Unablog

Joe Stack, the guy who crashed his plane into a building in Austin, Texas, is now being accused in death of being both a Tea Partier AND a liberal.

There was a Facebook group (gone already), lauding him as a hero. And a patriot.

I have skimmed his manifesto, or whatever you want to call it. It’s no Unabomber screed, but it’s close.

He was mad at a lot of stuff, including the Catholic Church and the IRS. Mainly the IRS, because he was being taxed more than he wanted to be as an independent contractor.

In his “manifesto” he described how he spent most of 1987 dealing with what he considered the unfairness of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, Section 1706. He spent $5000 of his own money doing… something. And a thousand hours, at least, making contact with figures of authority urging them to strike down this unjust provision.

He drove around L.A. (Many, I’m told, do.) Finally, he moved to Austin, Texas. Where work was scarce. And yet, there he was, he wrote, “…with a new marriage, a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention a new asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle.”

A piano? What? I thought he was broke! Who buys a piano when they’re not working? Somebody with an over-developed sense of entitlement maybe?

Here’s a conclusion from a San Francisco Examiner op-ed piece:

“Joe Stack was one of us.

At one time or another we've all been pushed, poked, prodded and pounded nearly into submission by the big government-corporatist-unionist establishment bosses.

Joe Stack was, and he snapped.”

The thing is this: He wasn’t one of us.

Why? Because he had an airplane.

I don’t have an airplane. Do you?

If I did have an airplane, I wouldn’t fly it into a building. I’d sell the fucking thing. And the fucking piano too.