Not sure why it took me so long to write this one, but better late than never. The impetus stems from a nasty murder/melee case in Jinan involving a water company and a disgruntled former employee:
Just after 10 am yesterday morning, when the company’s Party leadership committee was having a meeting on the sixth floor of a company building, a retired former female employee of the company, Shi Mou (石某), suddenly burst into the room and started spilling gasoline all over the room and igniting it. In the ensuing fire, three people were burnt to death and four were injured. Among the killed and injured were the company manager, the company Party secretary and deputy secretary, and the deputy manager of operations. (Danwei)
Compare and contrast with last week’s atrocity in New York City:
A disgruntled former apparel designer was killed Friday morning in a hail of police gunfire in front of the Empire State Building after he shot and killed a co-worker and engaged in a gunbattle with two officers, authorities said.
[ . . . ]
Police identified the shooter as 58-year-old Jeffrey Johnson, who was apparently laid off from his job as a designer of women’s accessories at Hazan Import last year. (CNN)
Designer of women’s accessories? No wonder he went nuts.
Both of these incidents can be accurately placed into the “Going Postal” category. You may not be old enough to remember this, kids, but the term “Going Postal,” which has been bastardized to mean any sort of uncontrolled outburst of anger, originally stems from folks who did so in post offices.
To the Wiki Machine:
The expression derives from a series of incidents from 1983 onward in which United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers, and members of the police or general public in acts of mass murder. Between 1986 and 1997, more than forty people were gunned down by spree killers in at least twenty incidents of workplace rage.
Ah, the good old days.
China has had its fair share of work-related murder sprees, although most of them involve psychos with big knives. Don’t let the higher numbers in the Jinan incident make you think that the U.S. isn’t serious about body count. The New York incident was an anomaly; we usually do our best to push the stats up into the double digits. Why do you think we allow mental patients to buy machine guns with magazines so large that they have to carry them around in wheelbarrows?
That being said, with the Jinan immolation, China does deserve style points. I mean, the guy in New York used a handgun, which is hardly original. But bursting into a board room with a can of gasoline, dousing everyone and throwing a match? Let me tell you, that’s some Keyser Söze gangsta shit. Not that I’m encouraging it, of course.
So who wins in the Going Postal sweepstakes? Look, I don’t want to diss China or anything, but the U.S. has been in this business for a long time; we’ve even lost American presidents to disgruntled workers. We’re the originator of Going Postal, the world leader, and we’re not likely to relinquish this status anytime soon, even if we have to arm every single U.S. resident with a bazooka.
© Stan for China Hearsay, 2012. |
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