Taking the sch Out of Fun

Ed Funsch - now there's a name to conjure with.

Ed is one of life's victims, the little man that fate plays with for its own amusement. 

Peremptorily fired from his job as "low man on the pole", the closest he comes to being shown an act of generosity is when he is told, "Look, why don't you stay on till the end of the week?' 

The brutality of this firing should not go unnoticed. It comes with no warning, no procedure is followed, no official reason provided. 

The only explanation Ed is given is his supervisor telling him, "You know the story. Cutbacks and seniority and ... you're low man on the pole." (cf. insidethex.co.uk) The situation captures perfectly what Mark Ames describes as " the bland, easily recognizable nastiness of contemporary corporate America", in his book 'Going Postal'. For those familiar with mass shootings in the United States, the title will be clear, for others it will be clarified by the rather long subtitle: 'Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and beyond'. 

The book opens with a lengthy exploration and analysis of the 1989 massacre perpetrated by Joseph Wesbecker, who systematically worked his way through the Standard Gravure building in downtown Louisville. Of course, Wesbecker was described in the media as a "nut job" (The writer's conflation of the general tone of condemnation reported at the time; expressed in the modern day parlance of the President of the United States.) who broke and went on a rampage. Ames concludes something much darker and ominous. He says that Wesbecker "sought revenge on the entire institution that mistreated, abused and injured, insulted, and eventually threw him away when there was nothing left to squeeze." The X Files' Season Two aired in 1994-95, ten years before Ames' book was published in 2005, but, with a liberal reading of 'institution', his assessment serves as well as a summation of Ed Funsch's treatment at the hands of the postal service and, possibly, society at large as it does Wesbecker's particular case. Indeed, as Ames points out, "[n]ot only was this rage murder spree an example of targeted vengeance, but its details and circumstances are strikingly similar to other rage murders in offices, workplaces, post offices, and even in the most recent setting of this crime, schoolyards." 

This similarity, which is evident across such a wide range of scenarios and social backgrounds, must originate somewhere. There is only one logical conclusion: American society and/or culture itself.

This, I would contend, is one reading of the conspiracy lying at the heart of this episode and the X Files generally. It isn't so much that the Government is deliberately manipulating the American people, it is just that the American people find themselves subject to a culture that shows so little care for the general well-being of the population. Corporate America simply has no heart.

The year "Blood" aired, a report commissioned by the U.S. Postal service "criticized the institution’s 'autocratic management style … tense and confrontational relations on the workroom floor.'" 

As rage murders are not confined to the Postal service, we can assume that this 'autocratic management style' is widespread in American culture, evident in all types of workplaces and schools. When one considers how much of modern life is spent in school and at work, it should not be too difficult to work out why these mass killings occur so frequently in the United States. 

But let us return to Ed. Let us conjure with his name.

It is not uncommon for writers to give characters names suitable to their disposition or role in the story. Charles Dickens could well be the most extravagant exemplar of this, with characters called such things as  Mr M'Choakumchild, (Hard Times) who could be nothing else but a Nineteenth Century school master. (cf. londonist.com) Or how about Mr Merdle (Little Dorrit)? Think of the French word Merde and you'll know what this character is full of. (cf. lithub.com)

So, back to Ed. 

Ed Funsch. Clearly something is messing with Ed's head, having fun at the expense of his sanity. The premise of the episode is that a combination of illegal crop spraying and subliminal messaging is what drives Ed to the paranoid delusional state that provokes his Charles Whitlock impersonation. What is really happening, of course, which is why the episode starts with his being fired from his job in the Postal service, is that Ed has been driven 'postal' by the heartless machine that is corporate America. As mind.co.uk outline on their website: "You are more likely to experience paranoid thoughts when you are in vulnerable, isolated or stressful situations that could lead to you feeling negative about yourself. If you are bullied at work, ... this could give you suspicious thoughts which could develop into paranoia." 

For reasons the understanding of which would surely lead to a curbing of the mass killing pandemic that continues to engulf the United States, corporate bullying, whether in the workplace or the school room, is churning out damaged human beings who, hardly surprisingly, determine to take revenge on the very system that has made them what they are. 

But, a disgruntled postal worker returning to his workplace or a teenager returning to school to inflict carnage isn't what happens with Ed. Ed, a postal worker, takes to the clock tower.

Although we need to see Ed situated in the workplace at the start of the episode to warn us of what's coming, we shouldn't let this distract us from all the other clues that reveal the extent of his paranoia's cause. Ed is not just a workplace washout, he is an American washout - a man who is just incapable of coping with the heartless brutality of modern American culture - a culture that can elect a President simply so he can destroy everything achieved by the previous encumbent, even to the point of denying health care to millions of Americans. A culture that says to its own people, "It is better that you die than we pay for you."

It is America itself that Ed is unable to cope with. So, from the clock tower, it is America that he takes his revenge on.