Re: So you say the reason for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq is simply to provide an outlet for the frustrations of some KKK-like characters who would otherwise be making trouble in the US. I can't believe it. Sure, I accept the racism and self-righteousness which is inherent in the American personality.
Then you'll accept 911 as an exorcism of sorts... 911 as America's redemption for the sin of the OKC bombing:
Purging Ourselves of Timothy McVeigh
by Edward Linenthal
From the first shocking scenes of the bloodied survivors emerging out of the ruins of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and the iconic image of fireman Chris Fields holding the broken body of one-year-old Baylee Almon in his arms, media coverage has struggled to locate the Oklahoma City bombing in an appropriate story line.
For the first 48 hours, when it was widely reported that foreign terrorists (probably "Islamic militants") were responsible, the bombing was understood as yet another example of America being victimized by aliens-an innocent nation in a wicked world-and enthusiastic calls for righteous vengeance littered opinion pieces and letters to the editors in newspapers across the land. If Oklahoma City was like Beirut, it was because foreign terrorists had defiled America?s "heartland" with alien forms of terror, shattering a widespread sense of American "innocence," as if the nation fell into the harsh and often murderous realities of history for the first time with the body count in Oklahoma City.
With the arrest of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols several days after the bombing, however, explanatory narratives became more complicated. The uncomfortable realization that this horror had been carried out by white male Gulf War veterans --one of them a decorated veteran at that-- sparked the excavation of a completely different story of American identity. It was a story of a nation tormented by enduring legacies of racism, xenophobia, and violent populism, of virulent cancers emerging from the national body, with the Oklahoma City bombing seen as a tumor, an indicator of more profound internal disease.
Enduring convictions of innocence could only be maintained by distancing McVeigh and Nichols from "real" America and "real" Americans. Harper's publisher John MacArthur said of his media colleagues, "They are going to turn them into oddball crazies, caricaturing McVeigh as a trailer park terrorist, which is no better than the caricature of the Arabs." Indeed, McVeigh and Nicols were called "monsters," "drifters," "loners," and "reptilian-like murderers." Time's Lance Morrow portrayed the perpetrators as violent resident aliens existing at the nation?s "delusional margins." The editors of U.S. News and World Report assured the public that the lesson to take from Oklahoma was not that the American character was flawed but that it was "still incandescent."
To be sure, some outside the American media mainstream saw the perpetrators as representing an authentic if virulent strain of national identity. Jonathan Friedland, the Washington correspondent for the London Guardian, told a National Public Radio audience that McVeigh struck him as "wholly American, from his belief in government conspiracy, to his infatuation with guns, even to his "loner" persona." In an angry column in the Nation, Katha Pollitt declared, "If we're seriously interested in understanding how a young man could blow up a building full of hundreds of people, why not start by acknowledging that the state he now claims to oppose gave him his first lesson in killing?"
McVeigh and Nichols were contaminants of the body politic precisely because they could finally not be dismissed as alien beings. They had undergone the traditional rite of passage for American males, service in the Armed Forces, and emerged not as able citizens but as mass murderers, imagining themselves warriors in a holy crusade against the federal government in which body counts of civilians were a necessary part of the struggle.
This sense of contamination is evident in the hundreds of letters from schoolchildren in Michigan, where the perpetrators spent time at James Nichols' farm and reportedly attended meetings of the Michigan Militia. The letters plead for Oklahoma City schoolchildren not to hate them for being from Michigan. The sense of shame was so great that several early unsolicited memorial ideas came from Michigan residents who thought memorial suggestion would be a way of "doing penance" for living in a state widely viewed after the bombing as a bastion for the extreme and often violent world view of the militias --a state sometimes called "Militiagan."
Beyond Michigan, the sense of contamination spread to the small towns in New York state where McVeigh lived and went to school. Students soon learned that they were labeled as being "from McVeigh-land," and called "The Bombers." A sense of contamination by association was also felt by residents of Kingman, Arizona, the home of accomplice Michael Fortier and a place where McVeigh lived for a brief time; of Junction City, Kansas, where McVeigh rented the Ryder truck that carried the bomb; of Herington, Kansas, where Terry Nichols lived. McVeigh's motel room in Junction City was remodeled, and residents of Herington took great pains to let representatives of the national media know that since Nichols had only lived there for a few weeks he was not one of them.
The threat of the toxic presence of the perpetrators was in evidence as well during the planning of the Oklahoma City National Memorial Foundation's Memorial Center, as the desire for a museum exhibition to tell the story of April 19th and its aftermath clashed with an equally strong desire to prevent pollution of the memorial center by inclusion of the faces or stories of the perpetrators. Planners struggled with an exhibition script that included "the dark side." Eventually they settled on small side rooms that told the story of the arrest and trial of McVeigh and Nichols with little visual representation.
The bombing not only sparked explorations of American innocence, violence, and the threat of contamination from perpetrators. It quickly became cultural capital to be used in ongoing battles in the culture wars. Oklahoma City figured prominently in often angry discussions about the complicity-if any-of hate radio; in the suddenly perceived threat from militia culture; in debates over habeas corpus reform; in a renewed call for limits to free speech; and, of course, in debates over the death penalty.
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