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but they do always mean the person is trying to curry the favor of the collective, and trying to keep people from asking questions. As Mildred Higgins, Wesbecker’s aunt, said in an interview the day after the murders, “He seemed like he was happy.”
    The lie of the smile, this smile-as-cloaking-potion, is revealed at the end of the Shea Communications attorney’s cross-deposition of Mattingly:
     
    [Mattingly]: Mr. Ganote had been involved in an accident at work and had had to have reconstructive surgery on his hand or his arm, and the company had exempted him from going back on the folder until he thought he was ready. And Mr. Wesbecker saw that as someone that he could compare himself to. You know, “They did it for Bill Ganote, they can do it for me.” At some point I said, “Why don’t you have Mr. Ganote give me a call so that I can get from the horse’s mouth exactly what happened to him and what the company agreed to do.” So he agreed to ask Mr. Ganote to call me, but that telephone call never occurred.
    Q. Did you take it that Mr. Wesbecker and Mr. Ganote were friends or on a friendly basis or that Mr. Ganote was going to cooperate with him in that regard?
    A. Yes.
    Q. That they were friends?
    A. Yes.
    Q. Did you know that Bill Ganote was one of the people that Joe Wesbecker shot and killed?
    A. Yes.
    Q. That’s all I have.
     
    The questioning attorney was trying to show here that if Wesbecker murdered a “friend,” it proved that he murdered at random, and therefore he was a freak, rather than a victim of the company’s brutality. But what neither the attorney nor even Mattingly could grasp—indeed what Wesbecker himself may not have been consciously aware of—is that a friend in that environment needn’t be a friend even in the casual sense of the word. A friend can be just another humiliation, a desperate, ongoing, failed attempt to connect with the herd. A friend could be a worker who doesn’t make your life hell, or a friend could be one of the workers who does make your life hell but slaps your back after every jibe and tells you that “it’s all in fun” and “don’t take things too seriously” because “we’re all just having a good time here.” Or it could be the person with whom you have to maintain good relations in order to keep everything from getting worse.
    Wesbecker very clearly spared one man during his shooting spree. I would bet that that man, John Tingle, was spared precisely because he never gave Wesbecker any grief, which is the most Wesbecker could have hoped for. Tingle told the Courier-Journal , “He didn’t fire at me, I guess because he liked me.” Then he added, “The guys he had shot in the pressroom were friends too.” Were they?
    In the post-Reagan era, where no one’s job is safe, where no one’s salaries or benefits are safe, and where the workforce is constantly subjected to downsizing intra-worker pressures, and a top-down culture of fear, there is no such thing as a friend.
    To add to all of these pressures, Wesbecker had to put up with the kind of toxic bullying which is common in the workplace, yet until recently, rarely considered. Sometimes Wesbecker would come to Mattingly’s office “very agitated at what had happened at work.”
    Here he describes one telling incident: “[S]omeone put something up on the bulletin board and it said, ‘If you need help in this regard, call Joe Wesbecker at 585-NUTS.’ He was not only upset, his feelings were hurt. And it wasn’t just that this was on the bulletin board, but that … no one in authority had taken it down.” The tough-it-outers might snicker and roll their eyes at the significance of this kind of harassment or of Wesbecker’s feelings being hurt. But as Mattingly noted, “He told me that he had attempted suicide more than once.”
    On March 29, 1988, Wesbecker told Mattingly that he would have his “friend” Bill Ganote call him and support Wesbecker’s case against the company. A