First, my best wishes for a recovery to the injured IRS workers. Condolences, if necessary, to the family of the missing worker.My comments are not a justification or an excuse for Joseph Stack’s actions. It is an attempt at understanding because his suicide note is complex.

His last paragraphs on going out and attacking the IRS eerily parallels the suicide note of the convicted killer, Jim David Adkisson, in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2008. His note concluded: “I’d like to encourage other like-minded people to do what I’ve done.” “If life ain’t worth living anymore, don’t just kill yourself. Do something for your country before you go. Go kill liberals.”

The two cases present themselves as suicide terrorists. But, there are apparent differences. Adkisson wanted to kill liberals in general and chose the Unitarian Universalist Church as a handy target. He appears to have been driven to his murderous rampage by his belief in a liberal, secular conspiracy.

In this case, Joseph Stack has a long history of disputes with the IRS over interpretations of law and regulations regarding taxes. No one can judge whether his disagreements were based on rational grounds or sound legal reasoning. There does not appear the standard right-wing conspiratorial approach to the IRS or that taxes are unconstitutional. There is no ranting about any secret cabal controlling the federal government or the Federal Reserve.

His problems with the IRS and the federal government span decades from Reagan to Obama. In some cases, he links historic events to his own personal demise–what the sociologist C. Wright Mills thought was necessary in finding the intersection between history and biography in order to understand a social problem. His complaint that the government did not care has more to do with a liberal point of view. Libertarian conservatives do not believe the government is responsible in any way for the “general welfare” of “We the people” except through a free market and private charity.

Parts of his narrative, though extreme in language, strike me as also left-wing, that is, Americans are suffering from false consciousness. In a sense, he could be making a Gramscian attack upon the system.

If Stack has an ideology, he is as opposed to the federal government favoring the powerful and rich at the expense of the poor and middle class, as much as he believes the federal government has an obligation to listen to its citizens and in times of distress help them.

On an individual level, his suicide note is a look into a life that with each successive economic upheaval in America became more desperate. Whether or not his differences with the IRS were legitimate, I do not know. But, his belief that there is a law for the rich and a law for the rest of us, is not unique to him, and is not necessarily limited to tax cases. His belief that the federal government bails out the rich and powerful, while neglecting the middle class and the poor, is not unique to him.

At a collective level, if his life is to have any meaning it may be simply this: in times of deep economic troubles such as we are in now–job losses, homes in jeopardy, pensions reduced, medical insurance not available or health care costs becoming prohibitively expensive–that the conservative, libertarian, Republican view that there should be no collective response is wrong and immoral.

The Preamble to our Constitution calls for the government, which we the people formed, “to promote the general welfare.” It is a communitarian notion. I think that is a major underlying theme in his suicide note.

That is not to say that he is a liberal or a conservative. I do not know his politics or his ideological orientation. He does not appear to believe in the Social Darwinism of the Right. He appears to be a man who became deeply disillusioned with his government and country based upon what he perceived and experienced, rightly or wrongly, the gap between our ideals and our practices.

View the full, unedited suicide note here. We would like to give full credit to David Neiwert for making this available for all to see. We encourage our readers to read it for themselves and come to their own judgment.

UPDATE 1:  Including Joseph Stack, two people died and 13 were injured.  Richard Benjamin at AlterNet has also looked beyond the terrorism to analyze, but in no way excuse or condone Stack’s terrorist attack.  Benjamin wrote:

“Deplorable though he might be, Stack is not quite a “random bad apple.” His act might be uncommon, but his jumbled populism is not. His crime is in no way excusable, but it spotlights a larger problem that both political and corporate elites like to caricature or dismiss: visceral populist anger.  Stack may have suffered from mental illness, but he is also an acute symptom of this nation’s neglected wounds.  The fire this time inflicted just two deaths (including Stack) and injuries to 13 victims.  The fire next time may be more traumatic.
We dismiss his screed, suicide and crime as “lunatic” at our own risk.”