a capital crime. The left's attitude to gun control has to be situation-specific, and pragmatic. In some societies, restricting guns would make precious little difference, since the murder rate is already quite low. In the US, the opposite obtains.

Labels: capitalism, class, crime, guns, racism, virginia tech

A profound sense of audience. posted by Richard Seymour

A wholesome moment from the Herald Sun:

Labels: advertising, massacre, tasteless, virginia tech

If only he'd been a Muslim. posted by Richard Seymour

Some of the American conservatives are irate at what they perceive to be a mainstream media conspiracy to deny Cho Seung-Hui's Islamic connections. You see, if the massacre could be Islammed-up a bit, then it could be described as a 'suicide attack', and a deliberate signal to evildoers all over the world as to what easy prey American youths are. Initially, it was revealed that Cho was an 'Asian' of some kind, and with the customary alacrity, neoconservative and fascist commentators in the media and through the blogosphere thought of the i-word. Then it was revealed that the phrase 'Ismail Ax' was scrawled on his body (although his package to NBC had 'A. Ishmael' written on it), and all hell broke loose on the farm. Doesn't the name alone connect him to something it says in Islam? Doesn't it relate to some Quranic tale or some disagreement Muslims have with Christianity? Why, the evidence is crystal-clear: "[Muslims] believe that Abraham was supposed to go out and attack idols with an axe, and some also attribute the phrase to meaning that Ishmael was supposed to kill Isaac, the father of all Western culture, with an axe. Cho was a South Korean immigrant to the US, but it seems undeniable that his killing spree, at least in part, was motivated by some sort of belief in Islam."

Well, let's look at Cho's statements and see if we can't find some clues in there:

You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.

Or again:

Do you know what it feels like to be humiliated and be impaled upon on a cross? And left to bleed to death for your amusement? [source]

Did you notice that, right there? Christ and crucifixion, dreams of immortality, hopelessly muddled references to some wider ramifications of the killings. Never mind that, however, and never mind that he chose to commit a crime that is perpetrated by and on Americans every year: it must be energetically removed from that context. Korean-Americans are warned to expect a backlash. Predictably, there has been a great deal of attention to the fact that he was 'Asian' (not Korean, not American, not South-East Asian - Asian, with all its civilisational overtones), and no doubt we can expect the usual sub-anthropological curiosity about 'Asian culture' rather soon. Pat Buchanan has decried 'multiculturalism' as usual, even while noting the all-American pedigree of the crime.

This is all the expected editorial bilge from the right, an effort to override the obvious and elementary considerations that the gun industry should be in some way restrained; that American institutions, especially educational institutions, have to look at how they treat non-white students; that this wave of attacks on school students, whether from adults taking an easy target before killing themselves, or from other students, gives the lie to the myths of comfort, privilege and comity that Americans are encouraged to feel are uniquely their possession. One can't help noticing that it is only after these repeated 'tragedies' (is that the appropriate word?), that this sense of 'community' is materialised in America, either with candle-lit gatherings, emotional sermons or mere politeness on New York streets, as attested to following the carnage in 2001. Every other day is fuck-you day, is it not? America is not unique in that aspect, but it is unique in its emphasis on competitive culture, on the wonders of creative destruction and disintegration. Only by perpetually retooling 'national identity' around war and empire are the inevitably breakdowns, violence, and mayhem temporarily and partially overcome: in a martial America, the class-supremacist and racist aspect of nationalism is subordinated to the primary need to Kick The Other Guy's Ass, whether it is the gook today or Muhammed himself tomorrow. (Of course, as the 'refugees' discovered after Katrina, the 'national' purview cannot be so easily disburdened of its raciological contaminants). Only through the imaginary collective experience of the frontier, and of death, is the individual refused into the social matrix, not as part of a society - nothing so Bolshevik - but as part of a shared national experience known as 'community', (a distinction with its roots in German Kriegsideologie). Since today that 'community' is defined almost primarily by the fact that it ain't Islam (never mind that Muslims are the second largest religious group in America), the cri de coeur of American reactionaries today is that 'there must be an Islamic connection'.

Labels: america, cho seung-hui, islam, islamophobia, muslim, virginia tech

Another one? posted by Richard Seymour

Why do they keep shooting up the students? Don't get me wrong, I am fully aware that this can be hyped, and used to justify the transformation of educational institutions into heavily policed camps, or 'profiling' that enables violating students' privacy. What's more, the ideological structures prevalent in American society have permitted these events to be understood in extraordinary ways that enable schools to suspend students or send them to the cop shop for wearing black clothing, issuing threats (however insincere) or using allegedly inappropriate language. Sometimes when the perpetrator is far too young to be held responsible for their actions, they are either tried as adults or they find an adult to try for something. Or when they have been tried as minors, various people have complained that their punishment isn't severe enough, as in the case of the Jonesboro Massacre. Clearly, these are ways to avoid dealing with the problem. For, surely the incidence of this in the US is at the very least way above average. What is more, it is suggested that many more are planned than succeed - for instance, after Columbine, a number of 'copycats' were allegedly attempted. One guy even runs a blog devoted to the topic.

These aren't always sudden outbursts: rather, they are often planned some time in advance, and weapons are accumulated to accomplish the act. There are often social causes involved, such as the destruction of the welfare state, yet the agents are often reasonably well off. I can only too easily fashion an Amisian response: killing is fun, a real kick, and the only wonder is that the civilised facade holds so well for so much of the time. Yet, I don't fancy the idea at all. I can't bring myself to seriously contemplate the idea of killing someone with pleasure, not even Martin Amis. I suppose, aside from the usual nutters blaming it on the teaching of Darwin in schools without an accompanying prayer, we will have to hear from people who think there's a 'culture of violence' - video games, movies, heavy metal and hip hop. To be sure, there is no shortage of cultural output that valorises random killing, but I can't help noticing a few things. Firstly, these complaints are usually tinged with racism (complaining about gritty movies with Fifty Cents and not the sexy ones with Brad Pitt). Secondly, they rarely focus on the involvement of the military-industrial complex in producing such output (video games with advertising that encourage you to 'Command Respect' by wiping out towns and villages, or that envision the overthrow of the Venezuelan government; Hollywood participation in the 'war on terror'). Thirdly, the 'culture of violence' never involves the actual business of strafing communities with bullets, cluster-bombs and daisy-cutters. Finally, of course, plenty of societies are entirely plugged into violent American culture, and generate cultures of violence all on their own, without necessarily having this scale of ongoing murderous assault on the young.

And then there will be the calls for gun restrictions, which would seek to restrain the use of an easily handled and highly effective weapon of death. No bad thing in my view. Yet, as Michael Moore pointed out in Bowling for Columbine, there are plenty of societies where gun ownership is prevalent, and where there isn't the repeated spectacle of classroom massacre. Student alienation in a viciously competitive educational system that prepares children for life in a capitalist society that where forms of social solidarity are embattled and diminished can have its role, perhaps, but then again, many of these shootings have been perpetrated by adults outside of the school system, often exacting some kind of bizarre 'revenge' on the children before committing suicide. Perhaps, then, it is too simple to locate a single cause: rather, a combustible fusion of most of these factors in various ways could produce the necessary circumstances.

Labels: cho seung-hui, guns, massacre, school shootings, virginia tech