By an unfortunate coincidence, I ordered this book right before the 11/5/2009 Fort Hood shooting tragedy, and after finishing it I was angry at how steadfastly unwilling the media (and much of society) are to ask the tough questions about why school and workplace shootings, which were almost completely unknown before the 1980s, have become such a grim and seemingly inevitable part of modern society. Mark Ames places the blame squarely on the new corporate culture of the Reagan years, where employees became expendable assets to be used up and thrown away. He chronicles in vivid detail the lives of these average people who "just snapped", and shows, using a lengthy and fascinating parallel to antebellum slave revolts, how time and time again these shootings were anything but random, how workers deliberately targeted their abusive and tyrannical supervisors while sparing coworkers they liked and yet their actions were always dismissed after the fact as "just random craziness" by a media systematically incapable of recognizing the recurring pattern. The same is true of school shootings like Columbine, where bullied and harassed students, routinely ignored by their school officials, felt that the only way they could bring their lives back under control was to go postal. It's hard to read this book and then read news stories about the Fort Hood tragedy, which is just the latest manifestation of the new ugliness in our society that Reagan symbolized and embodied. A good but extremely frustrating book.
