Workplace Massacre in Alabama: Did Endless Downsizing and Slashed Benefits Cause the Rampage?

By Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted March 13, 2009.

So now we can go back to the question of motive, a question that Alabama investigators are running away from: rapacious corporations that cheat their workers and plunder the company wealth, a systematic bullying that extends all the way down to the way workers treat each other, and the sadism in the way they treat the chickens. It's a snapshot of a vicious law-of-the-jungle world, and yet it's just plain flat reality for most Americans.

Put in this context, McLendon seems a lot less like a maniac, and more like a victim of maniacs, who finally snapped and lashed out -- killing many of the "wrong" people, although judging by his list and what authorities had said earlier, he had plans to kill the right people, too.

But this isn't something Alabama authorities would want to expose: It would pissing off a serious company which is in the middle of choosing which plants to close, and it would mean creating some very confusing and potentially dangerous sympathy for McLendon.

While much of the massacre details are a repeat of similar "going postal" attacks over the past 20 years, the way he killed his mother and family suggests that a new pattern is emerging to go with the Great Depression 2: Now, killers take their families down with them.

In today's rampage, the shooter began by killing his mother and torching her home, then driving to where other family members lived and killing them, before ending it all at his former employer Reliable Metals. This sequence strongly resembles a couple of other recent high-profile family slayings: one in Los Angeles, which left seven family members dead in January, and another in Ohio a few weeks later, leaving three dead. In those killings, the shooter and his family were left financially devastated by the Great Depression 2. 

It's interesting that McLendon began his attack by taking out his family, but ended it attacking the source of the pain -- inside the company premises, where he ended his life. McLendon's family murders were a bit more complicated than those in Ohio and Los Angeles, however: It appears that he was very careful and respectful with the bodies of his mother and four dogs after he killed them, placing the dogs at his mother's head and feet the way ancient civilizations buried their leaders, before setting their bodies on fire as if in a funeral pyre -- as if he loved her too much to have her endure not only the aftermath of his planned attack, but a world in which she was constantly being crushed by a vampiric corporation, and a culture that nurtured such corporations.

On the other hand, he seems to have had genuine scores to settle with other family members across town, whom he shot on their porch -- reports coming out indicate that a nasty divorce some years earlier had led to deepening disputes with this side of McLendon's family, suggesting that unlike his mother, they were killed for retribution.

For years, these shootings were considered "random acts" committed by people who "snapped for no reason." Now, hundreds of dead victims and a massive financial collapse later, we know better: They're reactions against corporate oppression. If the super-rich and the corporations constantly squeeze their workers of time, money and health, a few of their victims are naturally going to "snap" and fight back with guns. Call it a small price to pay for looting everyone's wealth.

Will it end? With the current economic crisis, there's a chance the playing field might even out a little, that our culture might finally learn to stop humping the plutocrats' legs while they plunder us and instead start biting them to get our fair share.

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Read more of Mark Ames at eXiledonline.com. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

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