on suicide notes

Music: The Mary Onette's: Islands (2009)

Not too long ago a 53-year Austinite and software engineer plowed his small airplane into a building that housed the local IRS office. He killed himself and one person, which is bad enough, as the man he took out was a great guy, although I'm not so sure about the grieving wife. Joseph Stack clearly hoped to kill many people, as evidenced by his "suicide manifesto", which he posted to his website before his failed kamikaze mission.

This violent event happened to occur on the day my graduate seminar was reading Lacan on psychosis and schema L. The lecture I had prepared was about the University of Alabama-Huntsville professor who killed three of her colleagues (clearly a psychotic break), however, we ended up reading Stack's "suicide manifesto" and discussing it. I remember remarking that I "he's clearly not psychotic" and all of us agreed he seemed smart. This was apparently the reaction of a number of people, who found the apparent reasoning of the manifesto persuasive.

But when you take a closer look, the "manifesto" isn't particularly smart or sane. His reasoning is of the order of the stupid, if we define stupidity as an inability to think clearly. More to the point, Stack's manifesto reflects an inability to think at all.

Stack refused to give himself over to cultural fantasy in a manner that would be an ethical traversal---that is, to stop demanding the Big Other to produce the lost object, to recognize he is the one who projects the lost object, and so forth. Stack's refusal to give up on demand resulted in the most unthinking act possible: like a toddler jumping up and down, screaming, and sealing himself off from the world in a closed-eye tantrum, Stack held his breath.

That the killer stopped thinking is made clear in the opening paragraph, which begins "in the middle of things" much like Lysias's bad speech in Plato's dialogue The Phaedrus:

If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

Stack sets-up the manifesto as an answer to the question, "why'd ya do it?" He alerts us to "the writing process," which seems to indicate he is referring to the process of writing this letter. He self-characterizes his rhetoric as a "rant," which gives us an indication of his degree of self-awareness (a narcissism attempting to cover-over feelings of worthlessness, in many senses). Tellingly, he also admits a difficulty with writing---that he cannot seem to express "the storm" of his mind, and finally a collapse into a cliché: "desperate times call for desperate measures." The recourse to a dumb cultural idiom is symptomatic of a failure to take responsibility for the cultural fantasy of mass murder---to see himself as a figure in the larger fantasy of despondency. As the letter continues, we witness a tortured struggle to assert a sense of self-importance---and to invoke another cliché,at all costs.

The letter in its entirety is rambling. Stack begins by arguing U.S. citizens are "brainwashed" into a sense of order and decency. The primary example is the U.S. tax code, which Stack says runs cover for politicians, "thugs and plunderers" who make justice "a joke." He then narrates a life story in relationship to taxes (to the exclusion of just about everything else), how he was apparently involved with an anti-tax group, got busted, moved to Austin, and watched his savings and retirement disappear.

At each turn, of course, is a seething anger and sense of entitlement: they took it from him, they took it away, and he's gonna show them, he's gonna get them. The script is easily summed up by Susan Sontag in the lyrics she wrote for a pop song: " If they mess with us/ If we think they might mess with us/ If we say they might mess with us / If we think we need a war, we need a war." When one clicks into this logic of victimage, reality hardens into principled, black and white façade in which the singular source of one's unhappiness is them. It's easily understandable why some commentators have associated the suicide manifesto with the "Tea Party Movement"; the politics are different, but the underlying logic is the same:

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are.

The Other is comprised of all-knowing, conspiratorial politicians (the same ones who horde "the secret" in board rooms, seated around a conference table and holding cigars with their sausagey fingers). The irony, however, is that such visions are as deeply scripted as zombie films, and that the person who is truly asleep and unthinking here is Stack: for these images, then, death?

Stack continues that he sadly " spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along." The Big Other, again, is pulling the strings and they know the answer: violence. So we have a letter that suggests nationalism is a lie (duh) an account of one's demise because of taxation (really, it was the taxes?), and this is evidence in support of the claim violence is needed. What is the reasoning, then, connecting the evidence (nationalism bad, my life sucks) with the necessity of violence?

There isn't any reasoning here. It's simply, "I'LL SHOW THEM!"

Or rather, if we want to dub this reasoning, then it is Hollywood reasoning: there are bad guys, and they want your life and your money, and they only way to deal with bad guys is to blow them up.

The clichéd but nevertheless chilling final remarks of Stack's screed reads like a movie script:

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Stack's definition of insanity is actually a good definition of reality (and the reason why one would chose to live---reality also bounces along because of unforeseen moments of contingency, which is why we have expectations of difference). Nevertheless, the rhetoric here is almost cartoonish, ending in sloganeering and fantasies of fatalistic heroism. What we have here is a regression to literate adolescence and all the signs of the type of resignation that allows one to be animated by cultural fantasies---capital-I Irony. Flying planes into buildings is hardly the novel symbolism that will inspire a revolution. And last I checked, the ultimate summation of Stack's rhetoric can be reduced to the Teen Age title of Metallica's first album. Fortunately, teenagers know to enjoy metal lyrics, which is how they enjoy their hip-hop: it's a form of play, not to be taken literally.