Fatal Audit

On February 18, a small-single-engine plane crashed into an IRS building in Austin, Texas. Two bodies were found at the crash scene, and two others were seriously injured. The pilot was named Joseph Andrew Stack, and he made it painfully clear that this crash was deliberate upon discovery of the 3,000-word manifesto he left behind. The government has declined to call this an act of domestic terrorism even though it seems to meet all the requirements: attacking one’s home country, extreme ideological motivations, and a low-damage, high-publicity output.

The aftermath of the attack has already reached the familiar, expected stage where friends and family say that Stack hid his rage from all of them. There were no warning signs, they said, he always seemed like a nice enough guy. We’ve gotten accustomed to this pattern, and there is sadly nothing unexpected when it comes to those few whose bottled up rage suddenly explodes. Fortunately for us, we can get a better understanding of Stack’s motivations by exploring his last written words. Stack’s personal life, his letter tells us, was fraught with marriage troubles and business failures, but these alone rarely drive a man to such extreme ends. To the best of our knowledge, the reasons given in his suicide essay are the true motivations for his act. It is completely reasonable to have some reluctance to acknowledge such a minority opinion, one which has led to violence and, in despair, suicide. However, doing so offers the possibility of preventing future instances like these. Naturally, such a man’s words must be taken with a grain of salt.

Stack begins his manifesto by addressing the question he is sure his audience is asking: “Why did this have to happen?” He responds by saying it is a very complicated matter that has been in the works for a while, and he apologizes in advance for his inarticulate manner. This is already a welcome relief from the pretension seen in similar screeds, such as the Ted Kaczynski’s “Unabomber manifesto” (given the self-important name “INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY AND ITS FUTURE”). Regardless, the two tracts have much in common: from the beginning, our author is looking down at the ranks of brainwashed, deluded citizens from whom he is wholly separate.

For Kaczynski, this opening was a passage entitled “The Psychology of Modern Leftism,” in which he criticizes the effect “socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like” on society at large. Stack, however, begins by indicting “the system,” saying that it has brainwashed us since we were children to believe that the government is responsible for bringing fairness and justice to the land. He claims to be the exception because he has spent years “unlearning that crap.” Stack believed that anyone who stands up for the “noble principals [sic]” of the founding fathers is destined to be condemned as a “crackpot.”

Stack dwells on the phrase “no taxation without representation” as one example of the founders’ ideas that has been neglected. Despite paying his taxes, Stack feels he has never been properly represented compared to the “thugs and plunderers” who run massive corporations, expressing disgust that the government came to the rescue as they “crash[ed] under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity.” Stack calls CEOs “vile, rich cronies,” accuses insurance companies of mass murder, and delicately labels politicians “thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags.” At this point, Stack sounds like an amateur stand-up comedian struggling for topical relevance: there’s nothing unique in what he says, and it’s overblown to the point of hiding any authentic grievances. So far as suicidal manifestos go, this bit is rather unexceptional.

Stack quickly segues into an ‘injustice’ which has directly affected him: tax law. He dubiously claims that we have a legal system that “not even the experts understand,” and thus, forcing people with an incomplete knowledge of their rights to sign without understanding is duress. This, he says, is totalitarian. Stack is confusing the casual meaning of the word ‘understand’ with the meaning it takes on in a legal context. When an officer of the law uses the word understand, they mean it to say you agree and intend to be bound by what they say: literally, you ‘stand under’ their will. One does not need to comprehend tax law to abide by it. This error does not help Stack to make his point about how oppressive a taxing state is, but instead reveals his own ignorance of the law.

At this point in the manifesto, it becomes especially important to remember that a writer like Stack is an extremely unreliable narrator. He has already made clear his obsessive feelings of victimization, and his attacks against the Catholic Church for its tax-exempt status ring of hyperbole, to say the least. Stack shifts from discussing the incomprehensibility of tax law to how he and a group of friends tried to game the system—for its own good, of course! Stack claims, “That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0.” At worst, he was trying to keep his entire paycheck and got caught, and at best, he was replicating the methods of those “monsters of organized religion” that he despised so much. Stack rationalized this by saying he and his cohorts were different because they were not “steeling [sic] from members of our congregation,” clearly not considering that he was stealing from his fellow taxpayers.

This event, Stack claims, is what made him realize that all the talk of liberty and freedom in America was a sham. However, only when he was on the wrong side of the law did he see problems with it. Vietnam, Nixon’s resignation, the Iran-Contra Affair—none of these help drive home the notion of injustice quite like being caught for tax evasion.

Stack continues by describing the destitution he has had to live in for most of his life. “…I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time.” Once again, hyperbole runs rampant as he attempts to portray himself as the eternal victim of the IRS. Stack neglects to mention that his personal fortunes allowed him to purchase a $230,000 house for his family—a house which he burned down the day before his suicide attack—let alone his private plane. Disregarding these good signs while focusing on the negative is the hallmark of the dangerously pessimistic, seeing any positive changes as mere flukes in an otherwise miserable existence.

Stack’s manifesto drags on a while longer before he justifies his use of violence and leaves us with this catchy quote: “The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.”

So what can we learn from Stack’s final message? For one, it tells us a great deal about his character: Joseph Stack was a narcissistic, pessimistic, paranoid individual. His goal was to lead the nation’s taxpayers to revolt, but his suicide attack nullifies whatever reasonable concerns he might have expressed to the world in a more peaceful manner.

No matter how exaggerated his attacks on society, there is some truth to what he has said. The stereotype of the greedy CEO that Stack so frequently channeled is not unrealistic—the wealthy have many more means to cheat on their taxes. Thus, they do it more often, at a much greater cost to society than the rest of us. His view of capitalism is sadly grounded in reality, as those willing to go the farthest for profits are rarely penalized for whatever collateral damage they incur along the way. Stack proves that it doesn’t even take a sane person to agree that the rule of law should apply to them equally. Stack is hardly going to have a lasting effect on the nation, and it’s difficult to imagine that any tax reform laws will be dedicated to his memory. Hopefully anyone who would follow in his footsteps will get the psychiatric help they need.

The rest of us need to engage in a debate about changing our national status quo, which can be downright exploitative from time to time. It’s not the revolution Stack wanted, but it may be better.