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A review by stevendedalus
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames
3.0
Ames's book is less a thesis than a screed: Modern capitalism is so mean and dehumanizing that it causes the people it crushes to lash out, whether at the work place or, societally, the school which is a microcosm of the empty capitalist world.
It's not convincing. Ames draws a parallel between modern scattered workplace and school violence and the similar violence during slavery. He maintains that in their times, both are frustrated wails against a paradigm so encompassing that true revolution is unthinkable.
Ames is almost manic in his struggle to force violent outbursts into the mold of true political revolution. These lonely, troubled men are lashing out against the system that has oppressed them, in a sense justifying their violence as an understandable, if reprehensible, response to the hollow and cruel world that they perceive (sometimes rightly) has discarded them.
Ames's analysis has a kernel of truth, but American workplace and school shootings have many other causes: the lessening of the hegemony of straight white men, gun culture, and the fetishization of violence, among many others.
The modern world does cause anxiety and it is mean and inhuman, but these gunmen are not secret revolutionaries. They are trouble people who are taking a culturally specific response to a world that has hollowed them out. Ames wants them to fit his neat narrative of Reagan's America creating unenlightened Marxists, and it is very evident that they do not, especially when he examines school shootings.
The world is a less secure place because of capitalism. But it is also less of a secure place because of the postmodern deconstruction of established hegemonies, because of the rise of competing narratives of oppression and power.
Ames's larger point is that the world is fucked up and these people's response is understandable: true. But this is larger than a mere class war, and Ames misses the bigger picture.
It's not convincing. Ames draws a parallel between modern scattered workplace and school violence and the similar violence during slavery. He maintains that in their times, both are frustrated wails against a paradigm so encompassing that true revolution is unthinkable.
Ames is almost manic in his struggle to force violent outbursts into the mold of true political revolution. These lonely, troubled men are lashing out against the system that has oppressed them, in a sense justifying their violence as an understandable, if reprehensible, response to the hollow and cruel world that they perceive (sometimes rightly) has discarded them.
Ames's analysis has a kernel of truth, but American workplace and school shootings have many other causes: the lessening of the hegemony of straight white men, gun culture, and the fetishization of violence, among many others.
The modern world does cause anxiety and it is mean and inhuman, but these gunmen are not secret revolutionaries. They are trouble people who are taking a culturally specific response to a world that has hollowed them out. Ames wants them to fit his neat narrative of Reagan's America creating unenlightened Marxists, and it is very evident that they do not, especially when he examines school shootings.
The world is a less secure place because of capitalism. But it is also less of a secure place because of the postmodern deconstruction of established hegemonies, because of the rise of competing narratives of oppression and power.
Ames's larger point is that the world is fucked up and these people's response is understandable: true. But this is larger than a mere class war, and Ames misses the bigger picture.