Mississippi Postaling

Two weeks ago, Eddie Mitchell shot and killed Clifton Patterson, a coworker at the Anglin Tire Company in Jackson, Mississippi. The ostensible reason was a running argument over missing tools, which Mitchell settled with a .38 caliber handgun. He shot Patterson three times: in the abdomen, rear left shoulder and the back of his head.

A local newspaper account of the murder noted the "irony" of a black hearse that was raised on a rack in the service bay where the shooting took place. The tire company's owner, Dent Anglin, described both the murderer and murdered as "real good employees."

"We can't figure it out," he said.

It's amazing to think that after more than 20 years of nonstop workplace massacres, a phenomenon as persistent and revealing as the Iraqi insurgency, Americans are still "shocked" and "can't figure it out." Not unless the murderer fits a convenient preconceived notion of evil.

Racism provided the E-Z frame for the worst workplace massacre in Mississippi, two summers ago in Meridian. Doug Williams burst into a sensitivity seminar that workers at his Lockheed Martin weapons plant were required to attend, shot and killed six coworkers, wounded eight others, then finished it off with a self-inflicted shotgun blast to his chest.

Initial reports painted Williams as Confederate racist trash. Five of the six coworkers that he killed were black. Yet it turned out that he shot an equal number of whites and blacks that day, that he had been brutally harassed and mistreated at the plant, and that his ultimate target was his white supervisor-who, as so often happens in these rage attacks, just happened to have stepped out when Williams unleashed his vengeance.

Indeed there is no way to neatly frame this uniquely American and uniquely contemporary phenomenon, especially not in terms of convenient politically correct moral markers borrowed from the mid-20th century.

Just look at some of Mississippi's recent workplace massacres: In April 1996, a black ex-firefighter, Kenneth Tornes, killed four officers in Jackson's central fire station; in May 2001, a Jackson woman shot and killed a coworker in the break room of their office in a dispute over reporting late to work; two months later, a Tyson Foods employee in Jackson shot and killed his supervisor after a counseling session; and three months ago, a Northrop Grumman plant employee killed one coworker and wounded another after he was denied a transfer.

Some were white, some black, one a woman. All had one thing in common: They were miserable in their jobs, and had been pushed to the breaking point.

An unbearable life in a wretched job is far more common and widely shared than our propaganda allows. The real question is: Why have these murders only started recently, and why do they only take place in America? Is it possible that ours are the most miserable workers in the world?