Mark Ames Quotes

It was hard to imagine that Natasha had squatted out a baby. Her cunt was as tight as a cat's ass...

I was a student at Berkeley in the late Reagan years. We had a lot of ideas back then, big dreams about getting famous and destroying the "Beigeocracy" that we thought stifled and controlled American Letters. Everything seemed possible then: world war, literary fame ... Anyway, something Really Big, with us at the center of it all.

Under Reagan, corporations transformed from provider's of stability for employees and their families to fear-juiced stress engines. Reagan's legacy to America and modern man is not victory in the Cold War, where he simply got lucky; it is instead one of the most shocking wealth transfers in the history of the world, all under the propaganda diversion of "making America competitive" and "unleashing the creative energies of the American worker".

People's memories are so short and America's propaganda is so powerful that most, even the greatest losers of this appropriation, have forgotten that a profound change occurred, which we now take for granted. We have been conditioned to react skeptically, even hostilely, to criticism of our current corporate values, values which form the foundation of everyday life today. What's more appalling is that huge numbers of those left behind in the wealth transfer genuflected to the new plutocratic class, celebrating the most vicious of the uber-CEOs. This craven CEO-worshipping is still going on today- middle Americans drag themselves home after work in order to gather around the television and watch billionaire assholes like Donald Trump deliver his "You're fired!" line to some desperate, stressed-out Smithers-abee.

Another journalist, Joanne Jacobs, summed it up even more simply: "Evil, not rage" inspired the Columbine killers, she wrote. Well, that settles that!

It's widely accepted today that high schools are miserable, nerve-pinching stress machines. They are governed by dim hypocrites; the climate favors the cruelest and shallowest students, and many, if not most students, are constantly suppressing a burning sense of injustice, shame, and powerlessness.

The shootings are a direct assault on the American Dream- which is why they are so disturbing. The fear reflects how unsettling and piercing the crime is. And the fear reflects a still-censored recognition that the shootings have widespread sympathy among students, and that any student, at any school, could be next.

Slate's Dave Cullen thought he had solved the why riddle in his article, "The Depressive and the Psychopath: At Last We Know Why the Columbine Killers Did It", published on April 20, 2004, the fifth anniversary of the massacre. Cullen wrote, "[Eric Harris] was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped him from doing something worse." Cullen's breakthrough, like the Richmond Enquirer's, is essentially this: Eric Harris murdered because he was an evil murderer.

Yet what's missing from Cullen's explanation is a context for Harris' rage attack on Columbine High School. Even Hitler is given a context by serious historians- the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles and the failure of Weimar Germany- whereas rampage murderers, like slaves once before them, are portrayed as having killed without reason. Their murder sprees were and are explained as symptoms of the perpetrators' innate evil, or of foreign forces, rather than as reactions to unbearable circumstances.

The whole country is infested with this meanness and coldness, and no one is allowed to admit it. Only the crazy ones sense that it is wrong- that what is "normal" is not at all normal- and some of them, adults and kids alike, fight back with everything they have.

No! No, she's fif-teen. Fif-teen.' Right then my pervometer needle hit the red. I had to have her, even if she was homely.

Just as some survivors of the Standard Gravure massacre expressed sympathy with Joseph Wesbecker, [Robert] Mack was, to many, a kind of hero. This is a crucial point, because in the case of real random murderers like serial murders, survivors never express sympathy with the murderer. However, in rebellions, survivors often do sympathize, particularly if the rebel belongs to the same oppressed group as they do.