Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond Read Online Free PDF

destroy the central nervous system, and his theory was this is why I am the way I am and he handed me this article for me to read. Toluene, as I understand, is a solvent. I’m not sure what they used it for and I don’t think that it had anything to do with the folder, it was just if you worked at Standard Gravure you were exposed to this.
     
    According to the Web site of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “Toluene may affect the nervous system. Low to moderate levels can cause tiredness, confusion, weakness, drunken-type actions, memory loss, nausea, loss of appetite, and hearing and color vision loss.”
     
    Canada’s National Occupational Health & Safety Resource Web site cautions that some studies on toluene’s long-term effect on the nervous system include “changes such as memory loss, sleep disturbances, loss of ability to concentrate, or incoordination …”
    Q. Did he make any statements to you or did you make any observations about him as to what his attitude generally was towards his employer in that first meeting?
    A. He had a lot of hostility toward his supervisors and toward the company. Because of what I described earlier, he thought the supervisors were using his handicap against him, and he saw the company as they are—these supervisors are representatives of the company. The company is doing nothing to stop them from harassing me and, therefore, the company, too, is at fault. That was his attitude.
     
    Apart from the familiar, relentless harassment and petty corporate malice revealed in Mattlingly’s testimony, the last part, where Wesbecker blames not only individual supervisors for his suffering but more importantly the company with a capital C—that is, the abstract, the symbol, the institution—explains, in the most explicit, clear language possible, the logic of his tactics on the day of his murder rampage. Wesbecker was out not just to get vengeance on a cold-blooded supervisor or two. He was out to destroy the Company. In this context, it is impossible to say that a single one of Wesbecker’s shots was fired “at random.” Each worker was a tangible part of the intangible Company that had crushed him—unless that worker was, like John Tingle, a recognizable friend of Wesbecker’s, in which case he was consciously spared. Tingle was not seen as part of the system that crushed him.
    Wesbecker didn’t start firing until the elevator opened to the reception room—until the he came face to face with The Company —and he only stopped once he’d made his way through the entire company building, sweeping from the management’s toner-ink penthouse on the third floor all the way down to the solvent-stench of the working-class basement and locker room on the other end. By destroying the Company’s physical manifestations—its employees being the Company’s concrete pillars—he attacked the sum of the Company’s parts more than simply its parts.
    The Courier-Journal ’s VondorHaar believed that Wesbecker was looking to get revenge on a supervisor. He was at least partly right, in that the murder rampage wasn’t simply a psycho gone berserk shooting anyone or anything in his path. But even VondorHaar misunderstood how deliberately the crime was executed. Wesbecker sought revenge on the entire institution that mistreated, abused and injured, insulted, and eventually threw him away when there was nothing left to squeeze. Nothing could be more contrary to the general view of the violent, unbalanced, murdering-at-random nut-case who goes postal—the freak who snaps.
     
    Yet this is the common portrait we are given. And it is the wrong portrait. Not only was this rage murder spree an example of targeted vengeance, but its details and circumstances are strikingly similar to other rage murders in offices, workplaces, post offices, and even in the most recent setting of this crime, schoolyards. Moreover, the