I live in Austin Texas. Yesterday in Austin, in the most surreal event to happen so far this decade, a software engineer called Joe Stack (good name that, for a software engineer) flew his his Piper Cherokee PA-28 airplane, loaded with 50 gallons of fuel, into the IRS offices in Austin.
Joe Stack simply snapped. It was an irrational gesture born of a hatred for the IRS, with whom he’d clearly had an adversarial relationship for years. Joe snapped. He put a suicide note on the Internet. He drove his wife and child out of the house. He set the house on fire and then he got in his airplane and crashed it into the Austin IRS building.
Events like this happen in good times, but they seem more common in harsh economic times. OK It’s tough out there.
Political Art
This was no more of a political act that me putting the cat out at night. It happens every now and then. In America as elsewhere, sometimes people snap. The normal outcome is that they get a gun and shoot a few people, before they get taken down. They don’t normally crash airplanes into buildings.
The only previous examples of crashing an airplane into a building was the immensely political strike of 9/11 and the strange loner action a few months later when a 15-year-old boy crashed a Cessna into the 42-story Bank of America Plaza building in Tampa, Florida. This too was a political act, if a very strange one. The boy left a suicide note indicating that he acted alone and that he supported Osama Bin Laden.
However, in America right now, the media, especially Fox News (the broadcasting arm of the Republican Party), tries to turn everything into a political act.
“If you put your cat out at night, the terrorists win.”
I heard about this event over the phone by the way. Probably because I live in Austin. The local jungle drums may this time have worked a little faster than Twitter. My wife was on the phone to her boss (she was working from home) who was interrupted on the call by her husband who had just been told of the event that had happened a few moments before.
The Austin press and TV were all over it instantly – and well they might be, because all the footage of everything could be syndicated across the world. Reporters were out interviewing the neighbours of the guy. There were reporters at the airfield just North of Austin, where the plane took off and there were reporters interviewing the survivors who had evacuated the building. Luckily only a few people were killed. It could have been worse.
Watching the news happen, I noticed the usual misinformation effect. There were reports, for example, that the air plane had been stolen. Not true. One wonders where they came from. Two jets were scrambled from Houston, in case some larger terrorist attack was in progress, but it clearly wasn’t.
It Was Just Life Imitating Art
We are all capable of delinquent, destructive and suicidal acts. We choose not to do them, indeed we choose not to even think of doing them. We could buy guns and shoot. We could go on the Internet and find how to make explosives and then make bombs. We could derail trains. We could drop concrete blocks onto traffic from bridges. Society has no defence against a lunatic who doesn’t mind dying. It has no defence against someone who snaps. But socity is big. It can take hits like that and move on.
If this had been a gunman, it would have been “just another crazy shooter”. But this was an airplane suicide and all previous acts of this nature in America were political. This event was tailor-made for the political amplifiers of every description.
- He was white and not Islamic. So was he another Timothy McVeigh?
- He hated the IRS. So was he a Tea Party wing nut?
- There was (almost unbelievably so) an FBI office and a CIA office in that building. So is there a conspiracy here?
- Will Fox News claim that “he was driven to this desperate act by the Obama regime”?
- Will MSNBC claim that Glen Beck has incited such crazies to acts like this?
No. He just snapped, and killed himself in a very destructive manner. That is all.
