This week marked the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, which can be "credited," if that's the right word, with truly imprinting the horror of terrorism on the American consciousness. Nine-eleven, as we now call it, was worse, but Oklahoma City came first, and its effect was magnified because it occurred in the heartland, and maybe even because it wasn't the work of some foreign-born religious fanatic wearing a turban, but of a home-grown anti-government fanatic wearing a baseball cap.
Perhaps the event's domestic origins are the reason that it has become a touchstone and even, perversely, an occasion for celebration by groups of some political persuasions. Former President Clinton's remarks about the dangers of incendiary language were an apt expression of concern about our current political edginess.
Radio anger-peddler Limbaugh exaggerated his own importance by pretending to believe those remarks were aimed at him; he resorted to childish inanity (it was Clinton who was fomenting violence!). He appeared reluctant to acknowledge that Timothy McVeigh, had he not been executed in 2001, would likely be a Limbaugh fan today (in fact Limbaugh's outraged response is understandable - he's been broadcasting nationally since 1988, so it's entirely possible that McVeigh was a listener before he decided to go bomb a building full of people.
McVeigh was in thrall to one of those wacko militia groups, and his bomb created a strong concern about the potential of those groups for violence. In 1995, such groups were secretive, low-key paramilitary organizations playing their games in remote forests and plains. One measure of the pernicious influence of talk radio and the willful fear-mongering of conservative politicians over the past decade and more is that many of the militia groups now seem emboldened to go public. They (as well as more mainstream gun-rights organizations) were much in evidence in demonstrations this week around Washington DC which sought, apparently, in a climate in which the Supreme Court is busy ensuring that every American can carry a gun wherever he goes, to expand guntoting even more and to resist "government inferference."
If they are ready to go public, they're obviously not afraid of retaliation or persecution, so the question arises: what's all the shouting about? Clearly, about something else - maybe shaping a political dialogue? Maybe it's a good thing that they're out demonstrating rather than home cooking up plots, but some of these folks are the psychological heirs of McVeigh, and it only takes one or two.
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