Gun Worship and the Oaklahoma City Bombing

by Phil Agre

Pathologists and forensic experts are relying heavily on medical records that might mention special conditions, like deviated septums, that might distinguish people.

"I've always preferred to work with bones because they're so much neater", [forensic anthropologist] Dr. [Clyde Collins] Snow once said.

But the remains of the bombing victims that arrive at the morgue include much more than bones. There are fragments of disembodied flesh that may never be reunited with the bodies from which they were ripped by the explosion yesterday at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building here.

So far, no rescue workers have been harmed. But they seem to emerge from the blast site changed and sobered by what they have seen.

The worst scene, perhaps, is the day-care center that crumpled on the second floor. "There is nothing in there that anyone would ever want to see," [construction manager] Mr. [Rex D.] Paine said. "I don't even want to think about it."

-- New York Times, April 22nd

But we have to think about it.

When I learned this morning that the bombing in Oklahoma City was the work of conservative extremists opposed to gun controls, my only surprise was how accurate my original guess had been. I had kept my guess quiet because the world did not need any more irresponsible speculation. But it made all kinds of sense to me because I take these folks seriously and believe that they mean the things they say.

The initial suspicions, reverberated through the national sounding-chamber of CNN during the initial hours after the explosion, centered on Muslims, given the similarity in methods between the Oklahoma City bombing and the bombing at the World Trade Center. Even aside from the complete lack of evidence for it, though, that hypothesis did not make sense because the Egyptian terrorists who tried toppling the World Trade Center were clearly after targets that symbolize the United States as a nation -- which the federal office building in Oklahoma City surely does not. This did not prevent the local Muslim center in San Diego from receiving a whole series of death threats, nor the publication in newspapers of a veritable census of Muslims living anywhere near Oklahoma. Nor did it prevent immediate assertions in Congress that legislation to (among many other unreasonable things) deprive immigrants of their Constitutional due process protections would now certainly become hard to stop.

Some speculation also settled on the survivors of the government's assault on the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas precisely two years earlier. But this did not make sense, either, given that the surviving Davidians have far too high a profile to be able to carry out such a large-scale attack.

The informational vacuum after a sudden mysterious event is a social ink blot, just as telling for the fantasies it does not produce as the ones it does. Nobody, for example, made the link between this bombing and the industrial agriculture system that makes dangerous chemicals widely available in very large amounts. Nor did anyone associate it with the recent Washington "discovery" of CIA death squad activities in Guatemala. Connecting the Oklahoma bombing to these other things would not have made much less sense than the speculations that did arise.

What was harder to imagine than any of these possibilities, apparently, was the reality: home-grown terrorism from within the now extensive subculture that believes that gun-control laws are the opening round in a violent government war against the citizens of the country. These people have not kept their beliefs or their organizing a secret. Dozens of self-styled "militias" now recruit across the country, openly training with a wide variety of weapons and communicating amongst themselves with an array of desktop-published newsletters, fax trees, and electronic mail. They have asserted plainly that the government's criminally idiotic assault on the Branch Davidians in Texas portends a generalized pattern of repression that requires preparation for large-scale armed conflict. These people are not a joke. Yet until now I have seen little comment on them in the mainstream press.

It is easy and tempting to denounce the people who blew up the federal office building in Oklahoma City as lunatics. It is also easy and tempting to dismiss them as sui generis products of a culturally alien radical fringe. But the truth is that they are acting on beliefs that large numbers of Americans hold. And the really frightening thing is that little separates these beliefs from the rhetoric of influential talk radio stars whose language is riddled with metaphors of violence and death. When conservative rhetors refer to the President's health care proposals as "forced collectivization", or when Rush Limbaugh encourages House Republican freshmen to keep a few liberals alive so everyone will know what they were like, these extravagantly hyperbolic metaphors of mass political murder go wholly unremarked -- they have become a taken-for-granted feature of the American political landscape. And have you actually *read* the writings of Pat Robertson -- the leader of the largest organized bloc within the Congressional majority party -- on the "new world order"? I think you should. Disclaimers notwithstanding, the Oklahoma City bombers act as though they believe literally the things that these folks say.

