Crazy F**king Americans

What the fuck, America? Are you so high on self-righteous rage that you send Joe Stack of Austin Texas into an IRS building in his airplane, coming from setting his own house on fire?

In the California where Joe Stack started out as a fresh-from-college software engineer, fighting the tax man was, quite literally, a religion.


Back in the 1970s and '80s, California was not just the center of the "silicon revolution." The Golden State was also a teeming hive of anti-government activity, much of it aimed at the federal income tax code and the agency that enforced it — the Internal Revenue Service.

Tax protesters and self-styled patriots railed against exemptions granted to religious organizations, the Catholic Church in particular. They formed their own "churches" and invited others to join.

"It sounds like he went down that same path," said Dennis Riness, who did time in federal prison for running a church-styled tax shelter. "And ran into the same brick wall."

More like glass and metal, I imagine, but same idea. Meanwhile, psycho college professor Amy Bishop, who seems to have gotten off murdering her younger brother in an argument and sending a colleague a faulty pipe bomb, take out her self-righteous anger over not earning tenure (ironic, as she padded her resume to get the gig in the first place) by shooting up the faculty meeting. For instance:

In 2002, she was charged with assault after punching a woman in the head at an International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. The woman had taken the last booster seat, and, according to the police report, Dr. Bishop demanded it for one of her children, shouting, “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!”
...

She yelled at playing children, neighbors said, and rarely kept her opinions to herself. She rejected criticism and fudged her résumé. Her scientific work was not as impressive as she made it seem, according to independent neurobiologists, some of whom said she would have been unlikely to even get the opportunity to try for tenure at major universities.

She was known to have cyclical “flip-outs,” as one former student described them, that pushed one graduate student after another out of her laboratory. On the day she shot and killed her brother, she ran out into the street with the shotgun and demanded a car at a local dealership.

I just saw Shutter Island last night and I get why some folks might be disappointed, but I think it's right on. We're a nation out of our heads. It's not the first time in American history, and it won't be the last.

And I'm wondering what we can do to stop it.