Eight Feet Deep

Cov­er­age of the plane crash in Austin today has kept me pretty well riveted.

Of course, it’s in my state, I have friends in Austin, spent tons of time in Austin and love all things Austin pretty much except for its traf­fic and Ashe juniper, or moun­tain cedar, to which I am extremely aller­gic. Also, since the act by the pilot allegedly seems inten­tion­ally aimed at the Inter­nal Rev­enue Ser­vice def­i­nitely sends some chills up my spine. I’ll tell you why, but first a brief an account of what I’ve heard about this so far,

A man from North Austin allegedly set his house on fire this morn­ing before tak­ing off in a small plane from the George­town, Texas, Munic­i­pal Air­port and crash­ing the plane in a North­west Austin build­ing hous­ing a num­ber of IRS employ­ees. From what I have heard on TV, the pilot report­edly died — cer­tainly not unex­pected given the state of the building(s) dam­aged by the plane and from the fire that resulted — two oth­ers were injured and one is missing.

The pilot of the plane, Joseph Stack, left a ram­bling state­ment and appar­ent sui­cide note on his Web site rail­ing against the IRS. The Austin American-Statesman, which has some excel­lent cov­er­age, dis­plays Stack’s rant on one of the news­pa­per blogs. The post omi­nously raises the specter of a vio­lent act and is signed by “Joe Stack (1956–2010):

“I saw it writ­ten once that the def­i­n­i­tion of insan­ity is repeat­ing the same process over and over and expect­ing the out­come to sud­denly be dif­fer­ent. I am finally ready to stop this insan­ity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try some­thing dif­fer­ent; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”

Since this has just hap­pened there is lit­tle known else about this man who, hope­fully, has only man­aged to kill him­self despite caus­ing a spec­tac­u­lar crash with result­ing dam­age. The Los Ange­les Times reported Stack was an Austin soft­ware engi­neer who expe­ri­enced a num­ber of busi­ness and tax prob­lems in Los Ange­les in the 1980s and 90s. The FAA reg­is­tra­tion for Stack’s plane, a single-engine Piper, showed his address as an apart­ment in Lin­coln, Calif., a sub­urb of Sacra­mento. This reg­is­tra­tion was dated 1998. News reports indi­cated that Stack’s wife and daugh­ter were trapped inside the house when it was torched but they were saved by firefighters.

This is not the first time an Austin IRS facil­ity has been tar­geted for attack. Under­cover ATF agents arrested a Tyler, Texas, car sales­man, in 1995 for plot­ting to blow up the IRS build­ing in Austin. Charles Ray Polk was sen­tenced to 249 months in fed­eral prison for a num­ber of charges includ­ing attempted use of weapons of mass destruc­tion. A sum­ma­tion of the events lead­ing up to his arrest are noted here in a deci­sion on an appeal before the 5th U.S. Cir­cuit Court of Appeals.

As I noted ear­lier, the events in Austin today are chill­ing. While we don’t know the details that went into plan­ning this act — whether it was a wider domes­tic ter­ror act — or just “Another Lone Nut” as was the name of a HBO spe­cial by come­dian and actor Richard Belzer, it is def­i­nitely scary. Scary, I say, because some­one can appar­ently just hop in the ol’ fam­ily plane, fire her up and crash her into any pop­u­lated build­ing. He could have crashed into one of the high rises down­town, the UT Tower or the beau­ti­ful Texas State Capi­tol.

It is like­wise scary that peo­ple whose minds are filled with hate or are ter­ri­bly dis­turbed think so lit­tle of their fel­low human beings that they either don’t care or intend to kill oth­ers as well as those who are in their way. It is espe­cially dis­turb­ing to those who work for the gov­ern­ment, some even part-time, who see less and less  coop­er­a­tion by the pub­lic in mak­ing our fed­eral sys­tem work.  There are a lot of gov­ern­ment haters out there these days. Hope­fully, more of them won’t snap.

I have to say a word about cov­er­age today. I’ve been check­ing out, of course, the Austin-area news out­let Web sites and watch­ing CNN. I must say CNN’s anchor­ing has been mostly weak, espe­cially watch­ing Tony Har­ris and Rick Sanchez. Even when Wolf Blitzer’s “Sit­u­a­tion Room” comes on it won’t be the best, but will be bet­ter than other shows today. Thank­fully, CNN still has resources to pull of good break­ing news coverage.