Four days ago, Andrew Joseph Stack, an otherwise unremarkable software engineer in his 50s, committed an act of terrorism when he crashed a small plane into the Texas State IRS center in Austin. While many people are still processing this event and its potential ramifications, some media sources seek to bury this story and downplay its significance.
While it seems impossible to outright bury the dissemination of an attack of this kind, the story has been obscured in the barrage of celebrity/media/sports stories that mass media outlets usually prefer. Yes, the attack was covered in the New York Times, but the Times downgraded the front page in a matter of hours to celebrate Lindsey Vonn’s gold medal in women’s downhill skiing.
While the Olympics are certainly worthy of coverage, is one medal out of 24, really a more significant event than what could be considered the beginning of a widespread populist revolt? It seems as if the New York Times, along with the rest of the established media, are choosing to downshift into celebrity/athletic fare, and deny that the suicide bombing was at all significant.
First of all, I have yet to hear any relating of this attack to the buzzword “terrorism.” This is despite the fact that the attack had all of the hallmarks of terrorism. We have a suicide, we have a plane being used as a missile, and we have a political and largely symbolic target. The main missing element is the foreign culture to scapegoat. Andrew Joseph Stack was a white, American-born, non-muslim, US citizen. Without the ethic or religious aspects, it’s as if the Right Wing Media doesn’t know how to properly leverage this news to support their point of view. Though it’s not as if they haven’t made a clumsy attempt or two…
Note that while Neil Cavuto could have used this forum to decry the Obama administration for its tax and spend policy and for creating too much big government, he remains incredibly timid in this interview with Scott Brown.
What Neil Cavuto knows (as do his Fox News Marionettes behind the scenes) is that this attack could just as easily have been targeted at the office of a major software company or the capital building, or even a media outlet seen as upholding the kind of corruption Andrew Joseph Stack saw as penetrating society.
Of course I don’t agree with his actions, per se. I think the scapegoating of the IRS is misguided and plays into the hands of critics who call him nothing more than a deranged nut with a crudely scrawled internet screed. And, of course the IRS agent killed in the attack had no particular power to change any of the problems that Stack layed out in his statements. I’m also fairly sure that a more thorough examination of Stack’s life will yield a lot more personal problems than financial trouble. It takes more than poverty to drive someone to violent reprisal.
However, that probably won’t stop Stack’s symbolic value in the decade to come. Populist rage is a valid, though unfocused way of looking at the society we’ve built. When you concentrate a society’s wealth to the extreme extent that we have, you’re bound to find large swaths of people who want to shake that system up, or even destroy it entirely.
And this is the dilemma for the corporate-controlled mass media. It spends much of its time glorifying violence, prejudice, hatred, inanity, and greed, so long as those emotions are used to distract and entice people who are being bled dry of their savings and properties. When those emotions are concentrated and directed back at the source of it all, the mass media panics. Better to bury the story than to understand it. Understanding what happened might encourage huge structural changes. And there are few things our corporate overlords like less than huge structural changes that they, themselves, didn’t engineer.
