Friday, February 19, 2010

He do the crazy in different voices.



Via we are austin.com:

Authorities have recovered two bodies from a Northwest Austin building after an Austin man flew his plane into it.

According to law enforcement, Joseph Andrew Stack, 54, burned down his home and flew a plane from the Georgetown airport into the building at 9430 Research Boulevard around 10 a.m. Witnesses say that a single-engine Piper Dakota dove low when it crossed Highway 183, even clipping one of the cars as it crossed the road. It then looked like it was going to swoop up, and crashed into the side of the building.

Stack, 54, departed the Georgetown airport in a plane that was registered to him.

Stack left what is believed to be a long suicide note on domain EmbeddedArt.com, which is registered to him. (The whole text can be found here.) The letter is titled "Well Mr. Big IRS man... take my pound of flesh and sleep well". The six-page document also includes what would be a date of death. The building housed some IRS offices.


April is supposedly the cruelest month, but February can be short, nasty and brutish. It's not a bad month, as these things go, for someone to lose their ever-loving mind in. I'm of the opinion that Joseph Stack lost his mind.

There will be people trying to pin his philosophy down one way or the other by reading his expansive diatribe against the government, with its side-swipes at the Catholic Church, capitalism, the FAA, the economy in general, the powers that be in Austin, and, well, anybody he felt made his life a little more difficult than it had to be. But I don't see a philosophy there. You could argue for the tone, for the first several graphs, being a little Randian--and his act as not merely going Galt, but going full-tilt Roark on the edifice of the collectivist evil of the symbol of Big Government, a building housing IRS offices. But really, his rant is kind of all over the place. Sacrificing himself in the act doesn't really have the Randian feel, you know?

No, his rant is not really about any political or philosophical ideology--I keep hearing a, well, a whine behind it. "Take my pound of flesh, and sleep well...." And see how you like it!

If I were to play the bloggers' game of rational terrorist vs. deranged criminal--the thing that gets to me is: he set his family's house on fire. That seems like a personal issue, to me, not a political one. Most of his beef was how he believed the IRS code targeted him, specifically. What he's left behind is interesting--but I don't think it's so much a political statement as the sad act of someone who found himself in a desperate place mentally, and wanted to go out in a flash. He could have taken many lives with him.

Disturbingly enough, this homicidal, suicidal, desperate person has already got a bit of a fan club. I'm not sure how people are seeing anything reasonable or admirable about what he did. It just seems senseless to me, and a bit insane.

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