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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The final decisive event in McVeigh's life was an external one: The Waco holocaust. McVeigh was already teetering on the brink, but when the Branch Davidian compound erupted into flames, he went over the edge. From then on, McVeigh was determined not just to plan his own survival, but to strike a blow against the government.
The most horribly engrossing part of "American Terrorist" follows: the evolution of McVeigh's plans to bomb the Murrah building, his coercion of the hapless, craven Terry Nichols (Nichols, by the authors' account, tried to drop out but, intimidated by McVeigh's threats, decided he had no choice but to help mix the explosives in the truck), the ease with which he was able to buy the deadly materials, his seeming indifference to whether or not he was caught (McVeigh removed the license plate from his getaway car and was driving with a gun bulging under his windbreaker), his final, fateful drive to Oklahoma City.
In their account of the trial, the authors paint McVeigh's attorney, Stephen Jones, in a less than flattering light. They convincingly dismiss his attempts to prove that McVeigh was merely a pawn in a vast international conspiracy. (Hoping to cash in on the renewed interest, the publishers of Jones' 1998 book, "Others Unnamed," are releasing a revised edition which will purportedly "refute" many of Michel and Herbeck's claims, in particular their acceptance of McVeigh's assertion that he acted alone.)
One puzzling aspect of the trial that Michel and Herbeck don't go into involves the complicated relationship between McVeigh's attitude toward his defense, his willingness to admit his guilt and his desire to use the trial as a forum for his political views. McVeigh wanted to use a "necessity" defense, arguing that he was innocent because he needed to blow up the building to defend himself from imminent harm at the hands of the government. His lawyers, for obvious reasons, counseled him against using this defense -- but the result was that he never got to expound on his political beliefs. Why didn't McVeigh stand up to his lawyers, acknowledge that he was certain to be found guilty and take the stand? The authors never discuss this: Presumably McVeigh felt that he had some chance of being acquitted, and in addition was so bitter that he didn't really believe anything he would say would be heard.
On one of the most inflammatory issues raised by the case, "American Terrorist" supports McVeigh's claim that he didn't know there was a child-care center in the Murrah Building. McVeigh claims that if he had known the child-care center was there, he might have switched targets -- although he says he would have done so not so much out of concern for the lives of children as out of concern over the bad press his action would get as a result. In any case, McVeigh makes no bones about the fact that he wanted a high body count: Lots of casualties would serve as a wake-up call and would be fair payback. "It was the same tactic the American government used in armed international conflicts, when it wanted to send a message to tyrants and despots," note Michel and Herbeck. The authors don't mention it, but presumably McVeigh, as a Gulf War vet, was aware of the hideous carnage U.S. forces unleashed on thousands of retreating Iraqis on the "Road of Death" -- a turkey shoot that, combined with the United States' failure to pursue Saddam Hussein, would have heightened McVeigh's rage.
So what, if anything, can we learn from McVeigh's story? In one sense, nothing. It proves only that given exactly the right set of circumstances, and genes, a constellation of rage-filled, paranoid beliefs can lead an apparently "normal" man to become a terrorist. After all, there are thousands of survivalists and gun-worshiping militia members, and hundreds of thousands of people who hate and fear the federal government -- and there has been only one Timothy McVeigh. Bennett's "party of fear" remains a marginal force in American society.
But it isn't quite as easy as that. It's difficult not to conclude that the difference between McVeigh and those zealous Christians who murder abortion doctors, for example, is one more of degree than of kind. (McVeigh was pro-choice and didn't believe in God, but he shares with the terrorists of the Christian right a fanatical conviction of his own rectitude.) It would be as foolish to dismiss McVeigh as an isolated nutcase, and fail to examine the ideological and social world from which he emerged, as it would be to dismiss Islamic terrorists as kooks without analyzing their belief system.
Why are so many Americans drawn to the belief system that led McVeigh to murder? Clearly, certain types of people -- paranoids, the insecure, authoritarians -- have a natural affinity for far-right ideas. It is worth pondering what the nature of that affinity is. And at the heart of it is that all-American icon: the gun.
A gun is pure power. Life? Click. Death. Firing a gun allows the participant to wield more power than almost anyone does in the ordinary course of events: This power is exhilarating and seductive. For some people, wielding that amount of power is terrifying: like a tear in the fabric of reality. Most nations have enshrined this attitude as their national policy towards guns. But in the United States, with its mythology of the frontier and the armed militiaman, the national attitude is different. There is a very large group of Americans who like the power of guns, but learn to control that power and treat it with respect. This group includes most law-abiding gun owners.
But there is another, more disturbing group. For those with paranoid, insecure, authoritarian temperaments, the power of the gun ties in with, or allows them to construct, a monstrous, Ayn Randian, cartoon-like vision of personal freedom -- a Wild West landscape of the soul, a pre-Revolutionary utopia where one's every desire is gratified, where stout yeomen carve out their own destinies, free from interference from parents or Uncle Sam. But this infantile, infinitely expansive, id-like fantasy clashes with the fact that the dreamer lives in society, a society of laws and government and parents. And so these gun-worshipping dreamers build up an equally monstrous vision of coercive governmental power -- an Evil Empire. And every now and then, one of those dreamers acts.
Timothy McVeigh would most likely have existed even if America's mainstream conservatives did not preach a gospel disturbingly similar to his. He comes out of the poisons in our populist soil: He is, to paraphrase William Carlos Williams, a pure product of America gone crazy. But while it would be unfair to blame right-wing ideology for McVeigh, it would be myopic not to see the connection between them. Call it collateral damage.
