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What are readers saying about Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond?
| Reviews of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond - Page 1 of 1 | «1»
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Zach posted a review at 2010-03-14 08:28:16.
(Language: English)
 
This book could do for 21st century America, what the Communist Manifesto did for the European 18th century,
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-09-30 07:53:26.
(Language: English)
Almost makes you feel sorry for the people who do all these horrible massacres. Seeing what made them go nuts makes one think, "man, that could happen to anyone."
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Gregory posted a review at 2008-06-18 03:38:20.
(Language: English)
This is an important and impressive book, that looks at the question of those American workplace/post office/school massacres as manifestations of the slave rebellions created by the Reagan era. It takes an American to truly describe the awfulness of American life; the mindless conformity,the pressure to 'succeed' in an already rigged system and the culture of intimidation that goes with it. I have always enjoyed Ames writing for the Moscow eXile, but this is deeper and more intelligent than any of that, as well as being amusingly human about the fate of some of the most oppressed in American society.
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A Reader posted a review at 2010-07-24 12:51:24.
(Language: English)
In Going Postal, Mark Ames presents a thesis so grim, so unacceptable in polite conversation that it's hard to even talk about without endless backpedaling and qualifications: that stress, the decline of the middle class, the decay of the American Dream -- essentially the entire character of our post-Reagan culture -- is directly responsible for rage killings and spree shootings in the workplace and school, phenomena that were almost totally unknown decades ago. It sounds crass and hyperbolic, but Ames documents everything from the particulars of a great many spree shootings (whose details belie the old canards of crazy loners shooting indiscriminately) to the history of slave rebellions which, though subject to their own social context, were just as baffling to early Americans to whom slavery was normative as office shootings are to us today. What Going Postal amounts to, then, is an attack on liberal capitalism itself, and its race to the bottom in which each worker does more work for less pay with less dignity and security. The conclusion is that post-Reagan America is a toxic place to live and work, and it's quite literally making us crazy, and the shootings are a more common and more predictable response than we think. Ames stumbles slightly in his deconstruction of school shootings, never fully pulling together the reality of bullying, the dangerous pressure to overachieve, and the crushing banality of suburban existence into a meaningful whole. One gets the sense that he's on to something, but it's never sold as convincingly as his deconstruction of workplace shootings. In his work for the Exiled, Mark Ames can be vulgar, childish, and crude. It's fortunate that he's largely able to dial that back for Going Postal, which is usually treated with the seriousness such a provocative book demands.
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A Reader posted a review at 2009-02-23 08:10:40.
(Language: English)
Superb and infuriating. Makes me want to dig up Reagan and give his leathery corpse a Boston Steamer. This should be required reading in every American school. It explains how things got this way, and why. It makes me want to dig up Reagan just so I can defecate in his mouth.
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Arthur posted a review at 2011-04-05 10:42:24.
(Language: English)
Dark and depressing, but absolutely essential reading. Ames makes the case that modern-day workplace and school massacres have several things in common with 18th and 19th century slave rebellions and that they are visited upon us due to the socioeconomic policies of the neoconservative and neoliberal movements, stemming directly from Reagan and the 1981 firing of air traffic controllers. It's nuanced, detailed, and filled with example after example of how America's social culture, in the workplace and in schools, not only contributes to these outbreaks of decidedly non-random violence but is their direct cause. Brilliant. I can't say enough good things about it. It is disturbing enough to make the reader (at least it made me) stop the book for a while and gather himself together in order to keep going to the end.
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A Reader posted a review at 2008-04-11 01:59:39.
(Language: English)
This book is is a sardonic, precise, and relentless attack on cultural trends in the US, a culture whose main focus is on harsh competition and "toughing it out," where flaws are seen as weakness, and weakness leads to abuse, where a precious few are rewarded fantastically and everyone else fights over the remains. I wouldn't expect anything different out of the editor of the outrageous Moscow tabloid the eXile, and people who are familiar with that will basically know what they're in for from the start. For everyone else, the book will probably hit them as gracefully and forcefully as a freight train.
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A Reader posted a review at 2007-08-05 05:29:44.
