Last night, my travels through the blogosphere somehow led me to the "manifesto" (really just a suicide note which I am not providing with the dignity of a link) written by Joe Stack, the guy who crashed his plane into an IRS building in Austin, TX. Mr. Stack was not unemployed, but he was driven to a level of financial desperation that is tragically becoming more and more common.

Here is what I think about Mr. Stack: The guy was a selfish jerk and a big friggin' baby. I hope he spends a long time burning in the very flames he created on his way out.

His story is basically that he tried to cheat the IRS through founding a bogus church. When they came after him, rather than face the music and deal with the consequences of his own stupid decisions, he crashed his plane into their building like a spoiled toddler on a killing spree. He burned his house down too. What a nice thing to do to your wife -- widow her and leave her homeless on the same day. This guy was a first-class asshole.

Here's the funny thing: I agree with much of what Mr. Stack wrote in his "manifesto." The American people are, indeed, for the most part "zombies" happily allowing themselves to get screwed by a tiny elite class. The government is corrupt as hell -- far more corrupt than most people would like to admit, especially in the area of defense contracting. (If anybody needs an audit, it is the Department of Defense.) The law does not apply equally to the very rich and the rest of us. Politicians are almost universally the worst kind of scumbags. The financial bailout was nothing more than a massive fraud perpetrated on taxpayers by the kings of high finance, seemingly our Overlords.

Et cetera. Mr. Stack expressed many frustrations that I and many other people feel.

You know what, though? Crashing a plane into a building and killing people who are just trying to do a job to pay the bills is not going to solve any of that. According to Mr. Stack, violence is the only way to effect real change. I regard this as a nakedly asinine statement because violence itself is the problem.

When the government takes your tax money and hands it directly to a bunch of super-rich Wall Street fat cats who are threatening to crash the entire banking system if they don't get your money, that's violence. Hell, the government takes your money under threat of violence; I don't think many people would pay taxes if they didn't face penalties. War is violence, obviously, and we're now fighting two of them that don't need to be fought, primarily to justify an insanely bloated military budget, the majority of which ends up in the hands of defense contractors, not our beloved troops. When the propagandists scare you with thoughts of the goat-herding, bearded boogeyman who hates your "freedom," that's a kind of violence against your head.

How are you going to solve this with more violence? Are we going to replace the current gangsters and banksters with a new class of rulers who think it's OK to crash their toy airplanes into buildings full of people?

I believe that we do need a revolution or at least deep, substantive reform that we are highly unlikely to get under the cadre of corrupt fools currently in charge. But that revolution needs to be fueled by the idea that violence itself is the enemy. It needs to arise out of raised awareness of the violence being done against us when we lose our jobs because banksters are hoarding all the money. It needs to manifest itself in massive, creative, peaceful demonstrations that shame the bastards.

Ridicule is our greatest weapon. The Achilles heel of every politician is that he or she craves recognition and adoration. Go after that. Make fun of them. Hound them. Don't give them a moment's peace. Let's get creative! It will be far more fun than crashing planes into buildings. Plus, politicians being the attention hounds that they are, will respond to massive public shaming.

As for the banksters, their Achilles heel is on the other foot. They don't want attention, just money. So give them attention and take their money. We should be demonstrating and sitting in at the offices of Goldman Sachs. We should be shaming them in their neighborhoods, shining a light on them. At some point, we need to strip them of the obscene and ill-gotten wealth that they have acquired through their extortion and fraud. That's why we need to work on the politicians -- because only they have the power to help us reap that justice.

Solitary acts of violence like Mr. Stack's are totally ineffective. I feel more sympathy for the IRS agent who was killed than I do for Mr. Stack. If he had taken his lumps, owned up to his own responsibility, and dedicated the rest of his life to activism, he could have made a difference. As things stand, I think he will only inspire other desperate, unstable people to do do similar things, and this is counter-productive to the cause of revolution or deep reform or whatever you want to call it. How do you suppose the gangsters and banksters will respond when threatened? Do you expect anything but violence in retaliation?

The Mr. Stacks of the world are no friends of the revolution. We need people with real courage, people willing to put their asses on the line, people willing to march, to sit in, to write and sing, to shine the light of justice on the dark crimes of violence being perpetrated against us. We need to push, push, push for peace, justice and the American Way until the forces of violence can no longer push back.