[(Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: from Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond)] [Author: Mark Ames] published on (August, 2006) Paperback – 20 Aug. 2006

I've been reading Mark Ames for years, since the eXiled. I don't always agree with what he writes, but I appreciate the angle that he takes and his willingness to dig for the truth. In an age of mass market media, hard-hitting journalism seems to have died off. As distrust grows, it seems that most media agencies are doubling down on the party lines rather than working to expose important stories. While Mark Ames is far from perfect, I at least trust he writes what he believes and doesn't censor it for fear of upsetting the establishment (whichever side that may be).This book is a poignant exploration of the suppression of the proletariat, and Corporate America's gaslighting of the every-day working man -- asking for more, while providing less and less. Dead are the values that viewed workers as people to be taken care of, the lifeblood of a company and the connection to its communities. Dead are the social supports which brought workers together, allowing them to better advocate for themselves and the betterment of their families.Instead, we are left with a system that strips more away from the needy while funneling profits to those who already have, enriching the few at the top at the expense of the many. The narrative of the American Dream makes the failure to rise above an individual failure, obscuring the real reason: unfettered plutocracy, the rule of money.America is not, and never has been, a free-market capitalist society. It protects the wealthy (and thus, the powerful).Ames explores this by asking difficult questions about an uncomfortable subject: mass shootings. Looking to truly understand the reasons people felt driven to perform such heinous acts, rather than seeking to put the public at ease and writing the shooters off as deranged solo acts, he digs into the past with a critical eye.This is one of the few books that I've read where I think the author has gotten it completely right. We want to dismiss people who have committed horrible and seemingly-random violence. It is uncomfortable. It can never be justified. But -- and this is the part that, I believe, lies at the heart of real journalism -- the damning question must be asked: how much responsibility does the system bear? Social norms tell us such a question should never be asked. Unfortunately, if the question isn't asked and isn't studied with an unapologetic eye, we will never know.Thus, as history has shown in the years since the publishing of this book, mass shootings have only grown, along with disparities in wealth between those at the top and those keeping them there by exchanging more-and-more of their limited time on earth for money that, somehow, buys less-and-less. Say what you will about Mark Ames, he asks the questions other people won't, delivering answers that we need but often don't want to hear.I just wish it didn't feel so much like pissing into the wind.

An important question this book raises: the Soviets, both the government and the people, were fully aware that their propaganda was just that. What about America's propaganda? Don't even try to tell yourself we don't have any...I don't know quite how I came across Mark Ames' "Going Postal". No doubt I was researching books in its subject area- for one thing, having read Brooks Brown's "No Easy Answers" I was interested in learning more about its subject matter. I recall finding its title- unusual. The words jump out at you, unashamed of any offense they may cause. And this book will offend- don't doubt that. It will definitely offend admirers of Ronald Reagan- Mark Ames must hate him more than anybody else, ever. But out of all those who read, learn, and understand what Mark Ames has to say here, the only ones who will remain offended are those who don't want the truth told. With everything that Mark Ames claims or declares, he has plenty of sources to back his points up and a willingness to explain each of them.This book is for the subject of rampage shootings as a whole what Brooks Brown's "No Easy Answers" is for school shootings and, more specifically, Columbine. Brooks focuses only on the shooting at *his* school. Ames not only references Columbine numerous times- and "No Easy Answers", as it turns out- but every post office and office shooting I've ever heard of up to 2005. To put it another way, "No Easy Answers" does a magnificent job of describing one base while "Going Postal" describes the whole ballpark.I had never expected to find school shootings, office & post office shootings, and slave rebellions, mostly in the antebellum South, all talked about in the same book. What surprised me even more was how relevant to one another Ames shows them to be. Much as slavery was so confidently accepted and believed to be understood by people of *its* time, Ames tells us, so do we with great confidence accept and believe to understand the common office and school environments today.And he poses some very interesting points and questions about the rebels of those respective times. We all accept the social environment that produced slavery as wrong, and totally condemn slavery itself. Ames raises the question- what if even Columbine came to be viewed the same way? What if in time the hysteria died down and it turned out something in the environment around them, not just pure evil, drove Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to do what they did?Oh, I can just *feel* the controversy. I didn't even write this book, and I can feel it. But trust me- it's not when somebody is asking questions that you need to be worried. It's when *nobody* is asking questions that you need to be worried.Mark Ames goes against every accepted, 'normal', explanation of rampage shootings. He attacks every point the established 'experts' have, and does so with great enthusiasm. Ames all but laughs Dave Cullen out of this book, ridiculing not only Cullen's undeserved status as the sole 'expert' on Columbine but Cullen's own book- and even some of his newspaper articles- and the points he makes in them. Ames discusses what he feels are the real reasons for slave rebellions in their time and the office, post office, and school rampages of today. Throughout the book, quotes from various individuals and sources are found, used very tastefully and as a nice finishing effect. Ames also discusses not only these rampages, these uprisings, themselves, but the social and economic changes in America between 1965/1970 and the then-present of 2005- a present which is little altered today. And he assaults the legacy of Ronald Reagan, and to a lesser extent George Washington, so viciously you really have to read the book and see it for yourself.But nowhere in this book, and I mean *nowhere*, did I find mere angry ranting. I can find any number of political books, news articles, and TV shows if I want that. What I found in "Going Postal" is what I found in Brooks Brown's magnificent book, but to an even greater extent and covering a greater subject area- the words of someone who knows the truth, knows telling it will be going against the tide, the accepted norm, but goes ahead and does it anyway. I said this reviewing "No Easy Answers", and I'll say it again here: read Dave Cullen's "Columbine" if you're interested in what you want to know. Read this book if you'd rather learn what you *need* to know.

