The rise of decline: experts say things are collapsing. Maybe they're not collapsing fast enough.

• Author: Cavanaugh, Tim

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WHEN ANDREW Joseph Stack, a software consultant with a history of tax troubles and marital problems, crashed his Piper Cherokee into the Austin, Texas, office of the Internal Revenue Service in February, the crime was widely seen as a referendum on the national psyche. Stack, who killed himself and one other person while injuring 13, was said to represent a strain of legitimate grievances in America.

In his syndicated column, Richard Parker credited Stack with summing up the American "continuum of disappointment, anxiety, fear and yes, anger" related to economic pressure and income inequality. "On the day of Stack's violence" Parker wrote, "everyone I interview who has read his suicide note has the same reaction: No, he should not have tried to kill anyone to make his point and so he deserved to die. And yes, the guy did have a point." Writing on AlterNet, Rich Benjamin called Stack "an acute symptom of this nation's neglected wounds," concluding, "We dismiss his screed, suicide and crime as 'lunatic' at our own risk."

A similar reaction greeted a far less catastrophic act of destruction that occurred a few days before Stack's attack. Terry Hoskins, an Ohio carpet store owner and landlord of several commercial properties, bulldozed his own home before it was foreclosed. Hoskins' local TV station ran a very sympathetic story on the destruction of the house. A blogger at macedoniaonline.eu called it "the tipping point" for Americans who have "been taken advantage like no one on earth by greedy Banksters and corporations."

Neither man made a very credible case for righteous everyman rage. Stack's breakout-hit suicide note rtms through such disparate peeves as banker bonuses, the Catholic church, the failure of health care reform, post-Cold War base closings in Southern California, Stack's own accountant, George W. Bush, tax treatment of freelance engineers, and capitalism. Hoskins' foreclosure resulted not from the real estate correction but from a 10-year battle against a family member and from his failure to repay commercial real estate loans for which the $350,000 house was collateral. The bank collecting on the loans is not some too-big-to-fail behemoth but Clermont County's own RiverHills Bank, which as of 2008 had a mere $118 million in assets and $96.2 million in deposits.

The elevation of such unlikely folk heroes might be a sign of the current recession's severity. Or it might not. A similar genre of morbid...