Conservatism need not imply this scary stuff. Most ordinary conservatives are reasonable people. Nonetheless, the discourse of the current generation of conservative polemicists is antidemocratic and dangerous. It is antidemocratic in its generalized attacks on "government", for which a democratic government is indistinguishable from a totalitarian one, or for which regulatory agencies implementing democratically passed laws are the equivalent of Soviet bureaucracies, or for which people who believe in the regulation of harmful practices are equivalent to Nazi conspirators. Ceaseless hyperbolic attacks on "government" as such effectively aim at making democracy -- that is, legitimate popular control over a government that pursues legitimately agreed-upon public-policy goals -- unthinkable. This rhetoric is dangerous when it weaves metaphors of violent attack into the most routine utterances. When a wide range of scientists wrote critical commentaries on the racist tract "The Bell Curve", for example, Rush Limbaugh declared that liberals "are trying to kill this book". Conservative writers develop elaborate stereotypes of liberalism as a kind of mental disorder -- see the introduction to P. J. O'Rourke's "Give War a Chance" for the contemporary model, with its brilliant "just kidding, folks" hedges -- and generally give license to a view of liberals and government bureaucrats as insane creatures who are engaged in a campaign of evil domination and irrational violence against the "normal" citizens of the country. Throughout history this rhetoric of violent attack has been used to justify all kinds of terrible things. Its great virtue for its authors is that these justifications are all deniable. Conservative rhetors will certainly claim that their metaphors are simply metaphors, and they will denounce analyses like this one as defamatory attempts to implicate them in a terrorist conspiracy, or as accusations that they condone violence. (I can already hear them talking in my head: "I suppose it was inevitable that those pompous ruling-class elites would welcome this tragedy as an opportunity to try to silence the few voices who dare to subvert their politically correct orthodoxy by telling the truth about their hatred of American ...".) But I would be extremely surprised if they *were* part of any criminal conspiracies, or if they *did* stay up late hoping that someone will blow up an office building. They don't have to do or want those things. All they have to do is foment hatred of their political opponents -- not just disagreement but hatred, portraying their opponents as evil, insane, and violent -- and whatever happens will benefit them one way or another.

The exact words keep shuffling and recombining, but the formula never varies: attack them by declaring that they are attacking us, encourage hatred against them by suggesting that they hate us, undermine respect for their right to speak by asserting that they are trying to silence us, legitimize the most elaborate campaigns against them by revealing their conspiracies against us, justify our incivility toward them by pouncing on the least sign of disrespect in their treatment of us, and respond to charges like these by adducing a few examples to the effect of "they're really the ones who are doing that to us". Regardless of the psychology that might inwardly motivate them, the outward effect of these rhetorical devices is to project the rhetor's own aggression onto the object of that aggression, refusing personal responsibility by portraying all of one's actions as responses necessitated by the aggressive other. This denial of responsibility is routinely found in domestic violence cases, for example. Its most important product is confusion: simply being exposed to it makes clear thinking difficult, and its absolute genius is that any attempt to identify it (like my own here) is readily portrayed as precisely an example of it. The First Amendment unequivocally protects all of these irresponsible categories of rhetoric, but it does not prevent concerned citizens from pointing out their true nature and lamenting their corrosive effects on society.

Our task today is not to end up like Argentina during its rueful "dirty war" period, caught in a downward spiral of authoritarian repression. The Republican House majority had already expressed its willingness to legislatively repeal the Fourth Amendment, and the op-ed pages today are ringing with calls to expand the apparatus of domestic surveillance. Will our own downward spiral take the form of a deadly embrace between heavily-armed far-right authoritarians and heavily-armed far-right anarchists? I have already encountered a first round of urgent speculation that press descriptions of the Oklahoma case are consciously preparing a pretext for a massive government attack on the Michigan Militia. I have even heard evidence adduced to the effect that the bombing itself was a set-up. Do we now have tens of thousands of heavily armed people on our hands, all of them convinced that they are about to be attacked, Waco-style, by the government? It is so bizarre that it is hard to even think about, but it is all too realistic an indication of how fast things have changed in the midst of what Noam Chomsky correctly calls "the virtual collapse of civil society". I was recently interviewed by a reporter for an op-ed piece on the potential privacy dangers in Intelligent Transportation Systems, including law-enforcement uses of vehicle tracking data, and let me tell you, I was very pleased that this piece did not show up on the op-ed pages today amidst the articles about dismembered children. I do not need the kind of abuse that this juxtaposition would certainly bring into my life.

Bill Clinton, whose whole personality has clearly been shaped by his own childhood experiences of violence, accurately pointed out the nature of the national trauma here:

The children of America need to know that almost all the adults in this country are good people who love their children and love other children, and we're going to get through this. (NY Times, page 8)

We're talking here about a basic, basic decomposition of our social order. Children across the country are terrified that this kind of irrational violence might visit them as well, and everyone who has known violence in their lives has surely lost some hours of work or sleep. I know I did, after reading the detailed account of the carnage in the Los Angeles Times (also known as "the liberal media") yesterday. So I ask, how can we stop the downward spiral of the culture of violence -- the fragmenting shouts of "they are attacking us" that multiply the guns, the bombs, the metaphors of violence, and the real thing?

Phil Agre, April 22nd 1995

This article is my sole responsibility and does not represent the position of any organization.