When you crack open a book entitled "Going Postal," you don't expect to start reading about the antebellum South. But Ames starts by transporting us back in time in service of his provocative theme - that today's rage murders in workplaces and schools are contemporary forms of slave rebellion, indeed the only possible form of rebellion in a society as decollectivized and militarized as the modern corporate United States.In this highly original and intriguing analysis, Ames ridicules "copycat" pundits who myopically search everywhere but right in front of their faces to explain the wave of workplace and schoolyard shootings that has swept through the United States over the last couple of decades. Hollywood movies, video games, the National Rifle Association, mental illness, bad parenting - the list of potential culprits is endless. But never the "toxic culture" of the institutions that breed these doomed revolts.Whereas initial news accounts often vilify shooters as almost cartoon cutouts - mentally imbalanced, trench-coated racists or kooks - Ames offers in-depth portrayals, so we come to know them as ordinary human beings oppressed and stressed to the breaking point by a ruthless corporate or school environment. Attempts to profile individual offenders fall flat, Ames argues, because the offenders are potentially anyone. As evidence, he catalogs the widespread sympathy for many of the shooters among their former coworkers and classmates. One would never see such sympathy among victims of serial sex murderers, he points out.Instead of profiling the individual rebels, Ames profiles the institutions. Shootings, he argues, happen in corporate environments rife with alienation, surveillance, mandatory unpaid overtime, and humiliating and degrading layoff rituals, where managers consciously harness fear to increase worker stress and insecurity. Sites of school shootings, meanwhile, are brutal environments where students undergo horrific torment only exacerbated by Zero Tolerance crackdowns.This book is meticulously researched and brilliantly argued. It's too bad that Ames couldn't find a better publisher, because the technical quality is extremely poor and the copy editor must have been on an extended coffee break. I understand that his first publisher bailed after 9/11. But the typos, overly small text, and poor binding are all minor, superficial flaws that should not stop you from buying and reading this fascinating book.PS: Coincidentally, and unbeknownst to me at the time, the latest rampage was underway, at Northern Illinois University. Although some other shooters have left written explanations or made posthoc statements (all included in Ames' book), this case is unusual in that killer Steven Kazmierczak co-authored a scholarly journal whose prophetic thesis almost exactly parallels Ames'.

Mark Ames must have had some hardened life. He gets it right on the money when he describes the institutional torment that leads to destructive behavior. In the end, when the institution takes everything including truth, compassion and dignity, the rational response is rage, murder and rebellion.This is a well-researched book, put out by someone who spent a lot of time researching and documenting the pattern. Ames' unlikely connection between slavery and the working man is made convincingly, with slavery occasionally being the more humane of the two.I left government service recently, after watching three supervisors fall prey to love-hate dependency-based work relationships. All of them eventually succumbed to rage. I spent time speaking with other office employees, both former and current, who lost their emotional balance and faded into oblivion, whether fired or effectively incapacitated. I had to read this book to understand the dynamics behind this less-than-rare phenomenon. Ames' validation is a double-edged sword. What is frightening is the notion that this oppression occurs frequently, but is never documented until someone commits mass murder. Ames notes in his book that rebellion occurs with great infrequency, as the unknown is always more frightening than the known, however unpleasant."Going Postal" is a must-read book, although it is less gory than it is reflective. Ames is an excellent historian and consolidator of relationship dynamics. His ability to interview his subjects and pick up on the details -- sometimes even humorous in a macabre way -- makes this a facinating documentary.

Mark Ames, who with Matt Taibbi at The eXile made an art form of colorfully written, in your face journalism that chronicled the plutocratic plunder of Russia, chooses a very different style for a no less important topic. Going Postal depicts, which considerable sympathy and arresting detail, how growing economic stresses have made the sort of bullying most of us thought ended in high school a trigger for "going postal" style violence. Ames describes how the people who snapped defy stereotypes, which makes it difficult to identify them individually, but it isn't hard to finger the environment that produces them: an increasingly stratified America which makes the competition for success and or mere economic stability increasingly intense, and the perceived (and often actual) costs of failure (job loss, not making it in an academic program) much higher than when jobs were plentiful. This is a troubling and important study of a phenomenon that seems destined to increase.