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

details and circumstances are also remarkably similar to doomed rebellions we have seen throughout American history—in their goriness, in the way they are totally misrepresented at the time of the uprising, in the mentally unbalanced psychology of the rebel (Wesbecker was not entirely “healthy,” as he admits, but then again neither were John Brown or Nat Turner—one who murders is by definition not “healthy”), and in the grisly, often tragi-comic results.
     

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“Your request is … irrelevant”
     
    Mattingly set up a meeting a month later with Paula Warman, the human resources VP whom Wesbecker subsequently shot in the legs in her office, and who cried into the telephone, “Some of us are shot! Some of us are shot!”
     
    Here is Mattingly’s account of his dealings with Warman, starting with their first meeting in June, 1987. I am reprinting much of his deposition testimony in full because Mattingly’s flat account perfectly captures the bland, easily recognizable nastiness of contemporary corporate America. You can sense the pressure cooker intensifying, the frustration and battened-down stress—you start to understand how Wesbecker, an already troubled buffoon whose vulnerability seemed to invite more abuse, had to conceal it all in a culture that only allows smiles, back slapping, and toughing it out.
    Mattingly: Well, the clearest memory that I have of that meeting [with Paula Warman] is something I said and then something that she responded. In the course of the meeting I told her that, “I’m sure you’re not going to want to hear what I’m about to say and I know the company is not going to want to hear it, but in my opinion, before you put Mr. Wesbecker on the folder you ought to shut it down, because putting him on the folder is endangering—could be endangering his life and the lives of the people around him.” Her response was she agreed with the first part. She said, you know, “The company is not going to want to hear that, and we cannot make an exception for Mr. Wesbecker because his job—because we have a union contract, and the union contract says this is his job description, and we cannot make an exception …”
    Q. When you said, “I’m sure you’re not going to want to hear this or the company is not going to want to hear this,” and then said, “Before you put Mr. Wesbecker on the folder you ought to shut it down,” did I state that correctly as you just did, sir?
    A. Yes, sir.
    Q. Shut what down, sir?
     
    A. Well, the folder, and if the folder meant shutting the plant down, shut the plant down, too. But in my opinion, it would have been—it was—it would be creating a dangerous situation to put him in that stress, in that stressful condition.
    Stress : the word comes up often in the study of rage murders. The problem is that even in spite of the awful effects of stress—from mental and physical health ailments to provoking massacres—we, the ones who suffer stress, are ourselves loath to describe our own stressed condition with language that might match the suffering it produces, for fear of sounding melodramatic, whiny—of not being able to tough it out. A little light goes off in most “normal” people’s heads warning them not to complain about cracking under stress and risk being marked as a loser.
     
    As Wesbecker and his discrimination handler pursued the case, Standard Gravure resisted. Nearly a year before Wesbecker’s rampage murder, Paula Warman wrote in a letter to Mattingly, “It is the company’s contention that manic depression is a condition rather than a handicap; therefore, your request for a workforce breakdown indicating those who are handicapped is irrelevant… . [W]e cannot in good conscience exempt him from this duty permanently.”
    Mattingly replied to Warman’s letter by telling her that his position represents the government’s position, and that Standard Gravure is not authorized to decide when it is or isn’t violating