(Language: English)
"Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond" is an investigative analysis of the rampage-massacre phenomenon by Mark Ames, the American journalist behind notorious Moscow expat satirical tabloid The eXile, of which I am a fan. I read it in three days, mostly at work, where it provoked a lot of raised eyebrows and blank stares from customers. The book could be divided roughly into three parts: first, Ames argues that the circumstances and character of modern rampage-massacres are similar to those of slave rebellions in America and the West Indies; secondly, he analyzes a number of postal, office, and school massacres on a case-by-case basis to demonstrate the total inaccuracy of any claim that these were the actions of "lone nuts" or people who "just snapped"; thirdly, he blames the Reagan Revolution and the subsequent widening of the income gap between the middle-class and their bosses for the appearance of these massacres in America in the 80s and the 90s. Essentially, the Reagan Revolution opened up white-collar workers to the same market pressures that had been oppressing blue-collar workers for years: an atmosphere of insecurity and fear, brutal competition against one another, total powerlessness versus a privileged management class. The problem is that white-collar workers retained the morality towards work that they held in better times, continuing to believe that they were the privileged ones, that the interests of their businesses were their interests and the interests of America, and that things like unionization or government monitoring were obsolete, irrelevant . . . or worse, something meant only for working-class factory workers and laborers. The arrogance of the middle-class is its undoing. As a result, white-collar workplaces and offices (and by extension, the schools of their children) have become increasingly competitive, sterile, and stressful; at the same time, the slashing of retirement, medical and other benefits and the freezing of wages for the vast majority of white-collar workers post-Reagan have made things worse. The rampage-massacre phenomenon, totally unknown in America until the early 1980s, appeared as a result. Ames compares rampage-massacres to slave rebellions in that both were/are totally unexpected, usually more violent than necessary, almost never targeted at the "right people," often carried out by people with mental illness, and universally misrepresented in the media of the time. Nat Turner's 1831 rebellion was framed by the American press as a copycat incident based on the slave rebellion in Hispaniola, just as school massacres in the 90s were blamed on video games or Marilyn Manson, or was attributed to the personal eccentricities of Turner himself, who had numerous religious experiences and visions involving cornfields dripping with blood. The one explanation nobody at the time brought forward was the inhumanity of the slavery system itself, just as no one today considers post office or schoolyard massacres to be caused by the inhumanity of America's bureaucratic, commercial, or educational system. History has vindicated Turner; Ames suggests that it may vindicate the Columbine killers or Joseph Wesbecker as well. A ballsy, smart-ass argument? I would expect nothing else from Ames, who counts Russian fascist politician Edward Limonov as a regular contributor to his newspaper and there includes serious investigative reporting alongside a "death porn" column detailing the most hilariously gruesome acts of violence he can find in the world news. Ames' analysis of slave rebellions, his breakdown of the rampage-massacre phenomenon, and his criticism of America's post-Reagan economic transformation are all top-notch, but are they as closely related as he argues that they are? I'm not sure even he believes it 100%, but the relationship is close enough to consider. Don't let his conservative-baiting trick you into taking him too seriously and throwing out the core of his argument with the veneer. Because the core is good. Defining quote: “The first two people he [mailman Patrick Sherrill] shot were Rick Esser, his supervisor, and Mike Rockne – grandson of the famous Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne. That’s right: the same Knute Rockne who was the subject of Ronald Reagan’s most famous movie, Knute Rockne – American Hero, the one where Reagan played George “The Gipper†Gipp, a star Notre Dame football player dying of pneumonia (the same condition that Reagan really died of, and the most common killer of homeless people, Reaganomics’ most visible legacy), who tells Rockne, ‘Just win one for the Gipper.’ Reagan used this same line to great effect forty years later to help get himself elected, and re-elected. The first rebellious uprisings against Reaganomics broke out in America’s post offices in the mid-1980s. The real spark, Sherrill’s massacre, was set off with a gunshot to Mike Rockne’s head, meaning at least one Rockne lost on account of the Gipper.â€
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| Reviews of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond - Page 1 of 1 | «1»
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